lessons from brazil

first off, a huge thank you for those who were able to come to the event i organized on Monday night, "Does Race (Still) Matter? Reconsidering Affirmative Action in the US and Brazil." to be honest, i woke up in the middle of the night the day before tossing and turning and making mental lists because i was so worried i'd fuck it up. luckily enough, it went pretty smoothly and all things considered i was happy with the turnout. i definitely learned things that i didn't know before (like the fact that GWB didn't know that there were Blacks in Brazil... smfh).

if you weren't able to make it, check out our live twitter blog feed. eventually, i'll get some video and flicks up as well.

anyways, i would like to quickly explore the thing that i found the most interesting and thought-provoking. a recent law was passed in Brazil that mandated that Afro-Brazilian history and culture be taught in public schools. this was to combat the otherwise lack of knowledge about Afro-Brazilian culture and to begin to shift from a white-centric history. yo, this is an amazing idea. something that i believe the U.S. should adopt. what would an education that included and celebrated the history and accomplishments of Blacks, Asians and Latino Americans? how would such an education contribute to a shift in public perception, acceptance and call for affirmative action programs specifically and racial power dynamics more generally?

how can we begin to confront our violent history? we learn of the attempted genocide of the Jewish people during the holocaust, but not of the genocide of the indigenous population in america. we learn of the england's mistreatment of us as a colony, but don't learn about either our violent history of colonization or our de facto colonization in Puerto Rico and the Phillipines. how would teaching our bloody history effect the way our children think about power dynamics?

would a history that includes Asian-Americans help to counter the myth of "forever immigrants?" would a history that includes cross-racial coalition building, such as Asian and Latino coalitions in the sugar fields of hawaii, help us to understand the importance of banding together toward a common grievance?  


and, in english, what if we read more books by people of color than by white people? since we will be the majority-minority soon, right? how would a reading of say Zora's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" effect the way in which we understand language, dialect and the hierarchy of it all? 


and, not just a celebration of the history and culture of other races, but what if we began to look at the history of racism and power in the united states throughout the disciplines. for example, learning how statistics was created by eugenicists in order to prove white superiority? or in science exploring how faulty "scientific processes" were used to bolster eugenicist arguments?


i think that we often look at Brazil as being much more behind us on the issue of race, because of the failure to confront it. yet, now that they are confronting it, we are pretending it is no longer an issue (it is!). and, in some ways, they are far outpacing us.

as a side note: my brother was telling me the other day that there are only 2-3 major textbook publishers in the united states that provide the educational materials for the entire country. they are based in texas(? - i think) and are controlled by one curriculum board comprised of mostly white, mostly conservative members. these are the people that control what the entire country learns. we must demand that this be changed by demanding a larger curriculum change within our public schools.