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143 I was asked to give a talk in Seattle sponsored by the World Affairs Council as well as to write a paper for a conference in San Francisco. This time I decided to talk about Bahia Street. This meant I had to justify the organization, not in terms of what the people in the favelas told Rita and me, but in terms of statistical and academic writings. In order to be “credible,” the local situation had to be couched in the knowledge and phrases of outsiders. Cecilia had once shown me an article from Veja, a Brazilian newsmagazine, published in 1988, the same year the new Brazilian Constitution prohibited racial discrimination. The article claimed that slaves in Brazil had been better off than African-Brazilians were then, in the late eighties. As I started to read about racial inequality, I found that the raw and impersonal statistics put in blunt terms what I had seen on the streets. At the time I wrote these papers, the late 1990s, the mortality rate among African-Brazilians was 30 percent higher than whites. Their illiteracy rate was double. African-Brazilians stayed in school an average of two and a half years. Only 13.6 percent finished elementary school and only; 2.1 percent completed high school. No wonder, even learning Portuguese on the streets as I had, my friends in the favelas had long ago begun asking me to read things to them. I was white, so it was assumed that I could read, regardless the language. In addition, African-Brazilians earned less than half (44.1 percent) of what whites earned. And Brazilians claimed they had no racism. Rita told me about an experience she and a black baiana friend had had in a middle-class area in Rio. Every restaurant they entered was closing—for them in particular, it seemed. This was prejudice against them for being from the Northeast as well as for their color. And Rita often said that she thought prejudice among poorer people was worse than among the middle class. I remembered a conversation my friend Herns and I had had a few years before. Herns was a black Haitian anthropologist. He went to the sixteen of race and remembering 144 dance lest we all fall down Sorbonne for his first degree and won an incredible scholarship that funded him to do a Ph.D. at any university he desired in the world. With great idealism, he chose the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. I met him through Cecilia when he was doing his thesis research on “the black family in Bahia.” “I thought I would escape racism by coming to Brazil,” he told me. “I believed all those things I’d read about Brazil being a divine center for racial harmony and hope.” We were sitting at a roadside café in Salvador after an intense night of dancing pagode, a form of samba that was infectious and took exhausting muscle control. “So, what do you think now?” I asked him. Herns mused in silence for a few moments. “When I first moved to Rio—I have a good scholarship, you know—I rented an apartment in an upper middle-class neighborhood.” “At least they let you rent it.” “Well, actually a white friend set it up, so I don’t know that. But the place had a swimming pool. Rio was hot, so a few days after my arrival, I decided to take a swim. When I got to the pool, it was fairly crowded with swimmers—all white. I got in and immediately they all got out.” “What! They all left, like that?” “Yeah. Like I contaminated the pool water or something. So, after a bit, I got out and started back to my apartment.” We sat in silence. I considered the humiliation I would feel in that situation. “But,”Hernsfinallysaid,“asIwaswalkingupthestairway,Ithought to myself, ‘I am an anthropologist. It certainly appears as though the swimmers left on my account, but it could have been coincidental. As a scientist, I need further experimentation.’” “Herns, what did you do?” “Well, I returned to my apartment, collected a book and an air mattress I had, and headed back to the pool. Put the mattress in the pool, climbed on, laid back and began to read.” “And?” “All the swimmers left.” I laughed. “Bloody hell, Herns.” “So, I had the pool all to myself.” He took a sip of his mineral water, a pleased smile now...

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