“A cook for a small family is needed. Preferably white,” said an advertisement for a job vacancy in São Paulo, published in 1912 in one of Brazil’s largest newspapers.
In 2019, in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais state, a message in a WhatsApp group for caregivers advertised 10 positions at an agency: “The only requirements: must not be black or fat, and need at least three months of experience.”
The century separating the two job ads is a stark example of how more than 350 years of slavery continue to affect Brazilian society: Black people were, and in many cases still are, overlooked even for the lowest-paid positions.
Despite making up more than half of the population (55%), Afro-Brazilians form the base of every socioeconomic indicator, overwhelmingly dominating the statistics on hunger, poverty, gender-based violence and the victims of homicides committed by criminals or the police.
Brutal deaths of Black people at the hands of police occur frequently in Brazil. Of the 6,393 people killed by officers in 2023, 82.7% were Black. Wrongful convictions of Black individuals are also alarmingly common.
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It is impossible to get your head around Latin America’s largest country without understanding its history, particularly from an Afrocentric perspective.
No other country in the world imported more enslaved Africans: 4.864 million people were disembarked during the transatlantic slave trade – 12 times greater than the number of enslaved Africans sent to the US and three times that of all of Spanish America.
Even in Brazil, most people do not know this history, so I decided to write a book about it, published this month (for now, only in Portuguese).
Projeto Querino is based on a journalistic project that involved a team of more than 40 people, over two years and seven months of work.
Inspired by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, it launched in 2022 as a podcast produced by Rádio Novelo and a series of magazine articles. Before joining the Guardian in April, I spent another year conducting further research and writing the book.
A central idea was to understand and illustrate how Black people participated in crucial moments of Brazilian history – such as independence in 1822 or the extensively delayed abolition of slavery in 1888 – something that some school curriculums and parts of the media refuse to acknowledge.
Its name is a tribute to Manuel Raimundo Querino (1851-1923), a groundbreaking Brazilian intellectual born free in Bahia state. He is considered the first person to portray Africans and Afro-descendants positively in the country’s historiography.
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But we also wanted to highlight how the choices made by white individuals – particularly wealthy people – continue to prevent descendants of those enslaved from accessing the wealth they created and still generate.
“Racism isn’t like some kind of gas floating in the atmosphere; it’s a human construct, just like slavery,” said the historian and writer Ynaê Lopes dos Santos in an interview for the book. “Slavery endured for so long because Brazil’s political elite was made up of enslavers.”
Until slavery was abolished in 1888 – the last country in the Americas to do so – state and federal laws had denied black people, even those who were free, access to schools. This resulted in a disproportionate rate of illiteracy even decades after abolition.
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One of the most significant remnants of the slaveholding mentality still prevalent in the country is the fact that almost every middle- or upper-class family employs at least one domestic worker – predominantly women and Black individuals who generally work excessive hours for low pay.
In the 19th century, enslaved domestic women used to endure shifts of 12-15 hours a day – often even longer than the notoriously gruelling routines on plantations – along with numerous instances of sexual abuse committed by their enslavers, a reality that is still perpetuated by some employers today.
After abolition, it took 70 years for a law to equate domestic work with other professions in Brazil, which happened only in 2013. Just two congressmen voted against it at the time – one said he had made a mistake, and the other was Jair Bolsonaro, the former president, who still proudly stands by his decision.
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Cases of racism, such as the job advertisement for caregivers, rarely have consequences, despite being against the law.
In the 2019 case, the agency responsible for the ad excluding “black and overweight” women got away with a fine of 5,000 reais (£675).
Despite centuries of enslavement and, after abolition, decades of persecution and neglect, Black people were crucial in transforming Brazil into a democracy. The Black women’s movements’ struggle was instrumental, for example, in the creation of Brazil’s public healthcare system, now available to the entire population and nonexistent before 1988, although the country falls short of providing equal conditions of citizenship for all.
Thanks to the Black movement’s fight for education, not only are Afro-descendants able to access universities, but so are poor white young people, Indigenous people and those with disabilities, as the affirmative action laws implemented since the early 2000s have been extended to everyone without the means to afford private education.
“We built Brazil,” Jurema Werneck, a prominent activist for public health rights and the country’s executive director of Amnesty International, told me. “Once we understood that we would have to stay here, we decided that this country should be ours, and we would leave our new marks, and that’s exactly what happened.”
Projeto Querino by Tiago Rogero is published by Fósforo