Negotiating Democracy in Brazil: The Politics of Exclusion 9781626371392

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Reiter.NEGOTIATING.ppi,iii

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NEGOTIATING DEMOCRACY IN BRAZIL

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Reiter.NEGOTIATING.ppi,iii

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NEGOTIATING DEMOCRACY IN BRAZIL The Politics of Exclusion

Bernd Reiter

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Published in the United States of America in 2009 by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.firstforumpress.com and in the United Kingdom by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2009 by FirstForumPress. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reiter, Bernd, 1968– Negotiating democracy in Brazil: the politics of exclusion / by Bernd Reiter. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-935049-02-9 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Equality—Brazil. 2. Democracy—Brazil. 3. Social classes—Brazil. 4. Social integration—Brazil. 5. Marginality, Social—Brazil. 6. Elite (Social sciences)—Brazil. 7. Brazil—Politics and government. 8. Brazil—Social conditions. I. Title. HN290.Z9S6463 2009 306.20981—dc22 2008026639 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This book was produced from digital files prepared by the author using the FirstForumComposer. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Preface

vii

1

Introduction

1

2

What’s Wrong with Brazilian Democracy?

17

3

The Historical Roots of Inclusion

31

4

Education and the Transfer of Privilege

53

5

The Domestication of the Excluded

73

6

Civil Society as Civilized Society

87

7

The Limits to Citizen Participation

105

8

The Political Class and the Persistence of Paternalism

127

9

Conclusion

141

Bibliography Index

149 169

v

Preface This book is the fruit of long reflection. All my previous experiences, as an activist in Germany, a peace worker in Colombia, and an NGO consultant in Brazil, have influenced my current thinking about democracy, racism, and civil society activism. When I began study at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1998, after six years of on-and-off living and working in Brazil, I was thirsty for theory. I had empirical knowledge, but felt a need for a theoretical framework with which to analyze the Brazilian reality I had witnessed. The constant dialogue I enjoyed with professors and colleagues at the Graduate Center, as well as the readings they suggested, went a long way toward supplying me with the theory I needed. The people who helped me the most were my advisers, Kenneth Erickson and Marilyn Gittell. They supported me intellectually and morally, and I would not have been able to stay in New York without their support. The same is true of W. Ofuatey-Kodjoe, then executive director of the Political Science program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Melvin Richter, professor of political science. They all were challenging, understanding, and most of all supportive. At times I thought about abandoning the program, as I had no money, but Damien Pwono and Cesare de la Rocca offered me crucial help that enabled me to carry on. Leonardo Drew offered me a job and over time became my dearest friend. France Morin introduced me to people who became important in my life, and she also enabled me to travel back to Brazil to work for her on her beautiful project “The Quiet in the Land and Projeto Axê.” The seminars and dialogues I had with Mark Blasius, Michelle Fine, Lenny Markovitz, Howard Lentner, Francis Fox-Piven, John Bohman, Asher Arian, and Claus Offe provided me with challenges and made me read more and think more. I wouldn’t have been able to continue working on this book without the funding and support received from the CUNY Graduate Center, the Spencer Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the FRIDE Foundation, and Marilyn Gittell, who offered me a position at the Howard Samuels State Management and Policy Center. My deepest thanks go to all of them. While in Salvador, Bahia, Barbara Souza helped me with the data collection on Bahian NGOs; Rita Dias Jesus assisted me when researching schools and school reform and became a dear friend; and Patricia Marquesini went to several urban planning and participative budgeting

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viii Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

meetings with me and introduced me to the local community. I would not have been able to conduct any research without them. A critical dialogue with Federal Judge João Batista de Castro Júnior allowed me to develop a keen sense of Brazilian law and legal traditions, without which this book would not have been possible. The University of South Florida—personified for me in Jorge Nef, director of the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean; Mohsen Milani, chair of the Department of Government and International Affairs; and Maria Crummett, dean of International Affairs— gave me crucial time off to finish this book. I would not have been able to finish without their support. Their firm belief in my abilities motivated me and kept me going. Mitchell Glodek provided crucial support with the editing and proofreading of my manuscript and gave me insightful and critical feedback. He did an outstanding job and I am very grateful. Finally, my graduate students at USF all contributed indirectly to this book by maintaining a stimulating and at times challenging dialogue about the central topics of this book. I am especially indebted to Andrea Villa, my graduate assistant, for all her hard work.

1 Introduction Societal inequalities undermine democracy. That is the main argument I seek to advance in this book. The country I chose as a case to demonstrate this relationship is Brazil – one of the most inequitable countries of the world. Over the last fifteen years I have spent much time in Brazil and conducted several research projects in different parts of the country. My work has focused on Brazilian civil society, education reform, and political participation. Reflecting on my research on different policy areas, I came to realize that one theme held them all together, that what I was seeing in different contexts were different manifestations of the same underlying pattern. Extreme inequality and the pervasive attempts of historically included sectors to perpetuate and defend their inherited privilege seemed to be responsible not only for a civil society that fell short of its democratizing potential but also for faltering school reform, and unsuccessful attempts of citizen participation in local governance. An analysis of the ways and strategies of defending privilege in Brazil promises to shed light on the social dynamics and causal mechanisms that impede democratic deepening. As such, my findings on Brazil are not confined to that country but pose general questions about societal inequality and democracy that are equally relevant for the study of democracy elsewhere. My studies of different aspects of Brazilian democracy revealed two general insights. The first is that to understand the impacts of societal inequality on democracy, one must focus on those groups that benefit from this inequality. The second is that democracy cannot be adequately understood by focusing exclusively on the political system. I realized that any treatment of Brazilian democracy must include an analysis of Brazilian society, in which, after all, the political system is embedded. This cannot be achieved by simply including the variable of civil society (as done, e.g. by Linz and Stepan, 1996) or by focusing on democratic culture (following Almond and Verba, 1963).1 To capture the shortcomings of democracy, one must analyze society and focus on the ways the societal system interacts with and indeed structures the political system.2

1

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Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

Although states must be seen as important and partially autonomous actors, most authors following the path-breaking work of Evans, Skocpol, and Rueschemeyer (1985) have overestimated the state’s autonomy and neglected the relationship between autonomous states and the society in which those states are embedded. Evans, Skocpol and Rueschemeyer were certainly right to point out that, “states conceived as organizations claiming control over territories and people may formulate and pursue goals that are not simply reflective of the demands or interests of social groups, classes, or society.”3 But while Brazil’s democracy undoubtedly suffers from the shortcomings of Brazil’s political system, the gravest impediments to consolidating democracy are not of a political nature, but of a social nature. Furthermore, it is not the failing state that causes Brazil’s democracy to fall short of its promises, but, on the contrary, Brazil’s extreme societal inequality that permits the Brazilian state too much autonomy from the will and needs of the majority population. In short, the extreme inequalities that characterize Brazilian society are ultimately responsible for its faltering political regime. Accordingly, my main argument is that a political system lacks legitimacy if the society in which it is embedded is extremely unequal. Inequality causes a great part of its population to be excluded from the active exercise of basic citizenship and civil rights. The flipside of exclusion is that included groups have long captured the state and used it to advance their own goals without feeling, and in effect without effectively being, accountable to the masses. In other words, the Brazilian political system is disconnected from the majority of its population, while a relatively small minority of Brazilians uses the political system to advance its own ends. In the words of Teresa Caldeira and James Holston (1998), “The protections and immunities civil rights are intended to ensure as constitutional norms are generally perceived and experienced as privileges of elite social statuses and thus of limited access. They are not, in other words, appreciated as common rights of citizenship.”4 I agree with this analysis. In this book, I therefore propose to “bring society back in.” Accordingly, this book argues that although Brazil’s political system is troubled, the division of its society is far more troublesome and much more consequential, not just at the societal level, but for the political system as well, because political systems are embedded in social systems. No matter how minimalist one wants to define democracy,5 its legitimacy must ultimately reside in a democratic

Introduction 3

society, where the core value of democracy, namely having access to basic citizenship rights, is guaranteed. A democratic political system embedded in an undemocratic society is an absurdity and those accounts that focus their attention exclusively on political systems are unable to capture the ultimate causes for faltering democratic regimes. Brazil provides a clear example and therefore an excellent case for studying the tension that results from a society where civil rights and liberties are not guaranteed to the majority of Brazilians, but where the political system continues to function smoothly, following the rules and procedures laid out for it by the Constitution. My second insight is that an adequate understanding of Brazilian democracy and its shortcomings requires a detailed understanding of the dialectic ways exclusion and inclusion constitute each other and what mechanisms are used by Brazilians in their everyday lives to uphold the crucial distinction between who counts as a full citizen with full access the citizenship rights and who does not. In my research I found that upholding this distinction is of utmost importance to the historically privileged and included groups and it is of far reaching consequences for both sides of this equation because it provides the critical edge, or the competitive advantage, in the daily competition for goods in markets characterized by extreme scarcity. This book, then, pays much attention to the strategies used by historically included groups to defend their inherited privileges. My main argument therefore is that it is not inequality per se that renders Brazilian democracy problematic. It is the constant efforts of historically included groups to uphold inequality and protect their privileged access to citizenship rights that casts a deep shadow over Brazilian democracy. To understand the dialectic relationship between exclusion and inclusion, it becomes necessary to step beyond the disciplinary limits of mainstream political science and integrate the work of other social sciences. Insights and theoretical frameworks borrowed from history and sociology have proven especially helpful for this endeavor. Once a shift of focus toward societal phenomena is undertaken, another step is necessary. I argue that understanding the impact of societal inequality on democracy requires another shift of in point of view, this time away from the excluded and toward the included and the mechanisms they use to perpetuate their inclusion and the related exclusion of others. By examining again and again the excluded, researchers, sociologists and anthropologists in particular, have contributed to the problematization of the excluded and helped consolidate the erroneous idea that there is something wrong with the

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Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

poor, the indigenous, blacks, and other historically marginalized groups.6 Instead of focusing solely on the excluded, we need to pay more attention to those benefiting from their exclusion. In the following, I shall propose the concept of “inclusion” for that purpose. Theorizing Inclusion

In the absence of specific literature on inclusion, the vast literature on exclusion, inequality, and injustice provides initial insights. Judith Butler (1998), for example, asks rhetorically, “is it possible to distinguish, even analytically, between a lack of cultural recognition and a material oppression, when the very definition of legal ‘personhood’ is rigorously circumscribed by cultural norms that are indissociable from their material effects?”7 For Butler, the answer is no. In her essay she explains that the cultural and material are indeed intimately intertwined. She traces this insight back to Marx’s German Ideology (1846) and Engels’ Origin of family, private property, and the state (1884). Marx points to the connection of the mode of production that produces a certain and corresponding mode of cooperation and social organization.8 Much of Butler’s critique takes issue with Nancy Fraser’s distinction between injustices of distribution and injustices of recognition. Nancy Fraser (1998) argues that both kinds of injustices are equally serious, but that they operate differently. For Fraser, to be misrecognized means “to be denied the status of a full partner in social interaction and prevented from participating as a peer in social life – not as a consequence of a distributive inequity (such as failing to receive one’s fair share of resources or ‘primary goods’), but rather as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of interpretation and evaluation that constitute one as comparatively unworthy of respect or esteem.”9 Accordingly, Fraser defines misrecognition as an “institutionalized social relation, not a psychological state.”10 Fraser also points to the connection she makes between the symbolic and the material. For her, “The norms, significations, and constructions of personhood that impede women, racialized peoples, and/or gays and lesbians from parity of participation in social life are materially instantiated – in institutions and social practices, in social action and embodied habitus, and yes, in ideological state apparatuses. Far from occupying some wispy, ethereal realm, they are material in their existence and effects.”11 However the material and cultural relate, this discussion clearly demonstrates that exclusion has two dimensions and it necessary

Introduction 5

follows that inclusion is equally constituted by material and symbolic or cultural variables. Among the symbolic variables, whiteness is extremely consequential. Whiteness, anything but a biological reality, is used as a symbolical indicator of civilizing potential.12 Lesser (1999) demonstrated that what it meant to be “white” shifted in Brazil between 1850 and 1950, but whiteness remained a cultural category, signifying superiority and well-deserved privilege. Brazilian elites openly discussed and compared the different degrees of whiteness of such potential immigrants as Arabs, Japanese, and Southern Europeans, associating whiteness with aptitude.13 The idea of whiteness was therefore constructed and used as a form of capital, strongly associated with merit and progressive, developmental potential. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of distinction provides an entrance point for conceptualizing whiteness as a highly effective form of capital, functioning in a social space that is constituted in relation to other social positions, where each one uses the other for reference. Although Bourdieu ignores ethnicity and race in his theory, his thoughts on gender point to a direction that allows further development. He argues that, “the volume and composition of capital give specific form and value to the determinations which the other factors (age, sex, place of residence etc.) impose on practices. Sexual properties are as inseparable from class practices as the yellowness of a lemon is from its acidity: a class is defined in an essential respect by the place and value it gives to the sexes and to their socially constituted dispositions.”14 In a similar way, whiteness constitutes capital in addition to the other types of capital, namely financial, social, and cultural. Their importance, however, does not follow a simple additive logic. One type of capital rather connects to the others and together they determine the social place an individual will hold in a society. This allows for some flexibility, as one form of capital can be used to partly compensate for the lack of another, although this flexibility is limited precisely by the lumped condition of the different capitals. In that way, as Bourdieu points out correctly, each single form of capital tends to over-determine the social position of its carrier, as the presence or absence of each single one is perceived as being indicative of the presence or absence of the others. It is in this sense that whiteness over-determines its carrier, bestowing him with a social position that might not be warranted. In other words, because of the composite character of the different forms of capital, whiteness signals the presence of other forms, even though they might not be

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Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

present. Blackness, at the same time, signifies the absence of other types of capital and equally over-determines its carrier. The resulting social position then becomes a social expectation and reflects back on the carrying individual. In Bourdieu’s own words, “the homogeneity of the disposition associated with a position and their seemingly miraculous adjustment to the demands inscribed in it result partly from the mechanisms which channel towards positions individuals who are already adjusted to them, either because they feel ‘made’ for jobs that are ‘made’ for them (…) or because they are seen in this light by the occupants of the posts (…) and partly from the dialectic which is established, throughout a lifetime, between dispositions and positions, aspirations and achievements.”15 In other words, individuals tend to conform to the social positions they hold and to internalize the role expectations associated with these positions. In sum, what matters is not the objective position an individual holds in the social space, but the subjective experience of living with and through this position and rather having to uphold and defend it in daily interactions, or trying to change or mask it in order to escape the negative effects resulting from potential over-determination. Defending or challenging one’s social place therefore is a daily struggle and bears very tangible consequences for one’s capabilities to live life. Given its relational character, maintaining one’s own inclusion requires maintaining the exclusion of others.16 In order to reproduce a social structure that secures privileges and advantages to one group and denies it to others, the maintenance of the border that marks inclusion and separates it from exclusion becomes extremely important. It comes to no surprise that Brazilian daily life is full of symbolic acts that fulfill this border-maintenance function. This is even more the case where racial capital is not clearly demarcated and therefore illusive for providing clear borders of belonging. Some Words on Methodology

Although I use statistical data, my main intention in this book is to better understand how and why inequality impacts democracy. Quantitative methods do not suffice to answer these questions, mainly because of their weakness in determining causality. The research method most suited for answering my questions regarding the relationship between inequality and democracy in Brazil, in my judgment, is the case study. By using a case study approach, I

Introduction 7

broadly follow Alexander George and Andrew Bennett (2005) who define the case study approach as “the detailed examination of an aspect of a historical episode to develop or test historical explanations that may be generalizable to other events.”17 Within the broader field of case study analysis, process tracing is one of the most valuable tools. Process tracing “attempts to identify the intervening causal process – the causal chain and causal mechanism – between an independent variable (or variables) and the outcome of the dependent variable.”18 Especially important in this method is the process tracing of deviant cases, extreme cases, most likely, and least likely cases. Process tracing can help to identify the chain of events that led to a certain outcome. By focusing on extreme cases, this method allows for an assessment of the most salient causes at work. By including deviant cases, it also allows for an assessment of the necessary or sufficient contribution of a causal variable in a certain outcome. Deviance can be caused by a previously overlooked variable. A deviant case might also lead to the specification of a theory. I thus selected cases that I find particularly problematic and therefore especially telling, and this book focuses on some of the most extreme cases in which included Brazilians actively engage in defending their inherited privileged positions in social hierarchies. The causes and perceptions of urban violence are amongst the most telling in this respect, as violence has become a way to interpret Brazil and the interpretations of the causes for violence provide evidence for the worldview of the included. Another very telling case that allows for an analysis of the ways inclusions and exclusion constitute each other is provided by focusing on the daily interactions between maids and their employers. The employment of maids is very widespread in Brazil and it allows us to draw important conclusions about the mechanisms used by employers to constitute and justify their superiority over their employees. The very endemic persistence of clientelism and corruption in Brazilian politics raises important questions and an analysis of the underlying causes for this persistence promises to shed light on the ways state employment is used to perpetuate inclusion and to defend privilege. To better understand this endemic Brazilian problem, one needs to examine the history of how Brazilian elites have captured and used the state to perpetuate their own privilege. But although these general treatments of Brazilian reality are extremely revealing and tell us much about how historically included groups operate to perpetuate their inclusion and to justify their

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Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

privilege, a true understanding of the causes and workings of defending privilege and upholding exclusion needs to zoom in even further and analyze the interactions between the included and the excluded in concrete and historically determined situations. To achieve this goal, this book presents case studies on education and political participation from one Brazilian city, Salvador. Salvador was chosen because it offered the richest and most promising environment for my analysis. Salvador is one of the poorest and most inequitable state capitals in Brazil, thus it provides us with a starker than average view of the mechanisms used to defend privilege. In addition, Salvador’s population includes an above average percentage of black citizens, which provides us with the opportunity to examine the racialized character of upholding privilege with more clarity. Thus, Salvador represents an extreme case that elucidates the general functioning of defending privilege in Brazil and elsewhere, and the cases from Salvador allow us to gain a deeper understanding of the causes and mechanisms employed by the historically included to defend their privileged positions in social hierarchies. Salvador, then, constitutes an idealtype for the constitution of inclusion and exclusion and for the racialized nature of this process, but it is not an exception. The exclusion from the full exercise of citizenship rights and the role that education and the abuse of state power play in achieving this exclusion is characteristic of the whole country. The examples I am able to present in this book are intended to highlight some of the mechanisms used to achieve this exclusion. Adding more cases from different regions or even countries will not alter the logic I seek to unveil. Definitions

My hypothesis that social inequalities cause Brazilian democracy to fall short of its promises immediately necessitates clarification of the two central concepts involved in the argument, namely “social inequality” and “democracy.” I rely on probably the most recognized voice in the field for the definition of social inequality. Amartya Sen (1992 and 1999) has proposed a “capability approach” to assessing inequality. According to Sen (1992), “capability is, thus, a set of vectors of functionings, reflecting the person’s freedom to lead one type of life or another. (…) This freedom, reflecting a person’s opportunities of well-being must be valued at least for instrumental [italics in original] reasons, e.g. in judging how good a ‘deal’ a person has in the society. But in addition (…) freedom may be seen

Introduction 9

as being intrinsically important for a good social structure.”19 Sen proposes a new foundation for the study of individual behavior, away from individual utilities and toward individual capabilities. Analyzing individuals as having a certain range of capability of choice and action brings the focus to enlarge these capabilities in order to get a more aggregated welfare function. In other words, it is Sen’s insight that investing in an individual’s capabilities through spending in her education and health also has a positive effect on markets, as these freedoms will very likely be used to produce and trade. At the same time, Sen gets rid of the predominant approach of treating self-interested action as the necessary and sufficient basis to produce Pareto optimality. If freedom to “choose what one has good reason to choose” becomes the basic assumption and replaces individual utility, then there is no reason to assume that profit maximizing is the only motive available to guide - and analyze human action. This treatment offers several advantages, but most importantly it highlights the criterion of the ability of individuals to choose the kind of life they themselves deem valuable. This approach is especially relevant for the analysis of countries with a colonial background, as we shall see later.20 Throughout his book, I provide several empirical examples of Brazilians with very unequal capabilities of living the kind of life they deem worth living and even of having a say in the collective decisions that impact their lives. The unequal distribution of the capability to live the life one values has not only important direct consequences on the democratic system. It also has important social consequences that impact democracy, as we shall see. Defining the concept of “democracy” is more complicated and requires some more elaboration in order to justify the choice of one definition over another. I find the most useful framework to be Jürgen Habermas’ (1998) conceptualization of discursive democracy. His theoretical framework allows for the formulation of a coherent set of assumptions and hypotheses about democracy, democratic legitimacy, and the public sphere that I find helpful in assessing democracy’s quality. Habermas’ model of discursive democracy operates in a space in-between normative models of democracy and sociological theories of society. That is it takes both the state and the society into account. From this perspective, inequality, misrecognition, and oppression are negatively related to democratic governance and they condition the very possibility of a democratic regime. According to Habermas, “only in an egalitarian public of citizens that has emerged from the

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Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

confines of class and thrown off the millennia-old shackles of social stratification and exploitation can the potential of an unleashed cultural pluralism fully develop.”21 This model of democracy is located in between traditional republican and liberal conceptions. From the republican view, it borrows the conception that democratic legitimacy ultimately rests on public will-formation. Against such communitarian approaches provided by Benjamin Barber (1985) or Michael Sandel (1996), it argues that participation in public affairs is not dependent on the cultivation of virtue, nor is it the citizens’ highest duty to participate in public affairs. In addition to the problems of feasibility that necessarily arise from republican conceptions of democracy in modern societies with millions of inhabitants, republican models of democracy also require substantive definitions of the public good, but what constitutes “the public good” has remained problematic. A discursive model of democracy argues that substantive definitions of the public good are desirable, but not fixed. They are instead open to review, because they are historically determined, and society must constantly engage in public deliberation about such substantive definitions. Habermas finds that modern societies are too big, too decentered, and too multi-cultural to constitute homogeneous public spheres where all citizens can and must participate, and thus rejects most communitarian models and those classical republican conceptions of democracy that take their inspiration from Aristotle and the Greek polis. Deliberation, instead, occurs in several spheres, at several levels of institutionalized and non-institutionalized society, inside and outside the state. Republican views become less and less applicable as societies grow more diverse and multicultural and the drawing of borders of community necessarily excludes certain groups from a solidarity defined in ethnic or national terms. Unlike the classical liberal conception of democracy, a discursive model of democracy recognizes the need for active citizen participation in democratic governance and remains skeptical of the idea that conflict and negotiations between private interests unfettered by government automatically produces public goods. It also takes issue with the liberal neutrality of the state towards different conceptions of the public good. From a deliberative perspective, it is not enough to ensure that everybody plays by the rules as certain substantive values of secular, modern societies are likely to come under attack by anti-democratic groups that play by the rules and use them to undermine the very basis on which modern,

Introduction 11

secular societies stand. In Habermas’ own words, “the discourse theory of democracy corresponds to the image of a decentered society, albeit a society in which the political public sphere has been differentiated as an arena for the perception, identification, and treatment of problems affecting the whole society.”22 According to Habermas, it is through “mobilizing citizen’s communicative freedom for the formation of political beliefs”23 that the democratically achieved common will can be created upon which legitimate state power must ultimately rest. Habermas further argues that, “the success of deliberative politics depends not on a collectively acting citizenry but on the institutionalization of the corresponding procedures and conditions of communication, as well as on the interplay of institutionalized deliberative processes with informally developed public opinions.”24 Seyla Benhabib (1996), in turn, explains that such deliberative models of democracy share a model of “plurality of modes of association in which all affected can have the right to articulate their point of view. These can range from political parties, to citizens’ initiatives, to social movements, to voluntary associations, to consciousness-raising groups, and the like.”25 For Benhabib, deliberative processes should happen in all these different forms of associations, allowing for an “interlocking” and the creation of “networks” of spaces for deliberative reasoning. She argues that “legitimacy in complex democratic societies must be thought to result from the free and unconstrained public deliberation of all about matters of common concern.”26 This definition comes closest to the model Cohen and Rogers (1995) have called “egalitarian pluralism,” understood as a set of institutional designs allowing for secondary associations to influence legislative and administrative arenas. Critics have argued that deliberations can easily be distorted and manipulated. But instead of undermining this approach, this critique rather points to the reasons why so many contemporary democracies are lacking in quality. Democracy, after all, cannot develop its full potential in societies that are characterized by extreme inequalities, powerful authorities that are able to manipulate or intimidate others, or traditions or religions that, prohibit discussion of particular topics or define certain norms as “God-given” and out of the realm of public deliberation. A discursive conception of democracy helps us see why most democracies are weak and why political processes are oftentimes distorted, leading to inequitable outcomes. As stated above, no matter how minimalist one’s definition of democracy, democratic legitimacy must ultimately rest on public

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Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

consent and democratic government must be embedded in a democratic society for this consent to form without excluding significant parts of the citizenry. A collective will must be achieved discursively and behavioral and moral standards must be formed, consolidated, and become institutionalized in the form of legal standards, as Emile Durkheim demonstrated in the late 19th century.27 Democratic legitimacy therefore must rest on a democratic public sphere that is open to all citizens, where the public sphere is understood as an open (public) domain of political will formation and discussion. By elevating the public sphere into the spotlight of democratic legitimacy, the discursive conception of democracy meets Amartya Sen’s capability approach. According to Sen, in a democracy all citizens must have equal access to appear in the public sphere without shame and be able to influence it. This basic insight remains unchallenged by the fact that historically, most, if not all, public spheres in the West have remained exclusive and reserved to white males. It is also not invalidated by the fact that in most cases, a plurality of public spheres exists, competing with each other. To the contrary, these caveats allow us to understand why democracy has fallen short of its possibilities in so many places. Habermas and Sen thus point us to the variables we have to analyze if we are interested in the study of democracy. Chapter Overview

Chapter Two presents a very brief diagnosis of Brazilian democracy and its shortcomings. I propose that the main problem of Brazilian democracy is its inability to represent its weakest elements. Democratic legitimacy, in Brazil, does not rest on the entire population, but on a minority, and access to civil rights in Brazil is a privilege rather than a right. Behind this shortcoming lies the absolute division of Brazilian society into included and excluded groups. Chapter Three elaborates the historical roots of inclusion in Brazil. Going back to the early 19th century, I demonstrate how a white minority was able to transform itself into the norm and render the black and indigenous majority into exotic others in their own country. This chapter ends with an analysis of how political elites were able to avoid a radical re-structuring of Brazilian society and thereby perpetuate their own privileges positions in the societal hierarchies.

Introduction 13

Chapter Four presents research conducted between 2001 and 2005 in Salvador, Bahia on inequality and education. Through a comparison of public and private middle and high schools I demonstrate that public schools, even after a state-wide reform effort initiated in 1999, provide poor education for the poor, whereas private schools prepare the offspring of the historically privileged for their brilliant futures. Chapter Five addresses the domestication of the excluded and demonstrates how the dichotomy of inclusion / exclusion is reproduced daily within the households of included Brazilians through the very widespread practice of employing domestic servants. I demonstrate that the domestication of the excluded constitutes the superiority of the included and that employing domestic servants is not a pre-modern practice, but part of Brazilian modernity. Chapter Six, presents and discusses research conducted in 2001, an analysis of Bahian NGOs. Although civil society has the potential to create independent, democratic, and counter-hegemonic public spaces, I find that the NGOs in my sample did not live up to that possibility and instead reproduced the same paternalistic and racist practices that characterize the broader society. Chapter Seven presents the findings of my research on popular participation in school management, participatory budgeting, and participatory planning, conducted in 2005 and 2006. Although several Brazilian cities created mechanisms to channel popular participation in various policy areas, I find that the deep societal inequalities and the division of Brazilian society into two factions ultimately render meaningful popular participation in any policymaking impossible. Chapter Eight presents a historical analysis of the Brazilian “political class.” It traces the elite domination of the Brazilian state and its appropriation and indeed privatization by the historically included back to a tradition of “bacharelismo” – a Luso-Brazilian tradition responsible for creating a sense of superiority and lack of commitment and accountability among state officials and elected representatives. Bacharelism provides an important background for understanding the connection between personalistic leadership styles and the state apparatus. It also provides the background for the discussion of the limits of popular participation presented in chapter nine. In Chapter Nine I recapitulate the main findings and conclusions reached throughout this book.

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Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

1 My approach also goes beyond the recent re-focusing on civil society to hold governments accountable, as proposed by Peruzzotti and Smulovitz (2006). Although I agree with Avritzer (2002) that democratic innovation must originate from the societal level, I am much less optimistic about the degree to which such innovation characterizes Brazilian society. In my opinion, it is sobering to realize that most accounts of innovative social practices rely on the cases of Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte, and the fact that Participatory Budgeting came to an end in Porto Alegre in 2004 further adds to my skepticism. 2 In their treatment of Brazilian democracy, authors like Diamond (1999), Linz and Stepan (1996), Hagopian (2000), and Mainwaring (1995 and 1997) typically point to a weak party system and problems resulting from an unstable balance between parliamentary and presidential systems as the causes for unfinished consolidation in Brazil. Although this approach has improved our understanding of the importance of institutional settings to achieve certain outcomes, such analyses must remain unsatisfactory. The debate over which political institutional settings are more likely to improve the functioning of democratic systems runs the risk of confounding means with ends, because although institutions are important to provide incentives and channel expectations, they cannot guarantee a desired outcome, as recently pointed out by Avritzer (2002). 3 Evans et.al. Skocpol 1985:9. 4 Caldeira and Holston 1998:276, in Aguero and Stark (eds.). 5 E.g. following Joseph Schumpeter in his minimalist treatment of democracy, where political elites compete for votes in regular and fair elections. 6 To be exact, by focusing on the excluded, social scientists involuntarily help the included to escape analysis and they are at risk of becoming functional in the ongoing process of consolidating the idea that blacks, indigenous groups, women, homosexuals, and the poor are “Others,” whereas they, the included, represent the norm. In my own empirical research I consistently found nothing to be wrong with the excluded and a lot to be wrong with the included. A shift of focus away from the excluded and onto the included necessitates a shift of optics, away from an anthropological gaze on those historically constructed as Others and a redirection of focus on the men and women who have the power to decide over what counts as right or wrong, normal and deviant, beautiful and ugly, worthy and unworthy of social esteem and over who is to be considered an equal participant in the public sphere and who is not. I am, of course, influenced by Foucault’s analysis of “Discipline and Punish” and his analysis of the different ways power influences our societal relationships. 7 Butler 1998:41. 8 Engels wrote, “According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a twofold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing, and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human

Introduction 15

beings themselves, the propagation of the species.” (quoted from Butler 1998:41) 9 Fraser 1998:141. 10 Ibid. 11 Fraser 1998:144. 12 Harris (1993), studying race relations in the US, demonstrates how symbolical whiteness was constructed and used in the United States as a form of capital in order to justify undeserved. 13 Lesser 1999. 14 Bourdieu 1984:107. 15 Bourdieu 1984:110. 16 This insight goes back to Hegel’s discussion of the master and slave relationship. According to Tajfel (1986), groups constitute themselves in relation to other individuals and groups. A sense of identity is fostered through the drawing of borders that separate those inside from those outside. This drawing of borders not only permits the effective separation of one group into two or more, it also constitutes each group with reference to the others. Tajfel’s main dialectic insight was that one group can only exist by defining itself as different from another. Difference and identity are constituted together. In short, inclusion can only produce the desired effect if it is contrasted with exclusion. 17 George and Bennett 2005:5. 18 George and Bennett 2005:206. 19 Sen 1992:40f. 20 My adoption of Sen’s framework is thus similar to the use Guillermo O’Donnell (2004) makes of Sen’s analytical approach. 21 Habermas 1998:308. 22 Habermas 1998:301. 23 Habermas 1998:147. 24 Habermas 1998:298. 25 Benhabib 1996:73. 26 Benhabib 1996:68. 27 The Division of Labor in Society, first published in 1893.

2 What’s Wrong with Brazilian Democracy? Brazilian democracy is, by most accounts, consolidated. Regular and fair elections have been held for over twenty years now and the Brazilian citizenry is actively engaged in the political process, through voting and other, extra-parliamentary activities, such as social movements (e.g., the Movement for Landless Peasants (MST)) and other kinds of civic activism, such as impeaching President Fernando Collor for corruption in 1992. However, if we look at Brazil through the lens of Habermas’ discursive model of democracy and if we apply the framework offered by Amartya Sen, we are able to recognize some important shortcomings. What are these democratic shortcomings? The answer to this question flows directly from Sen’s treatment of democracy presented in Chapter One. The central question Sen poses concern the ability of individuals to choose the kind of life they themselves deem valuable, in other words, their capability. In Brazil, as we shall see, the capabilities to shape the life one wants to live are unequally distributed; members of one group of Brazilians not only shape their own lives, but also shape the lives of all those excluded from actively participating in this process. Because such a large contingent of Brazilians is rendered invisible and voiceless by the extremely hierarchical structure of the society they live in, their presence in the public sphere is consistently neglected and overlooked, thus casting a long and dark shadow over Brazil’s democratic legitimacy. The quality and indeed survival of democracy hinges first and foremost on the equality of the citizenship status of all members. In Brazil, this equality of status as citizens has not been established yet. To illustrate this state of Brazilian affairs, this chapter presents a rather impressionistic description of some very pertinent episodes of recent Brazilian history. Both episodes, the strike of the Bahian civil and military police in July of 2001 and the email hoax of Brazilian intellectuals in August of 2006, which followed two attacks by the criminal organization First Command of the Capital (PCC) in the state of São Paulo, provide very vivid portraits of Brazil’s failing democracy and of the ways average Brazilians experience this 17

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Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

failure. After describing those two episodes, I provide some background information on violence in Brazil and I conclude with a diagnosis in which I identify division as the main paradigm for understanding and analyzing Brazilian society. We Are All in Hell

In August of 2006, a hoax interview appeared on the Internet and swiftly captivated the attention of Brazilian intellectuals. Purportedly an interview of Marcola, the imprisoned head of the criminal organization PCC, by one of Brazil’s most respected journalists, Arnaldo Jabor, the fake interview quickly became the topic of many conversations and was treated with fascination and respect, passed from one intellectual to another like a secret and powerful code. The PCC had been responsible for two highly orchestrated waves of attacks on the city of São Paulo earlier in 2006. In May of 2006, 68 city buses were burnt, and 16 banks were bombed, and there were seven related homicides (of security guards, police officers, and one private individual). The night of July 11-12, a second wave of attacks hit the state of São Paulo. According to a story by the renowned weekly Veja, from July 19, 2006, PCC is active in all of the 144 São Paulo state prisons and has contracted several lawyers to act on their behalf. The interview was soon discovered to be a hoax. In a matter of days, however, the interview found a vast audience among the upperand middle-class Brazilians who were able to read it on the Internet. The following are excerpts from that hoax interview. Title: We Are All in Hell J.: Are you the PCC? M.: More than that, I am a sign of new times. I was poor and invisible, you never looked at me for decades… Now, we are rich with the multinational enterprise of cocaine and you are scared to death… we are the late start of your social consciousness. J.: And the solution would be? M.: There is no solution. The whole idea of solution is wrong. Have you ever looked at the 560 favelas in Rio? Did you ever fly over the periphery of São Paulo? What kind of solution? Only with billions of

What’s Wrong with Brazilian Democracy? 19

dollars spent systematically, with a very competent government, a tremendous political will, economic growth, a revolution in education, general urbanization. And all of these would have to be done by some kind of “enlightened tyranny” that circumvents the centennial bureaucracy, ignores the legislative branch that has been complicit, or do you think that 287 “bloodsuckers” will act, and a judiciary that does 1 not work? There would have to be communication between federal, state, and municipal police and all of this would cost billions of dollars and would require a profound psychosocial change of the political structure of this country. In other words: it’s impossible. There is no solution. J.: Are you not afraid to die? M.: You are the ones that are afraid to die, not me. By the way: here in jail, you cannot come in and kill me, but I can have you killed out there. We are suicide bombers (homens bomba); in the favelas are 100 million suicide bombers. We are already another species, a different type of animal, different from you. Death, to you, is a Christian drama in a bed, a heart attack. Death to us is the daily carcass (presunto, literally “ham”) thrown into the river. Didn’t you intellectuals talk about “class struggle,” about “be a criminal - be a hero?” Well, we are here. It’s us (…) There are no more proletarians, or exploited (infelizes), or excluded. There is another thing growing out there, created in the garbage, learning with absolute illiteracy, graduating in the prisons, like an alien monster hidden in the corners of the city. There is already a whole new language. We are looking at the post-misery species. The post-misery produces a new assassin culture, supported by technology, satellites, cell phones, internet, modern weapons. This is shit with microchips, with megabytes. J.: What has changed in the periphery? M.: Money. We have it now. Do you think that someone who has 40 million dollars, like Beira-Mar [notorious crime boss, the author] doesn’t rule? With 40 million, the prison becomes a hotel, an office. What police will end this fountain of gold? We are a rich and modern enterprise. If the employee doesn’t function, he is thrown into the microwave. You are the broken state, dominated by the incompetent; we have flexible management methods; you are slow and bureaucratic; we fight on our own turf, you on foreign land; we do not fear death, you die of fear; we are well armed, you come with tasers; we are attacking, you are defending; you have this mania with humanism, we are cruel,

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Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

without mercy; you transform us into superstars of crime, we make you clowns; we are helped by the favela population, out of fear or out of love; you are hated; you are regional, provincial, our weapons and our product come from abroad, we are global. But we don’t forget about you, you are our clients; but if you forget about us, we create a wave of violence. J.: What should we do? M.: I will give you a tip, even if it goes against me. Get the drug barons. There are congressmen, senators, generals, even the president of Paraguay involved in the trafficking of drugs and weapons. But who will do this? The military? With what money? The country is bankrupt, sustained by a dead state and 20% interest rates and Lula even augments public spending, hiring 40 thousand petty thieves (picaretas). Will the military fight the PCC and the Red Command? I am reading Clausewitz’s On War. There is no chance of success. We are killer ants, hidden in the cracks, we even have anti-tank missiles, if you mess up, we will launch a Stinger. And we also make one of those “dirty bombs.” Can you imagine, a radioactive Ipanema? J.: So there is no solution? M.: You can only achieve any success if you stop defending “normality.” There is no more normality. You need to make a selfcritique of your own incompetence. Look, there is no solution. Do you know why? Because you don’t even grasp the size of the problem. It’s like Dante wrote: Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch’intrate! Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Rather than serving as an accurate description of Brazilian reality, which it is not, the hoax, as indicated by its popularity among intellectuals and its explanatory appeal among educated Brazilians, provides an excellent window into the mindset and the fears of Brazilian middle and upper classes who were able to read this “interview” because they have access to the Internet. To them, the excluded have indeed developed into a different species and this post-misery class indeed projects an extremely irrational fear onto the minds of included groups. Most included Brazilians have long abandoned public spaces and have retreated into private islands of safety and control, evidenced by the rapidly increasing number of ever-more sophisticated and autonomous high security condominiums in every major Brazilian city. In all likelihood, this hoax interview is the brainchild of an included member of Brazil’s included citizenry and as such, instead of telling us much about

What’s Wrong with Brazilian Democracy? 21

Brazilian reality, it rather provides us with a window into the fearful mind of the included and into the ways they interpret and perceive Brazilian reality. The following section depicts yet another very elucidating event that occurred several years earlier, in the state of Bahia. th

Friday the 13

In July of 2001, after negotiations with the executive branch over a demand for a raise in salary from 180 Reais a month (less than 100 US dollars) to 1,200 Reais broke down, the Bahian police went on strike. The strike united the institutionally divided civil police and military police, and, as a result, all Bahian cities, including Salvador, the state capital, were without law enforcement. The following excerpts from my field notes taken during the time of the strike, when I was residing in Salvador, I include to provide another impression of the absolute and apparently insurmountable inequality and indeed absolute division of Brazilian society. This is the day when the fragile veil that protects the haves from the have-nots, the citizens from the excluded, whites from blacks, bursts. It also is revenge day, payback day. The non-citizens have formed spontaneous gangs to sack commercial establishments, shops, gasoline stations, and mug the people they encounter in the street. Hysteria has established her reign and made ordinary people look like dangerous thieves. This is the day when whoever has something is in fear of losing it. Armed private guards are in the street gunning down potential or real thieves, people run in panic, fear in their eyes. Cars do not stop at crossings, because they fear assault. Buses have stopped operating. Most of all, it’s the day of truth, when the tension caused by injustice, inequality, lack of opportunity, and lack of access becomes visible. It is a day of civil war-like disorder. Thousands of people are in the streets running, screaming, assaulting, and shooting. They come in waves, giving a certain dynamic to this apparently spontaneous movement. The waves ebb down and then grow again, constantly renewing the composition of their members as behind nearly every middle-and upper class neighborhood of Salvador lurks an ”invasion” – an informal squatted area of non-citizens. The invasions seem to feed the flow of participants as favela-dwellers leave their habitual confines and all of a sudden become visible in middle- and upper-class residential areas. The mostly white residents panic as Bahia shows its true face – and that face is black.

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Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

Everything happened in the afternoon – when all shops were open. 200 people invaded a shoe store in one popular commercial area. Bread, groceries, TVs, refrigerators, videos, and the like were the main targets. What the local news calls “gangs of thieves” in fact seem to be a mixture of some armed criminals, with mostly ordinary poor people fulfilling a dream that is continuously nurtured by the media: that of middle class consumption. Although the assaults and the threats are real, the general hysteria and the fear by far surpass this reality. All of a sudden, every black male without a proper shirt in the street becomes a potential thief and a target of private security guards, heavily armed and badly trained. Several people are killed. Adding to the hysteria was the fact that from one moment to the next telephones were liable to stop working because lines were congested. Taxis didn’t stop afraid of assaults, traffic stopped as thousands tried to escape the bravery of the ones that have nothing to lose. All businesses closed at the same time, at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Later in the day, the local news reported that this Thursday brought eleven assassinations to a city that in “normal times” counts three assassinations every day. The whole movement was like a mirage. It started unexpectedly and didn’t last longer than two hours, leaving the city on alert, waiting for the night. At 6 p.m. the president sent the military to keep order in the city. The 8 o’clock news announced that military troops from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo would reach by tomorrow afternoon. Bahians face a night of fear and uncertainty.

Although this incident was particular and unique, the general sentiment of fear and tension it unleashed are not. Violence and fear have come to characterize more and more the same Brazilian society that only 20 years ago was known and praised for its cordiality. Violence has become a structuring element of Brazilian society. According to several recent studies,2 the country’s homicide rate grew from 11.4 violent deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 1980 to 27.8 in 2001. Homicide rates are under 5 per 100,000 for the United States and under 3 in France, the UK, and Canada. In 2001, São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city with a metropolitan population of some 10 million, registered 12,638 homicides. New York City, with a population of almost 12 million,3 registered 678 homicides in the same year.4 According to the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE), rates of death resulting from firearms increased by

What’s Wrong with Brazilian Democracy? 23

95 percent over the last 10 years in Brazil. In some cities this increase was even larger. Between 2000 and 2003, the number of assaults on drivers went up by 74 percent in the city of São Paulo and the city currently registers some 500 kidnappings every month. The numbers are not much different in other urban centers. And although violence is perceived by the included as a direct threat to them, the overwhelming number of homicide victims in Brazil are in fact poor, very young (between 10 and 25), male, and black.5 This is not surprising, given that most violent incidences are indeed intra-class and intraethnic, meaning that they affect the poor and non-white slum dwellers the most. It is thus not only the very real threat of violence that makes the included retreat into their privatized security zones; it is the fear of all those perceived as potentially violent others that structures contemporary Brazilian reality the most – a fact described in detail by Teresa Caldeira (2000). Brazilian society seems to be drifting apart, falling victim to the centrifugal forces unleashed by violence and the perceptions and images that violence creates in the minds of Brazilians. What lies behind this increase of violence and how does it affect Brazilian democracy? A central component to this answer is the extreme inequality of Brazilian society itself, made worse by the highly racialized structure of life-chances and capabilities among Brazilians. The Background: Structural, Racialized Violence

The extremely unequal distribution of capabilities to live the life one deems worth living provides the trembling ground upon which Brazilian society is shaking. Some basic data suffices to present the general picture. Approaching this data from the opposite angle than usual, namely with a focus on the constitution of inclusion, helps to shed a new light on a situation deemed widely known and its consequences understood. In 2004, 41.7 percent of Brazilian blacks were poor, while only 19.5 percent of whites were in the same category, “poor” being defined as living on less than half the minimum wage per month.6 In the poorer regions, for example the Northeast, 56.7 percent of all blacks and 44.6 percent of all whites were poor.7 To black Brazilians in general and to Northeasterners regardless of race, who are widely perceived by their southern countrymen as being non-white no matter what their skin color, poverty is not the exception, but the norm.8

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Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

In a country with extremely high unemployment rates, especially when the percentage of the economically active population working in the informal sector is considered, having a regular job must be seen as a privilege and thus a characteristic of the included. Research on the informal sector in the city of Salvador has demonstrated that about 40 percent of the economically active Bahian population works in the precarious jobs of the informal sector. These jobs offer no job security and no health-, unemployment-, or retirement benefits.9 “Digital inclusion” provides another indicator to characterize Brazilian societal divisions. According to the Brazilian Institute for Research in Applied Economy (IPEA), in 2004, 23 percent of whiteheaded households had a personal computer at home and 8 percent of black-headed households.10 Furthermore, in the same year, 60 percent of black households and 40 percent of white households had no telephone.11 Accordingly, having a telephone and a computer at home is the privilege of a minority, especially when racial background is taken into consideration. One last criterion to differentiate included from excluded Brazilians is ownership of a car. In 2005, 12 percent of Brazilians owned a car.12 Given that the average household size in Brazil of 3.73 persons per household, approximately 44 percent of Brazilian households own a car. This information is complicated by pronounced regional differences in car ownership and by the fact that rich households may own more than one car. Despite these distortions, it is nevertheless safe to say that the majority of Brazilian households do not own a car. Car ownership, in other words, is a privilege in Brazil. In sum, whereas some Brazilians live a lifestyle comparable to that of middle classes in Europe and the United States, the majority of their fellow citizens live an entirely different reality. The racialized oppression that characterizes Brazilian reality must be constantly and violently supported and sustained so that “the way things are” is maintained. As the state is one of the most powerful holders of power and violence and is indeed strongly influenced by elite interests, it is clear why the Brazilian state has been accused of actively participating in the oppression of its own peoples.13 The Brazilian state defends the interests of included Brazilians against the interests of the excluded, commonly perceived as the “dangerous classes,” as Caldeira (2000) and Pinheiro (1997) have pointed out.14 The systematic exploitation of indigenous people and Afro descendents is a persistent Brazilian institution, difficult to change because it is seen as “normal,” “the way things always were,”

What’s Wrong with Brazilian Democracy? 25

“tradition,” or just “right.” As reifications reflect back onto individuals and order their lives, institutions take on roles and identities and become consolidated, helping individuals to construct their own identities by fulfilling role expectations. Once a patterned way of doing things has become institutionalized and elevated into common sense, it not only structures behavior, but also the thinking about and the perception of reality, limiting otherwise available options. As a result, thinking about the excluded as being “inferior,” and perceiving their oppression and subordination as “normal,” has become deeply anchored in Brazilian reality. As such it oftentimes escapes scrutiny, especially by those that share those lifeworlds. The routinized practice of exclusion helps to establish and justify privilege for those who exclude. In Caldeira’s (2000) analysis, the ability of the rich and influential to break the law with impunity, and of police to commit violence without restraint, and the resulting lack of credibility in the state as the exclusive and just exerciser of violence, has given rise to a vicious circle. Public spaces are abandoned and private security agencies defend the rich against the poor. The poor are constantly disrespected, mistreated, and tortured – by the very group that should protect them, the police. As a result, public spaces, where peoples of different economic and social backgrounds could meet, are no longer even included in the designs of city planners. Instead, because they offer protection, closed condominiums predominate in most urban centers. Everything outside becomes potentially threatening and dangerous. Poor neighborhoods become the Wild West for the police who hold a world-record in the killing of “suspects.”15 Democracy has lost its very spaces of reproduction. The independent New York-based NGO Human Rights Watch, in its 2001 worldwide assessment of human rights violations, has written about police violence in Brazil: Police violence continued to stand out as Brazil's major human rights problem in other contexts as well. In São Paulo state, police killings of civilians surged from 525 in 1998 to 664 in 1999, the highest total since 1992, when police killed 111 inmates in a massacre at Carandiru prison. This violent trend intensified over the first six months of 2000, as police in the nation's most populous state killed 489 civilians, an increase of 77.2 percent over the comparable 1999 figure. A study released in July by the police ombudsman shed light on these shockingly high figures. Analyzing the autopsy reports of 222 persons killed by police gunfire in 1999-one-third of the victims of fatal police

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Negotiating Democracy in Brazil

actions-it reported that 51 percent had been shot in the back and 23 percent had been shot five or more times. The findings suggested that many had been summarily executed, and not killed as a result of legitimate use of lethal force in shootouts, as authorities routinely reported. More than half of the victims had no prior criminal record.

According to a 2001 report by the respected Rio-based Institute for Study of Religion (ISER), the number of crime suspects killed in encounters with Rio police more than doubled from 1993 to 1995, and grew again to reach about 400 deaths in 1996. In addition, this study reveals a clear racial bias in police killings. The figures in the report, from January 1993 to July 1996, demonstrate that among those killed by police in Rio de Janeiro, 70.2% were Black, while whites accounted for only 29.8% of the total, in a city that is roughly divided equally between whites and non-whites. Inclusion and the Absolute Division of Society

The breathtaking increase in daily violence in Brazil is more than dramatic. It expresses a state of societal affairs. In Brazil, a society is breaking apart into two groups, victims, real and potential, and victimizers. The structuring of this dichotomy is a lesson in dialectics, as those most in fear of becoming victims are indeed deeply involved in the victimization of historically excluded groups. In an irony of fate, the victims of structural exclusion become potential victimizers – real and perceived - and those that continually benefit from a system of structural violence run the risk of becoming victims of the system that continually benefits them. In a strict sense, not exclusion, but division, is the main paradigm that characterizes Brazilian society. Exclusion implies that one group of the population is held outside of the rights-invested citizenry. But this phenomenon does not seem to capture the full extent of Brazilian violence and the fear thereof. It rather seems that the increase in violence testifies to the end of illusions on the part of historically excluded groups and to the increasing lack of adequate understanding of the excluded on the part of the historically included. More and more excluded groups seem to be losing their hope of making it into the camp of the included by means of work, despite the fact that since the early 2000s the income of the poorest has slowly increased, due to a slowly growing economy and special welfare programs targeted at the poor. In 2004, the average Brazilian black woman still earned only about half the salary of the average white woman

What’s Wrong with Brazilian Democracy? 27

(R$291, compared to R$562) and the average black man in fact earned slightly less than half of the average white man (R$450, compared to R$913).16 Black wages are not only persistently lower than white wages; they are also simply not high enough to allow for a middle-class life style in a regular, middle-class neighborhood. The poor, who are likely to be non-white, must confront the reality that “catching-up” to the included, who are likely to be white, might not be an option, because although their salaries are slowly rising, so are those of the included and the distance that separates them and their lifestyles from those of the excluded remains the same. This perception is, of course, exactly right, and no ideology is in place that is able to keep their hopes up or powerful enough to distract them. Nor could there be an ideology pervasive enough to do the job, given the extreme scarcity of markets and the fierceness with which historically included groups are willing to defend their privileged access to them. To make matters worse, included groups have always portrayed themselves as a different kind of people. The division between them and the excluded is of an absolute quality and although social mobility occurs in practice, it is impossible in principle. Unlike in such countries as the United States, where rich people are just that, rich, in Brazil included groups are much more than just rich. They are the people, the real people, while the excluded are less than people; they are perceived and constantly portrayed by the included as incomplete people, as child-like, unfinished, incomplete beings, referred to as “gentinha,” (small, unimportant people) or “povão” (Lumpen). Despite being the majority, they are perceived as constituting a problem, something to be dealt with by the police or the military. This is the reason why so many Brazilian grassroots organization make the struggle for “the right to have rights” their first goal. Exclusion in Brazil is first and foremost oppression and as such it challenges and consistently denies the very humanity of the oppressed and transforms all those benefiting directly or indirectly from their oppression into monsters. Knowing of this fact, even if only unconsciously, instills horror and fear into the oppressors and transforms the whole society into a self-devouring machine. Violence is the visible symptom in this process. Conclusion: Brazil’s Disjunctive Democracy

On a less sanguine note, the above numbers demonstrate that one of the clearest indicators for Brazil’s faltering democracy is the fact that

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the Brazilian state does not protect its citizens. This reality is responsible for the related fact that most Brazilians have no access to and do not seek support from the legal system. As Sérgio Adorno (1994) has long demonstrated, over 70 percent of Brazilians involved in criminal conflicts do not seek the justice system to resolve their problems. Teresa Caldeira (2000), in turn, has demonstrated that most Brazilians do not seek the executive branch of government for the resolution of conflicts either. Instead, ordinary Brazilians fear the police and try to stay clear of them - for good reason, as the numbers above demonstrate. In the words of Caldeira and Holston (1998), Brazilian democracy is “disjunctive,” because Brazilian citizenship lacks a civil component, arguably the most important column upon which democratic citizenship must rest. In sum, Brazilian democracy is failing because it systematically fails to protect a great part of its population not only from each other, but also from the state. Civil liberties are not guaranteed and Brazilian democracy thus lacks a consolidated civil component. The absence of this component manifests itself daily in the lives of all Brazilians in the form of extreme violence and the resulting discrediting of the Brazilian state and anything related to the state, most importantly the police, who are perceived as incompetent and more of a threat then a help; the judicial branch, which is rarely seen to be upholding one’s rights (and if so never in a timely manner); and the legislative branch, which is perceived by most Brazilians as endemically corrupt.17 The suspicion of anything official, public, and state-related extends even to public schools and all public service in general, as we shall see further below. To most Brazilians, public transportation and public schooling equals bad transportation and bad schooling and it denigrates its user. Public service is for the poor. Historically privileged Brazilians send their children to private schools and never use public transportation. After all, they are the ones who created the state in order to control those they brought into the country to serve them. Brazilian elites are not only above the state; they perceive the state and any state-related services as an instrument of their whim. Brazilian elites, in other words, have privatized the state and the public realm and use it as an instrument to control, co-opt, appease, or, if pressured, serve the ordinary people. As we shall see in the case studies discussed later, this service, if it exists at all, is always treated more as a favor than a duty and it is invariably of bad quality. Included Brazilians have thus abandoned the public sphere at the same time that they have captured political power. In the same way

What’s Wrong with Brazilian Democracy? 29

that they have privatized their education, health care, and transportation, they have left the streets and public spaces to the poor and the excluded. As a result, public space became “dangerous space.” The included responded to the rise of the poor and historically excluded by abandoning the public sphere and thus further delegitimizing it. As a result of this process, to most Brazilians, “público” equals bad and implies “for the poor” and the public sphere is not perceived as the source of popular sovereignty. If “the people” are given any voice at all, it is under the strict guidance and tutelage of the included. The absolute division of Brazilian society into included and excluded sectors has eroded the very basis on which any democracy needs to stand, namely on a shared recognition of its people. In Brazil, there are two kinds of people, with very different capabilities to make their voice heard and to influence politics and policymaking. Worse, the included sectors have taken it on themselves to speak and decide for the excluded, thus transforming them into childlike minors and, at the same time, uplifting themselves into positions of powerful overseers of the country’s destiny. For such a state of affairs to consolidate and find acceptance, it must be rooted in history and become tradition. Before further scrutinizing the different ways in which societal divisions affect Brazilian life and democracy, we need to take a look at the historical roots of inequality in Brazil. The following chapter thus seeks to explain how Brazil reached this point of extreme division that characterizes its contemporary reality. 1

This comment refers to a political scandal that exploded in mid-2006 involving members of parliament who had stolen public money allocated to buy ambulances for poor regions. They were labeled “Bloodsuckers” by the Brazilian media. 2 E.g. by the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE) together with SIM and DATASUS, both related to Brazil’s ministry of health, as well as the report on “Violence and Firearms,” released in November of 2004 by the Núcleu de Estudos da Violência (NEV) of the University of São Paulo. 3 US Census Bureau, this number refers to New York City’s metropolitan area, composed of New York City, Westchester, Rockland, and Putnam Counties. 4 Bureau of Vital Statistics, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. 5 Data from 2004, SIM/DATASUS/IBGE. 6 PNAD 2004.

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7

Being poor is defined by Brazilian convention as earning less than half the minimum wage, i.e. less than 175 Reais (80 US Dollars) per month. 8 100 Reais = 48 US Dollars (2006); Homens brancos = white males; Mulheres brancas = white females; Homens negros = black males; Mulheres negras = black females. 9 Add reference of Vanda Sa Barreto and Nadya Castro. 10 IPEA. 11 Idem. 12 Global Auto Report, August 2006: www.scotiabank.com. 13 By Caldeira 2000, Pinheiro 1997, Hanchard 1999, and others. 14 Foucault described the powerful and violent ways governments have tried to discipline people and turn them docile and obedient. He has labeled this power “governmentality.” 15 According to a 2001 report by the respected Rio-based Institute for Study of Religion (ISER), the number of crime suspects killed in encounters with Rio police more than doubled from 1993 to 1995, and grew again to reach about 400 deaths in 1996. In addition, this study reveals a clear racial bias in police killings. The figures in the report, from January 1993 to July 1996, demonstrate that among those killed by police in Rio de Janeiro, 70,2% were Black or Pardo (Brown-skinned), while whites accounted for only 29.8% of the total, in a city which is roughly divided between whites and non-whites. 16 IPEA, 2006. 17 Caldeira and Holston 1998.

3 The Historical Roots of Inclusion This chapter provides some historical background for the ways in which European descent and whiteness became such important markers of privilege and inclusion in Brazil. I discuss some of the main ideologies that served this cause and demonstrate that the foundations upon which social and racial hierarchies were constructed during the first half of the 20th century have never been effectively undermined. In 1500, Portugal took possession of the American lands discovered by Pedro Alvares Cabral. The lands and people Cabral encountered, however, did not offer anything of value to the Portuguese crown. There were no big cities, like the ones discovered by Cortez, and the indigenous people did not display much gold. The Portuguese had to focus on another highly valuable commodity able to produce profits for Portugal. They found it in the “white gold” of sugar, then an extremely rare and costly commodity from the Arabic peninsula. Sugar cane was introduced to Brazil in 1535. The climate of the Northeast was especially favorable and sugar continued to be an extremely profitable commodity during the 16th and 17th centuries and Salvador, the capital of the northeastern province of Bahia, became Brazil’s first capital and colonial center. Its prosperity was entirely based on sugar, which from its very beginning was cultivated on plantations, with the extensive use of slaves. The Portuguese colonizers initially tried to enslave native Brazilians, but their familiarity with the terrain made their enslavement and control an expensive endeavor. By 1550 the colonizers brought the first African slaves. The Portuguese had acquired experience with sugarcane plantations and African slave labor in their previous colonial experiences and, although indigenous Brazilians continued to be enslaved, African human capital soon became the main source for Portugal’s overseas wealth. Brazil grew rich exploiting African slave labor until 1888, longer than any other country in the western world and slavery was the foundation on which economic prosperity was constructed in all regions of colonial and imperial Brazil, that is from 31

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the mid-16th century to 1889, when Brazil became a republic.1 According to Thomas Skidmore, “In 1819, according to one unofficial estimate, no region had less than 27 percent slave[s] out of its total population.” Furthermore, “In 1872, when slaves made up 15.2 per cent of the national population, no region had [less than] 7.8 per cent of its total population still in slavery, and the highest ratio was only 19.5 per cent.”2 After the emancipation of slaves, however, Brazil did not provide for any mechanisms to further their integration into the rapidly modernizing nation. No reconstruction was ever tried. Instead, political elites were looking for white immigrants to substitute slave labor in an attempt to “whiten” the nation and “improve its racial stock.”3 The millions of Europeans flocking to Brazil were able to experience upward social mobility denied to Afro-Brazilians because where industrialization created jobs, preference was given to white immigrants. Most Afro-Brazilians were left with only one option, namely to become self-employed in the informal sector. Only a few made it into industrial jobs as industrial labor proved extremely exclusionary and full of internal hurdles standing in the way of a career within this most modern and advanced sector of Brazil’s economy. Most blacks were restricted to the lowest job categories.4 The informal sector remained the place par excellence for black labor. To this day, racism has been able to limit Afro-Brazilian upward mobility within the industry and the service sectors. As a result, in 2002, Afro-Brazilians were still extremely underrepresented in modern, relatively high paying Brazilian companies and overrepresented in relatively low-paid sectors and in positions with low prestige.5 Research conducted during the late 1990s demonstrates that during that decade about 40 percent of the economically active population in the state of Bahia was active in the informal sector.6 The informal market consists of jobs offering no job security, no stable income, no contracts, and no benefits. Adding the 40 percent of Bahians that are active in the informal market to the 12 percent officially unemployed tells us that over 50 percent of the Bahian economically active population holds no regular job. This number corresponds, not surprisingly, with the number of people living in irregular houses, without holding a land title.7 To reserve access to jobs and civil rights for whites, a whole apparatus of ideologies was set in motion, aimed at justifying white privilege and black poverty and exclusion. The roots of this effort

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reach back to the end of the beginning of the 20th century, when scientific racism became accepted among Brazilian elites. Ideological Justifications for White Privilege

Nancy Stepan (1991) points out that in 1918 Brazil established the first Eugenics society in Latin America, ten years after the first of these societies was created in London. In the early decades of the 20th century, when eugenics was discussed among Brazilian intellectual elites, politicians, and doctors, child labor was common and widespread, welfare policies were unknown, and the majority of the poor population was nonwhite and illiterate. The exclusion of AfroBrazilians was so absolute and their position within social hierarchies so firmly anchored at the bottom that during post-abolition, AfroBrazilian organizing was effectively undermined.8 This changed when poor European immigrants, who came into the country already having had experiences with organizing and political activism, joined the ranks of poor Afro-Brazilians. Discussions about the “worthiness” of different immigrant groups and the question of whether some of them were “racially as inferior as” Afro-Brazilians9 suggest that racism was extended to include other potentially dangerous groups. The responses to these perceived threats came quickly and were efficient. The first national strike organized by workers in the city of São Paulo in 1917 triggered the first formal call for eugenics, by medical doctors that same year. Nancy Stepan explains that, “traditionally, the educated, mainly white, elite feared violence and danger from blacks and mulattos, whom they portrayed as lazy, undisciplined, sickly, drunk, and in a constant state of vagabondage. To these fears were now added new ones about disorder and violence by foreign-born factory workers, many of whom were expelled from the country on charges of being anarchists bent on overthrowing the social order.”10 Influenced by the racist ideology, dressed up as “positive science” at the beginning of the 20th century, Brazilian elites were caught in a difficult dilemma. Scientists from Europe and the US had long argued that racial mixing would lead to “racially inferior stock,” and they explained that Brazilian backwardness was due to a lack of racial stock suited for civilizational progress. Thomas Skidmore (1976) describes the influence of such European intellectuals as Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, who had spent some time in Rio de Janeiro as a representative of the French government and found Brazilians “ugly” and “degenerated” because of their long history of

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racial mixing. The British historian Thomas Buckle seems to have had a similar influence on the Brazilian elites. Like Gobineau, he attributed Brazilian backwardness to “negro inferiority” and “mulatto degeneration” which had led the country into “tropical decay.” US social scientists of the time shared such racially biased evaluations of the prospects of progress of a society with such a large non-white population. Nancy Stepan eloquently sums up the anxieties of the Brazilian elites of the time: “They [the educated classes of Latin America] wished to be white and feared they were not.”11 This association of whiteness with being civilized and blackness with being incapable of civilization goes back to racial ideologies of the 19th century, originating in Europe and the United States. These ideas reached Brazil at a time when Brazilian elites were worrying about the country’s prospects for becoming a civilized nation. Brazilian intellectual elites absorbed racist ideology abroad and molded it into something that would fit their own needs. As Stepan points out, this process was not just a “copying” of European racist ideology, but a reinterpretation and adaptation to fit the Latin American context. Many intellectuals, politicians, and especially physicians publicly deliberated about issues of race and civilization during the “Old Republic” (1889 – 1930). One of the most influential intellectuals of his time was the Bahian physician Raimundo Nina Rodrigues. Rodrigues was the first Brazilian to systematically study race. He was also a legal physician, which points to the fact that questions of race were treated in the field of sanitation, hygiene, and crime. Rodrigues was the founder of what was then perceived as the new and scientific anthropology in Brazil in the 1890s. He received a medical diploma from the Bahian Medical School in 1888 and became an assistant professor in the same year. In 1891 he was transferred to the department of “Hygiene and Medical Law” and was made distinguished professor on that occasion. By the 1890s he was, in the evaluation of Lilia Schwarcz, “the most renowned professional working in this area.” Rodrigues was the founder and chief ideologue of the “Nina Rodrigues School” and one of the most influential and widely discussed theorists and public intellectuals in the first three decades of the 20th century. In his theorizing, Rodrigues applied the then-available theories about supposedly inert characteristic of different human “races” to the explanation of individual achievement, dementia, criminal behavior, and even to the modernization and prospects of progress of the nation.12 The following passages from Os Africanos no Brasil, “The Africans in Brazil,” first published in 1905 and his most

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influential work, will provide the reader with an idea of the general tone of Rodrigues’ work: In fact it is not the social inferiority of the negroes that is being discussed here. Nobody has ever taken the time to contest it. And what would it matter to contest the obvious? But there is a dispute between those who declare them inert because of the organic constitution of their race, which is definitive and irreparable, and those who think of it as transitory and curable. For the first, the organic constitution of the negro, molded by the physical and moral habitat where he developed, does not allow for an adaptation to the civilization of the superior races, products of a different physical and cultural environment. This would be in fact an organic and morphological incapacity. For some authors, and Keane defends that explanation, it is the precocity of the ossification of the cranial sutures that obstructs the development of the brain, which is responsible for such a consequence. And the irreparable permanence of this vice is attested in the revealed incapacity of the negroes, during all historical times, not only to assimilate the civilizations of the different peoples they had contact with, but also to create their own culture.13

Further: The allegation that the white race, the most cultured of the sections of the human race, lived in no less precarious conditions of backwardness and barbarism; the fact that a lot of negro tribes have already reached levels very close to those of whites at the beginning of historical times; even more, the belief that the most cultured negro tribes are repeating, in Africa, the phase of medieval political organization of the modern European nations (Beranger Feraud), does not justify the hopes that the negroes can inherit the European civilization, and even less, that they can achieve social maturity when living with cultured peoples. What the impartial study of the negro people shows is that within them there are degrees, there is a kind of hierarchical scale of culture and development. They get better and fall back; they are capable of a future civilization. But it is impossible to say if this civilization must necessarily be the one of the white race, as a neutral examination of the facts shows that the acquisition of the European civilization by the negroes is extremely weak. And confronting the necessity to become civilized quickly or to capitulate in the competitive struggle that the white race promotes, the incapacity and the feebleness to progress of the negroes come together in practice. The extraordinary advances of the European civilization have given whites the dominion of the world, their marvelous industrial applications have overcome distance and time. It is impossible to concede to negroes, as to weak and retarded peoples in general, the leisure and time that they would need for their very slow and remote acquisition of their social emancipation. 14

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And finally: What is important for Brazil to determine is how much of its inferiority comes from the difficulties of its negro population to civilize themselves and if this inferiority can be compensated through racial mixture, which is the natural process through which the negroes are integrating themselves into the Brazilian race to increase the big mass of its colored population.15

Rodrigues goes on to analyze the capacity of African peoples for civilizational advance, quoting several European specialists, who found that Africans would need centuries to overcome their culture, which had degenerated into indolence and sensual pleasure. After having thus demonstrated the difficulties that Africans face in the progress of their civilization, he considers the different influences to which the Africans brought to the Americas were exposed: Given that the negro in America has advanced a lot externally, given that he has assimilated the forms of civil life, nevertheless, at the bottom of his heart, he still is a child; and that he has distanced himself only very little from the infantile stage of humanity in which his African co-brothers find themselves. Of those wrote Stanley in the Times: To lead them and live amongst them, it is necessary that we resolve decidedly to consider them like children, (…)16

As a defender of polygenism, Rodrigues seeks to demonstrate that blacks cannot have the same origin as whites. He argues: The most humanist of the abolitionists can never cancel the biological differences amongst men. Are they not of such a nature and intensity that they have led some of the most competent naturalists, like Linneu (sic.), Fred Muller, and Maeckel, to admit that the so-called human races are all different species, biologically distinct of the species Homo? … Especially the negro is inferior to the white, starting with the cephalic mass that weights less, and the masticatory apparatus that has animal-like character, up to the ability to abstract that is so weak and poor with him. In whatever social condition he might be, the negro is condemned by his own morphology and physiology and can never become equal to the white.17

The next step in Rodrigues’ argumentation was to demonstrate that the Africans brought to Brazil were not all from the “worst stock,” and that some of them were not even “real negroes” but “Hamits” from northern Africa, who are, according to him, not only of lighter complexion, but “actually descendents from Europeans,”

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which is demonstrated by their capacity to have produced such high cultures as the Egyptian and Abyssinian. This argument offers Rodrigues two advantages. First it shows that certain, lighter skinned Africans were capable of some degree of civilizational advance, comparable to that of the mulatto, and secondly he argues that it explains the exceptional achievements of some selected AfroBrazilians, thereby explaining such exceptionalism through their European descent. In his chapter on “The psychological survival of criminality of the Brazilian negro” Rodrigues argues that “the negro has a genetic tendency towards criminality, just like other inferior races,” but to a higher degree. Rodrigues presents the proof of inherent criminality of blacks by drawing parallels between accounts of brutality in Africa, witnessed and described by European observers, and similar brutalities carried out by Afro-Brazilians. The explanation Rodrigues finds is that “tribal people do not recognize individual guilt when committing crimes to peoples from other tribes.”18 As these passages demonstrate, Rodrigues shied no effort to demonstrate that Afro-Brazilians and Africans were unfit for civilizational advance. However flawed his arguments seem today, at the time his theories were presented as advanced modern science, giving them a status of truth in a nation that was trying to become civilized and modern at all costs. Using “scientific” methods such as anthropometry and craneology, authors like Rodrigues were able to dress their racist statements in a neutral and scientific robe. Nancy Stepan explains the relevance and impact of these theories, arguing that, “if Latin Americans were still small contributors to science by world standards, the history of eugenics in the region must be seen as part of a generalized endorsement of science, as a sign of cultural modernity, and as a means by which the various countries of Latin America could emerge as powerful actors on the world scene.”19 Crafting Public Policies: Eugenics in Brazil

Once the inferiority of Africans and Afro-Brazilians was widely accepted, the ensuing problem was how to avoid its negative influence on the “superior white stock” and thus avoid widely feared degeneration.20 The scientific methods that Rodrigues and others had absorbed from Europe and North America and adapted to national contexts provided the theoretical and ideological grounds for the institutionalization of eugenics in Brazil in the 1920s and 30s. The glue that bound racist theorizing to eugenics was sanitation. The São

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Paulo Eugenics Society was founded in 1918. In 1919, one of the central figures to organize this society, Renato Kehl, moved to Rio de Janeiro and with him the center of the Eugenics movement. In 1922, the psychiatrist Gustavo Reidel founded the “New League of Mental Hygiene” in Rio de Janeiro. Eugenics in Brazil became established as a sub-discipline of medicine, and it blamed crime, alcoholism, deformity, laziness, and the like on racial degeneration. The ideology of eugenics was also part of the discussion about immigration. Several politicians and respected intellectuals argued for whites-only immigration, to improve the Brazilian racial stock, and thereby increase its chances to catch up with the “civilized world” and become modern.21 In 1929 Brazilian proponents of eugenics organized the “First Brazilian Eugenics Congress,” held in Rio. When Getúlio Vargas took power in 1930 and set out to forge the modern Brazilian state, Kehl seized the political opportunity of the moment and created the “Central Brazilian Commission of Eugenics.” This commission was able to promote eugenics nationally. The link bridging racist theory with sanitation and public policy was brought to a short formula by the vice president of the São Paulo Eugenics Society, who articulated a forceful definition of the relationship among hygiene, sanitation, race, progress, and civilization. He explained first that, “to sanitize is to eugenize” and went on to say that, “Sanitation-Eugenics is Order and Progress.”22 “Order and Progress,” of course, was written in the Brazilian flag and national anthem after becoming a republic in 1889. This theme reflected the wish of Brazilian elites and the military to modernize the country, lifting it up to European standards and its centrality can hardly be overstated. The 1930s in Brazil were a time of nationalism and of defining national identity. At the 1929 Eugenics Congress, some physicians had already argued for the sterilization of unfit elements, and some physicians had already carried out sterilizations on women “diagnosed as exhibiting sexual derangements and perversity syndrome.”23 The Constitution of 1934 explicitly addressed eugenics and made “eugenic education” a state responsibility. In the eyes of Brazilian elites, the future of the nation depended on limiting and controlling black influence on the nation. “Whitening” became the official state policy of the late 19th century, triggering massive, stateled European immigration.24 Following the racial theories of the time, the advance of civilization was attributed to the available “racial stock.” Afro-Brazilians, after having forcefully been brought to Brazil without any participation in designing or even carrying out

The Historical Roots of Inclusion 39

Brazilian state policies, were now blamed for the “backwardness” of the country. Brazilian statesmen and public persons such as jurist and literary critic Sílvio Romero (1851-1914) and director of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, João Batista Lacerda (1846-1915) openly discussed how to “improve the Brazilian race” with the promotion of white immigration. Gilberto Freyre

The ideology of whitening predominated in the discourses and actions of the Brazilian state and its elites at least until the late 1940s, when the ideas of Gilberto Freyre began to influence the discussion.25 In his theory of “racial democracy,” first published 1933 in his book The Masters and the Slaves, Freyre provided the new ideological foundation on which Brazilian intellectual and state elites could construct “order and progress” as whitening had clearly failed. Freyre argued that “the Brazilian” is a new, tropical race, best adapted to the tropical climate. According to the anthropologist Freyre, who had studied under Franz Boas at Columbia University, Brazilians combined the best characteristics of the three founding races – white, black, and indigenous. He traced this “new race” back to the special malleability and benevolence of the Portuguese colonizers. In his analysis, the Portuguese colonizing enterprise was smoother and gentler than the British or Spanish because the Portuguese had been exposed to African influence in their home country even before they started to colonize Brazil. They had also experienced racial mixing with blacks in their motherland and other colonies earlier and in greater numbers than any other European colonizing nation. And last but not least, the Portuguese had to populate a country as huge as Brazil and all their other colonies in Africa and Asia, with a population of little more than one million inhabitants at the time. In Freyre’s analysis, the way the Portuguese, predominantly male, colonizers resolved the problem of effectively occupying Brazil with so few people was by populating the new lands with new subjects of the Portuguese crown, the offspring of sexual encounters with native Brazilian and African slave women. Freyre greatly romanticizes the nature of these sexual encounters and went to considerable lengths in his descriptions of the “mutual attraction” that in his view characterized these relationships, ignoring the fact that reports about the early colonial times rather tell a story of rape and of European males running wild and fathering hundreds of children out of wedlock in Brazil. In fact, this behavior, facilitated

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by the great distance that separated Brazil from any form of controlling or law-enforcing authority, appears to have been so widespread that Catholic missionaries eventually made a formal complaint to the king.26 Freyre, who also prefers to ignore the extremely unequal distribution of power that characterized the encounter of his “three foundational races,” nevertheless provided just the ideology the state was looking for at this crucial stage of Brazilian nation building. Indeed his ideas about “tropicalism” and “racial democracy” were adopted by the state and elevated to the status of official national doctrine. During the 1940s, Freyre’s story provided the foundational myth of modern Brazil and became the golden way the Brazilian nation imagined itself. Vargas27

When President Getúlio Vargas came to power through a putsch in 1930, the nation stood at a crossroads. Brazil had emancipated the remaining slaves that were still in bondage in 1888 only 42 years earlier, without offering them any assistance toward integration. Furthermore, during the preceding 80 years Brazil had received several million immigrants, mostly from Europe, China, Japan, the Middle East and North Africa. Not all of them had been successfully integrated and some groups, having previous experiences with anarcho-syndicalism, formed powerful labor-based social movements. In 1930 the state was under pressure from rightwing São Paulo coffee planters interested in defending the status quo, from radical elements within the military known as the tenente movement, and from a Communist Party that actively recruited disenchanted workers and called for the dissolution of the newly established government.28 In January of 1930 the Communists held a hunger march in Rio de Janeiro, and communist insurrection appeared imminent. Likewise, throughout the closing months of 1930, rumors pointing to an attempted right-wing coup had the effect of bringing Vargas closer to the Military Academy and the Naval War College.29 Furthermore, coming to power as a provisional president after a fraudulent round of elections in 1930, Vargas could not afford to lose popularity. He needed to find a way to stay in power and to bridge the many cleavages that threatened the nation.30 The republic was threatened by too many demands coming from too many actual and potential fractions and Vargas responded by enforcing a state driven political, social, and cultural agenda in order to maintain societal and

The Historical Roots of Inclusion 41

political order. Populism, nationalism, and state-led social engineering became the preeminent tools of Vargas’s strategy to stay in power and promote order and progress. Vargas started his political career on a platform based on “a broad-based appeal to recognize workers’ needs and to regenerate the nation.”31 A mixture of social policies, propaganda, and the promotion of Freyre’s all-embracing concept of Brazil’s new race was able to successfully undermine the articulation of sectional claims based on social, cultural, and economic inequality. The concept of “racial democracy” in particular served to unify the Brazilian people under the notion of forming one nation undivided, leaving no space for factionalism to form and organize.32 Furthermore, Freyre’s exaltation of mixture offered a way to surpass the deep-seated fears of backwardness and pessimism that positivist thinkers had raised among elites. In the attempt to forge national identity and wield social control, Vargas viewed education as the necessary tool to prepare individuals for specific roles in order “to preserve the moral, economic, and political unity of the nation.”33 Institutionalization of Brazilian national identity and racial democracy occurred through the intervention of the state in the nation’s cultural management, the education system, as well as through the use of propaganda in promoting national ideas and maintaining cultural, social and political stability. According to Hermano Vianna (1999), “various cultural elements were selected from the already existing regional models and recombined to form a homogenizing official national culture,”34 including but not limited to the triumph of samba in carnival and on the radio, becoming a symbol of Brazil as a whole constituting a new image of the country.35 In order to actively disseminate this inclusive model of Brazilianness, Vargas promoted the creation of a network of federal agencies charged with cultural management, as well as a partnership with educators, artists, and intellectuals, which would facilitate the forging of the desired nation.36 Vargas’s 1930 presidential agenda included the creation of several new ministries and departments, including the Ministry of Education and Public Health, the Ministry of Labor, Industry, and Commerce and the Department of Press and Propaganda. Together, these state agencies would be at the head of the state’s campaign to make education, healthcare, labor relations, industrial and cultural policy part of the national project of constructing the nation.37 In fact, from 1934 to 1945, with the help of intellectuals, the Minister of Education

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Gustavo Capanema set out to “reconstruct the relationship between the state and the people, making education, culture and public health important national issues for the Vargas regime.”38 According to Darien Davis (1999), “re-educating the Brazilian population through all the means of communication was tantamount to the regime’s vision in promoting pride among Brazilians.”39 These policies were so successful that a large portion of Brazilian popular and marginalized groups considered him to be the “father of the poor.”40 Getúlio Vargas directed an outstanding public education project in order to forge the idea of Brazilianness among the youth of the nation and Freyre’s Casa Grande e Senzala was made a required text in high school and university education.41 Moreover, school textbooks intended for upper-level elementary students included plays such as Nossa Raça (Our Race), which explicitly exalts racial mixture. The four main characters of the play represent Freyre’s three foundational races, namely black, white and indigenous, culminating in the formation of the new race, the Brazilian. According to Nava (2006), “for the dramatic finale, the stage directions call for the student actors portraying the three historical races to fraternally embrace while the actor portraying the Brazilian (the new race) proclaims, ‘The three races joined together, to produce a superb and noble type, thus forming the Brazilian race’.”42 During the proto-fascist Estado Novo phase of Varga’s rule (1937-45), democratic mechanisms were further weakened and the state was able to act with fewer restrictions. In December of 1939 Vargas created a Department of Press and Propaganda (DIP) to propagate the government’s nationalist ideas and to protect the government from criticism. It was divided into five different branches, namely propagation, radio diffusion, cinema and theater, tourism, and the press.43 After January 1940, the Ministry of Education and Public Health started scrutinizing all textbooks used in primary education for “criticism of the regime, disrespect of national tradition, incitement of class struggle, destruction of religious sentiment, and ‘pessimism or doubt as to the future power of the Brazilian race.’”44 Vargas also successfully applied new communication technologies to his advantage in order to propagate patriotic messages. The radio became an essential tool for disseminating national values, especially the Hora Brasil (Brazil Hour), a daily program broadcast across the nation. This program included a range of Brazilian cultural and political manifestations intended to incite patriotism and promote national identity. The state even regulated carnival and the compo-

The Historical Roots of Inclusion 43

sition of samba music45 and minister Capanema advocated the introduction of radio technology in all schools because he saw it as a powerful tool to forge a sense of nationalism at educational establishments.46 Direct intervention in the educational system and use of mass media allowed the Vargas government to disseminate patriotic messages, as well as the notion of an all inclusive nation where race distinctions no longer prevailed - a nation on its way to progress, but true to its roots. The ideology sustained by Nina Rodrigues and his school led to the national acceptance of eugenics as a doctrine to understand and ultimately direct the creation of a “healthy” political and social body. Gilberto Freyre did not attack this basic assumption, as he himself differentiated between the more and the less “civilized” racial stocks Brazil received from different parts of Africa. At the same time that blackness was construed as inferior, whiteness was construed as its opposite and counterpart, as an unproblematic and “normal” state of merit and privilege. But against the more pessimistic Rodrigues, Freyre argued that Brazil’s future, although biologically mixed, was culturally European and therefore “white.” To make sure this would be the case, the Vargas regime outlawed African cultural manifestations and banned public drumming and the practice of African religions.47 Integrating the Excluded without Changing the Social Order

In his analysis of Brazil’s dependent capitalist development, Florestan Fernandes (2006) demonstrates that once the Portuguese crown had moved to Brazil in 1808 and lifted the restrictions on national industrialization that had until then hindered any form of genuine national development, it became obvious that it was not national political elites, but foreign investors and traders who had the power to dictate the path of Brazil’s industrialization. Political stability was the main aim of these international forces, as much of the national production rested on the maintenance of slavery and of a social structure in which the majority of the people had no access to civil rights.48 This was especially the case for mining and latifundiobased production of export-oriented crops. Foreign importers and exporters actively supported the growth of a national agrarian aristocracy because the opening of the ports in 1808 exposed Portuguese traders to international competition and the demise of the monarchy, eighty years later, necessitated national

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coordination of export oriented production. According to Fernandes, international traders interfered so strongly in the organization of Brazilian production that, “they converted the agrarian aristocracy into a type of ‘minor partner,’ despite the tendencies and internal political consequences of a bureaucratization of patrimonial domination.”49 With the establishment of the first republic in 1889, Brazil initiated a process of urban growth and saw the emergence of a new urban elite, connected to the export industry and some related branches, such as banking. Fernandes agrees with the analysis of Gilberto Freyre (1986) and Raimundo Faoro (2001) that these emerging urban elites represented the interests of the land-bound aristocracy, mostly because they were the sons of rural aristocrats and latifundistas. Their main interest was to preserve a social structure that allowed them huge profits based on extreme exploitation. Thus the emerging urban elites of the late 19th century were responsible for anchoring the influence of land-bound coffee and sugar cane barons into the heart of developing and urbanizing Brazil. Those elements of the emerging urban classes that were opposed to the interests of land-bound aristocrats and their agents were never able to gain enough strength to change the prevalent order – a fact that Fernandes attributes to the dependent character of the Brazilian economy. São Paulo-based coffee planters provided the strongest motor of export-oriented economic growth. And as Fernandes explains, their main interest was to counteract their loss of social status, a direct result of abolition. The main insight that Fernandes (2006) reaches in his analysis of the Brazilian “bourgeois revolution” is that when slave-holding coffee planters were forced to give up their master status, they sought to compensate this loss by manipulating political power to their advantage.50 The relatively peaceful transition to independence in 1822, which was made possible by the maintenance of monarchy until 1889, allowed for the preservation of social order and traditional hierarchies. According to Fernandes (2006), “the native elites did not stand up against the structure of colonial society.”51 Instead, national elites slipped into the power vacuum left by the former colonial masters and took over their functions. Fernandes demonstrates that during the constitutional monarchy (1822-1888), as well as during the first republic (1889-1930), rural aristocrats effectively ruled the country. Through a series of measures aimed at restricting voting rights and at concentrating political power within small circles of

The Historical Roots of Inclusion 45

ministers, the Brazilian masses were kept outside the reach of citizenship rights and indeed civil society. According to Fernandes (2006), “the first republic preserved the conditions that, during the Empire, had allowed for the coexistence of ‘two nations,’ one that was part of the civil order (the small minority that effectively constituted a ‘nation of equals’), and one that was partially or entirely excluded from it (the great majority, four fifths or more, that constituted the ‘real nation’).”52 During the Brazilian industrial revolution, which gained momentum towards the end of the 19th century with the ascent of coffee, the social hierarchies inherited from colonial times were not destroyed. Instead, as Florestan Fernandes (2006) demonstrates in detail, the most dynamic sector of Brazil’s economy at the time was fearful of losing its social status and sought to compensate its potential loss of social status by manipulating politics in its favor, initiating a tradition of nepotism and clientelism that still plagues the country. Instead of agents for modernizing change, São Paulo coffee planters, Brazil’s pioneer capitalists (Silva, 1976), became agents for conservatism and the maintenance of social hierarchies. As a result, the incipient industrial revolution did not provide opportunities for a change of social hierarchies. Former slave masters rather sought to transfer their master status into the cities, thus giving rise to a whole new class of urban slave holders, who, as slavery slowly came to an end, sought to uphold their masterly status vis-à-vis the urban poor by transforming them into slave equivalents. Kenneth Erickson (1977) follows the paths of the corporatist structuring of Brazilian society from its origins in the 1930s to the military regime that took power in 1964. In his analysis, the main interest of political elites during the 1930s was to “foster class harmony” through the maintenance of “as much of their country’s traditional culture and social structure as possible.”53 The analyses of Raimundo Faoro, Florestan Fernandes, and Kenneth Erickson all point to the same phenomenon, namely that the maintenance of harmonious class structures was deeply connected to the maintenance of racialized and gendered societal hierarchies. This meant in practice to control and limit upward social mobility of the lower strata of society, restricting it to the minimum necessary to serve the needs of elite-guided industrialization and urbanization.54 In the words of Davis (1999): “Brazil entered industrialization without destroying its pre-abolition attitudes and practices.”55 In the early 1960s, leftist movements found a political opportunity provided by the policies of then-president João Goulart.

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They posed a real threat to the corporatist structure of Brazilian society, so much so that a civil-military coalition carried out a coup to prevent a fundamental restructuring of Brazilian society. Following the logic pointed out by Barrington Moore (1966), the historic opportunity to break up the traditional corporatist structure was lost. Instead, political and economic elites, supported by the military, were able to avoid societal change by imposing restrictions on democratic participation, and hence consolidating a society that had made the political, economic, and cultural exclusion of its own majority a longstanding reality. Where scientific racism had first projected Brazilian nonwhites to the bottom of society, the national projects of both Vargas and the military regime made sure they remained there and the corporatist political institutions that sustained Brazilian social and racial hierarchies since colonial times were not effectively restructured. The military coup not only avoided social re-structuring, it also blocked the formation of a separate group identity.56 Dark skin complexion remained a signifier of low status, making all blacks suspects of being poor and potentially dangerous. No kind of reconstruction was ever attempted, and as Anthony Marx (1998) points out, the state-supported dissemination of the “racial paradise” doctrine, first invented by Freyre, allowed for a demobilization of racial consciousness and locked Afro-Brazilians into the Brazilian nation, while robbing them of the means to successfully mobilize. According to Anthony Marx, “state-imposed racial domination helped to prevent class warfare.”57 In a similar tone, Darien Davis (1999) shows that, “Vargas’ generation succeeded in encouraging Brazilians to identify with ‘the nation’ above other possible communities such a racial, ethnic, or regional ones. In the process, nationalists created enduring national myths and symbols which successfully marginalized racial consciousness for the rest of the twentieth century.”58 According to the same author, “Not surprisingly, however, blacks never attained a visibility in the national imagery, and it was only though select mulattos that they were included at all.”59 As a result of such state-led maneuvering, the inferior positioning of Afro-Brazilians at the bottom of social hierarchies became so deeply rooted in Brazilians’ common sense that it has escaped scrutiny. It has become one of the ways Brazilians make sense of their everyday reality. Amelia Simpson (1993), in her study of “The Mega-Marketing of Gender, Race, and Modernity,” demonstrates how in Brazil a “normalizing” discourse continuously

The Historical Roots of Inclusion 47

associates whiteness with merit and blackness with unworthiness and danger.60 Simpson analyzes the career of Xuxa, an ex-soft-porn star who emerged in the 1980s and soon became Brazil’s most famous TV star, hosting afternoon prime-time programs for children. Simpson argues that, “in her celebration of whiteness, Xuxa not only taps deep and jealously guarded feelings among Brazilians about race but also asserts the validity of a nearly universal ideological construction wherein the blond female is presented as the ‘most prized possession of white patriarchy.’”61 In Brazil, whiteness is a highly desirable good to all those that are able to claim it with success. Because of Brazil’s long history of associating whiteness with civilizational potential, whiteness has developed into the strongest marker of elevated social status. It symbolizes education, holding a regular job, and most Brazilians almost automatically associate it with being middle class, having money, owning a car, and having access to other private services, most importantly private education. Conclusion: The Maintenance of Social Hierarchies

In 2008, Afro-Brazilians still found themselves at the bottom of a now democratic Brazil and they face difficulties mustering enough group consciousness to organize and construct sufficient political power to challenge the age-old social hierarchies of their society. After the systematic discrediting of Africans and their descendents by Nina Rodrigues and his adepts and the elevation of Europeans and their descendents to a status of having a superior civilizational potential, the Vargas regime struggled to achieve the complete destruction of potentially relevant and threatening social cleavages. The regime was successful insofar as it achieved the amalgamation of Afro-descendents into the national body, although black protest and mobilization was never successfully brought to an end. The reluctant Brazilian industrial revolution also never provided for enough economic and political opportunities to mobilize and restructure the age-old Brazilian social hierarchies inherited from colonial times. The only remaining rational strategy for Brazilian blacks to achieve upward mobility, after scientific racism, racial democracy, and “order and progress,” was to disassociate from anything African and black and to gradually assimilate into the hegemonic mainstream, structured as it was and is by white supremacy. Afro-Brazilians have been transformed into a minority despite their numerical majority and they face the paradox of being

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considered exotics in their own land – the objects of white study, fear, and hidden desire, rather than the subjects of democratizing change. Being pushed to the bottom of social hierarchies and forcefully kept there through powerful state action, which forcefully applied a nationalist ideology, the historically excluded embraced the process of re-democratization, which culminated in the presidential election of 1985. Their struggle to establish a true and genuine democracy suffered severe setbacks with the death of president-elect Trancredo Neves, and later with the involvement of Fernando Collor in schemes of corruption and nepotism. As the country went through the presidencies of Itamar Franco and Fernando Henrique Cardosos to finally elect Luis Ignacio, Lula, da Silva, the excluded were able to conquer more and more democratic spaces and to make their voices and concerns reach the spheres of traditional power. Yet at the same time that the hitherto excluded pushed upwards, the included also moved ahead, responding to the pressure from below by using new mechanisms and places for the reproduction of their traditional privilege. To the historically included, especially to those located at the lower stratums within that category, the expansion of democracy, and the slow ascent of the excluded it brought about, were perceived as a threat to their own, already precarious, status within Brazilian social hierarchies. To them, the upward-moving masses provided the reason to engage in diverse strategies - material and symbolic - to maintain their distance above the lower ranks of society. Once formal democracy was achieved, the struggle to maintain and defend traditional privilege was nowhere as clear as in education. The following chapter thus focuses on education as one of the central places used by the historically included to reproduce and maintain privilege by keeping their distance from the excluded. Under conditions of economic and particularly labor market scarcity, such as in Brazil, if the excluded threaten to “move-up,” the included risk losing the precarious advantages they have. Symbolic distancing and border maintenance become survival strategies aimed directly against the excluded and their efforts to join the ranks of the middle classes. As pointed out before, explaining how exactly historically included groups fend off the attempts at upward mobility by excluded groups requires going beyond broad treatments of how inclusion reproduces exclusion. To understand how this dialectical relationship works, one is required to analyze the concrete life experiences of those affected by the defense of privilege, and of benefiting from it. The following chapters will thus “zoom in” and

The Historical Roots of Inclusion 49

focus on several social and political arenas where the struggle over who counts as included and who does not is routinely fought out. Such a “zooming in” necessitates a choice of cases. This book focuses on education, servant – employer relationships, civil society activism, participation in local politics, and the maintenance of paternalism in the political realm. As explained earlier, the cases were selected because they are particularly revealing and they allow us to gain insight and a better understanding of the mechanisms used to reproduce privilege and how the use of these mechanisms affects the lives of the historically excluded. The cases discussed in the following chapter, in other words, unveil causal mechanisms that are highly characteristic of the ways privilege is reproduced in Brazil. As such, the lessons learned from the following chapters are of value in understanding the ways in which democracy is negotiated daily in Brazil in all spheres of life. 1 The Brazilian historian and politician Luis Viana Filho (1908-1990) describes the changing history of Bahia and its importation of African slaves. In the 16th century, most slaves reaching Brazil came from West Africa. These were traded at the Portuguese fortresses along the Slave and Gold Coasts (today’s Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria), mostly in the fortresses of São Jorge da Mina (in today’s Ghana) and Whydah (in today’s Benin). Starting in the 17th century, most slaves bought in Africa and shipped to Brazil came from the Portuguese colonies in Africa’s “Costa” and “Contra-Costa” (today’s Angola and Mozambique); this remained true until the end of the 18th century. During this 200 year period, Bantu-speaking people became the majority among Africans in Brazil. The collapse of Saint Domingue as a major world producer of sugar due to slave rebellions and Haitian independence led to a sugar boom in Bahia starting around 1796. This was followed by the temporary movement of the capital of the Portuguese Empire to Rio de Janeiro, during the Napoleonic Wars, and then Brazilian independence in 1822, which freed Brazil from trade restrictions that had been imposed on the colony by the crown. Bahian sugar producers (instead of investing in new technologies, like enginerun presses and mills) increased their importation of African slaves. The supply of West African slaves increased in the first half of the 19 th century, and prices for them fell, due in part to African regional conflicts that were nurtured by interfering colonial powers, meeting the increased demand for slaves in Bahia. Between the start of the boom and 1850, when the slave trade was officially abolished in Brazil, great numbers of slaves from West Africa, mostly prisoners captured during the regional wars and mostly Yorubas, were shipped to Bahia, greatly altering the racial and ethnic composition of the Bahian population. 2 Skidmore 1998:43. 3 Lesser, 1999. 4 Bairros 1987, 1992.

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5

See Bairros, 1987, 1992. The restrictions of mobility within industry have been proven by several studies, for example Castro and Guimarães 1993. The importance of the informal market is also demonstrated by Castro (1992). Luiza Bairros (1987) has written a masters thesis (later published) about “Sins in the Racial Paradise. The Blacks in the Bahian Labor Force.” The same author has also published an article, together with Vanda Sá Barreto and Nadya Castro (1992) about “Blacks and Whites in a labor market in change.” 7 Gordilho 19997. 8 As explained in detail by Kim Butler, 1998. 9 Some of these discussions are analyzed by Jeffrey Lesser (1999). 10 Stepan 1991:39. 11 Stepan 1991:45. 12 As explained by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, 1999. 13 Rodrigues, Raimundo Nina 1988 [1905]: 262, my translation. 14 Ibid: 263ff. 15 Ibid: 264. 16 Quoted in Rodrigues 1988: 267. 17 Quoted in Rodrigues 1988: 268. 18 Ibid. 19 Stepan 1991:40. 20 It is worth noting that Nina Rodrigues himself was reported to be a mulatto. This gives his very intense effort to prove the superiority of whites a somewhat schizophrenic touch. 21 The book by Jeffrey Lesser (1999) focuses especially on immigration politics and the “struggle for national identity” in Brazil. 22 Quoted in Stepan 1991: 90. 23 Quoted in Stepan, 1999: 113. 24 Lesser 1999: 4. 25 See Thomas Skidmore (1988), Carl Degler (1986), and Lilia Schwarcz 1999. 26 Schwartz 1988: 125. 27 The work of Andrea Villa, graduate student at USF, has raised many important points and given me valuable ideas on this topic. Thank you Andrea. 28 Levine 1998:9. 29 Levine, 1998:24-25. 30 Levine, 1999:26. 31 Levine, 1998:9. 32 Davis, 1999:84. 33 Davis, (1999): 93. 34 Vianna, 1999:41. 35 Ibid:10. 36 Williams, 2001:52. 37 Ibid:53. 38 Davis, 1999:95. 39 ibid:85. 40 Levine, 1998:138. 6

The Historical Roots of Inclusion 51

41

Davis, 1999:99. Nava, 2006:109. 43 Ibid:105. 44 Nava, 2006:99. 45 Nava, 2006: 98. 46 Schwartzman, 1984: 88. 47 Braga 1995: 13. 48 Fernandes 2006:51. 49 Fernandes 2006:116, my translation. 50 This process is described with more detail in chapter 9. 51 Fernandes 2006:50, my translation. 52 Fernandes 2006:242, my translation. 53 Ibid: 180. 54 Such an understanding points to the importance of political institutions, power structures, and the influence of state elites who effectively designed institutions to avoid social change. This goes against more sociological explanations à la Lipset (1993) who argue that social change triggered by industrialization would inevitably expand the middle classes who would inevitably have a positive impact on the consolidation of democracy. 55 Davis 1999:24. 56 Erickson 1977. 57 Marx 1998:188. 58 Davis 1999:2. 59 Davis 1999: 120. 60 As explained above, in Footnote 3, the concept of “normalization,” developed by Michel Foucault (1995), refers to the elevation of whiteness to a standard against which other groups have to be measured. Selden (2000) uses a similar approach when writing about Eugenics and the Social Construction of Merit, Race, and Disability in the US. 61 Simpson 1993: 8. Simpson’s quote is from Richard Dyer 1986: Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, New York, St. Martin’s Press. 42

4 Education and the Transfer of Privilege Schools are among the most important places for the reproduction of privilege in contemporary Brazil. It is in schools that inherited privilege is passed on from generation to generation. Schools socialize the young into the traditions, norms, and social hierarchies of their societies, and in Brazil guide the internalization of racism and help stabilize a system that would otherwise require even more violence to maintain the exclusive notions of citizenship against the wishes and hopes of all those excluded from citizenship. In addition to being spaces of learning and formation, schools also produce educational goods; the educational degrees obtained from schools are valuable on several markets, most importantly the labor market. Schooling also bestows a symbolic value, and thus status on its bearer. This status, according to economist Fred Hirsch (1976), is “positional;” it achieves its value relative to others. In other words, educational status can only fulfill its function of providing better chances on the job market or bestowing higher status onto its bearer relative to the lack of educational status of others. In the words of Hirsch: “if everybody stands on their toes, nobody sees better.”1 This chapter analyzes both aspects of education, its formative function and its production of positional goods. It argues that the Brazilian school system has long served historically included groups to reproduce their privileged positions in Brazilian social hierarchies. The dominant strategy to achieve this goal has been to use education as a tool to construct social status, according to the logic outlined above. The chapter further argues that whenever excluded groups were able to gain access to those schools that served the reproduction of privilege of included groups, the included “moved on” and found new ways, and new schools, to achieve the same purpose and thus fend off the “threat from below.” As a result of such maneuvering, Brazilian public schools served the reproduction of privilege until the 1950s. Once popular schooling became accessible to the masses, included groups abandoned public schools and sent their children to private schools, which led to a decline in teaching quality in public schools. Over the last five decades, private schools have thus become 53

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the most important institutions for reproducing privilege, while public schools have become places for the reproduction of exclusion. Public schools provide poor education for the poor. Between 2001 and 2005, I conducted several empirical research projects on education and school reform in the state of Bahia. Bahia provides an especially telling case, because the state of Bahia initiated a World Bank-financed reform of its primary and secondary educational cycles in 1999 and because the dynamics of racism that characterize the whole of Brazil can be observed more clearly in Bahia, where a majority of the population is black. Despite their numerical dominance, Bahian blacks are still considered exotic others by the included minority. The schools I visited in Salvador, the state’s capital, do not differ, however, from the schools in other Brazilian metropolises. In the more southern states, public schools have more money at their disposal and might occasionally have better equipped classrooms, but the dynamics of reproducing inclusion by maintaining exclusion are the same, as national data readily proves. Bahian public and private schools are thus not “special cases.” They rather are typical and at times extreme, which makes them especially telling. What is true of schools in Bahia is true of schools across the nation, but in Bahia the dynamics of exclusion are so extreme as to be more clearly visible. Method

The main research question motivating my research on Brazilian education and education reform was whether school reform had improved the situation of historically marginalized groups of Brazilian society, especially Afro-Brazilians. To determine the impact of the reforms, I employed both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Specifically, I seek to expand the complexity of the analysis of the quantitative data available to include such indicators as the frequency and type of parental participation, the type of community interaction, and an assessment of how racism impacts the academic performance and learning environments in Bahian primary and secondary public schools; add qualitative components to the existing quantitative data to analyze democratic school governance and the ways racism influences school and classroom realities and learning experiences; and finally to extend the unit of analysis beyond classrooms and schools by comparing public schools with private schools diachronically, that is before and

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after the reform, and synchronically, across different school systems - public and private. In addition to collecting statistical indicators on school performance, such as changes in grade averages, age-grade distortions, promotion and repetition rates, and indicators of academic achievement, all readily available through the Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC) and the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE), I carried out on-site participatory observation in the schools of my sample and conducted 60 interviews with key stake holders involved in Bahian schooling, including students, teachers, parents, principals, community leaders, and policy makers at the state and municipal levels.2 The Sample

During my first research trip to Salvador, state capital of Bahia in 2001 I regularly visited six public schools, four of which were administered by the state and two by the municipality. All four state schools offered fifth to eighth grade classes and two of those also offered high school education, i.e. grades nine to eleven. One municipal school offered first to fourth grade only, whereas the other offered grades one to eight. In 2005, I focused on one state school offering grades five to eleven and to one municipal school offering grades one to eight. Two schools in the 2001 sample, one state and one municipal, were presented to me by the respective administrations as “model schools,” at which education reforms were actively being carried out and had produced some initial results. I selected the other four schools to represent the different types of schools in the Bahian system. Different schools were selected for the 2005 survey to fill the need to broaden the sample and get information on schools in different neighborhoods. I therefore designed the sample to take account of the existing variety of school types (grades one to four both with and without preschool, one to eight, five to eight, five to eleven and nine to eleven), administration types (state, municipality, and private), and geographic location. The resulting sample of schools thus represents the variation of schools types that characterize the Bahian school system. The sample does not, however, include schools in rural areas, so my findings are restricted to urban school environments.

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Inequality and Education

Education and democracy are interdependent. For education reform to effectively address the needs of all the people, schools must be embedded in democratic institutions and processes. The only way to achieve this goal is by allowing parents and communities to shape and influence school policy. In the words of Amy Gutmann “a democratic theory of education recognizes the importance of empowering citizens to make educational policy and also of constraining their choices among policies in accordance with those principles – of non-repression and nondiscrimination – that preserve the intellectual and social foundations of democratic deliberations.”3 In 2001, 27.5 percent of Brazilians 15 years and older living in the Northeast were illiterate.4 “Functional illiteracy,” defined as being over 15 years old with less than 4 years of instruction, was 47.8 percent in the Northeast and 23.1 percent in the Southeast.5 In 2000, 36.1 percent of Brazilian blacks, and 20.8 percent of whites, were “functionally illiterate.” In the Northeastern region, this number was as high as 45.9% for blacks.6 Although average educational levels have risen for everybody over the last years, a significant educational gap remains between Brazilian blacks and whites.

Brazil: Average Years of Education by Race 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

Black Whites

1992 1993 1995 1996 1997 1999 2001 2002 2003 2004

Source: IBGE / PNAD

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The Public and the Private

Over 80% of Brazilian children of school age attend public schools. Brazilian elites tend to avoid public schools, but the poor have little choice. Whereas private schools prepare the children of traditional elites for their bright futures, public schools are places of frustration and disrespect to anyone seeking social mobility. The historical roots of this problem are deep. In 1996, 85 percent of Bahians had not completed the elementary educational cycle and were considered, by Brazilian standards, “functionally illiterate.” Included sectors of Brazilian society avoid public schools and make every effort to send their children to “good,” that is, private, schools. Graduating from a good school distinguishes the graduate, sets him or her apart from the masses and provides an important asset for finding a desirable job. Because of the extremely high unemployment rates, which in the state of Bahia hover around 40 percent of the economically active population, holding a degree from an elite school only serves its purpose if not too many young Bahians have access to it. Access to elite private schools becomes a central tool in defending inherited privilege. Education Reform in Brazil

The history of modern Brazilian school reform goes back to the 1930s. Ever since there has been much talk about Brazil’s “bad” educational system and the need for reform. But this talk has rarely translated into decisive steps to improve the quality of the public educational system.7 The latest reform effort was the enactment of a new educational law in 1996, redefining educational priorities and opening the way for changes in the national curriculum guidelines, school management, parental and neighborhood involvement, school autonomy, and school finance. One crucial element that has been shown to have significant influence was the FUNDEF (State Fund for the Maintenance and Development of the Fundamental Cycle and the Valorization of Teachers) created in the same year. FUNDEF was designed to achieve two goals; it was to attack the enmeshing of municipal and state authorities that has historically blocked a rational organization of education, and to provide fiscal incentives for municipalities to provide pre-school and fundamental education, that is, for grades one to eight. (to that end FUNDEF guarantees a minimum amount of money (315 Brazilian Reais / 140 US dollars in 2001) for every enrolled student in the municipal system.) The law

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provided incentives to poor municipalities to enroll as many students as possible, resulting in increased municipal budgets and a trend of municipalities effectively taking over the educational responsibilities that the 1988 law requires. As a direct result of FUNDEF, the percentage of matriculates from the fundamental cycle educated in municipal schools rose from 37.20 percent in 1996 to 51 percent in 2000.8 The state of Bahia started its own educational reform in 1999. A World Bank loan of US$ 69.6 million, directly benefiting the Bahian State government for the years 2000 to 2002, kick-started the Bahian educational reform, labeled “Educar para Vencer” – Learn to Win. The main reason for the Bahian government to look for international loans in order to improve the educational system seemed to be the financial inefficacy of the state and municipal systems. In some rural municipalities, students studied an average of 15 years to complete 4th grade.9 In the Northeast of Brazil, the age/grade distortion10 in the fundamental cycle, had been reduced from 80.6 percent in 1991 to 64.1 percent in 1998, but this was still the highest rate in the country (Brazil’s average was 46.6 percent in 1998). High repetition rates were “jamming” the Bahian public school system, as older students did not move on to open vacancies for new students. Investing in educational quality therefore promised to reduce educational costs, as better teaching quality would help to avoid repetition. Positional Goods, Scarcity, and the Public – Private Divide

Although Bahian public schools are gradually improving,11 structural inequalities remain and limit the prospects of graduates from public schools to find a job or to start a university education, particularly if compared to graduates from elite private schools. The main obstacle to a better performing public educational system lies in the private appropriation of public resources by the political and economic elites. According to David Plank (1996), clientelism lies at the heart of this problem. Clientelism in the educational systems means mostly the provision of jobs for supporters, but also preference in the allocation of funds. “Brazilian politicians often find that their electoral prospects are best served by concluding private agreements with particular voters or groups of voters.”12 Plank rightly points out that, “the crucial issue in Brazilian politics is therefore not what policies are to be assigned priority, but who is to control the instruments of power. Under these circumstances, many of the benefits of government action are captured by favored groups and individuals.

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Meanwhile, the interests of those with less influence (e.g. the poor, clients of opposing candidates) are systematically neglected.”13 As a result, administrative agencies are overstaffed, underqualified, and inefficient. Plank (1996) further demonstrates that each new secretary of education in the state of Rio de Janeiro makes approximately 4,000 political appointments and a survey of the secretary of education of the state of Ceará showed that 19 percent of the functionaries occupied their position at the discretion of the secretary.14 Salaries are provided for “ghost teachers” that do not work at all, or have other jobs elsewhere. Leal (1990)15 has estimated that 20% of those receiving teacher’s salaries are actually not practicing their job, but working elsewhere. Another side effect of this practice is the high turnover in administrative positions. Each time an opposition party wins election, the new secretaries fire current employees and replace them with their own supporters. In that way, discontinuity is added to low levels of professionalism. At the same time that the public school system is failing, private schools have become the places par excellence to secure and actively defend privilege. Plank (1996) found that during the early 1990s, an estimated 23 percent of all public educational expenditure was allocated to higher education institutions, though these enrolled only 2 percent of the students in the public education system.16 Plank concludes that, “on the one hand, private schools receive large quantities of public money through direct and indirect transfers from federal and state governments. On the other, the fees that private schools charge parents are subject to regulation by public authorities. In concert, these policies serve to ensure the survival of a large number of private schools and to guarantee the ‘right’ of parents to send their children to them. At the same time, these policies contribute to the further deterioration of the public schools, both by depriving them of potential revenues and by encouraging the flight of parents who might provide an articulate and effective voice in favor of school recuperation. As a result, the public schools are widely and accurately perceived to be schools for the poor, of no immediate concern to anyone other than those condemned to attend or work in them.”17 Although the governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luis Ignacio, Lula, da Silva have taken important steps to revert the historical misdirection of public funds to highly selective public universities and private secondary schools, the malaise of public schools of the primary and secondary cycles has remained a

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characteristic of the Brazilian educational system. The public schools I researched still did not prepare their students for bright futures, but frustrated their hopes and curtailed their dreams of a better future. With a 40 percent unemployment rate for people under the age of 24, Salvador has the highest unemployment of all Brazilian cities.18 The chances of finding a good job are thus quite slim. Access to college education is also restricted and competitive, regulated by a mandatory access test known as the vestibular that has traditionally had the function of keeping graduates of public schools and those applicants unable to afford private prep-courses out of Brazilian colleges and universities.19 After all, education is a “positional good” (Hirsch) that only has value to its possessor if others do not have it – or at least not the same amount. 20 In his book on the Social Limits to Growth, Hirsch points out that certain goods are relational. He refers to these as “positional goods” and defines them as goods that derive their value not from their absolute position, but rather from their relative position to others. Hirsch argues in the case of education that if everyone has access to high education, the effect of leading to better jobs is thereby neutralized. Job requirements simply rise, making higher investment necessary, giving the better off an advantage over the less well off. At the same time, the investment required to achieve the same outcome rises, in a process he calls “screening.”21 When overall educational levels rise, a job formerly open to high school graduates now demands a college degree. The maintenance of the privilege of access resides on a better starting position. The traditional included are thus able to hold the distance to the historically excluded by simply raising the value of the positional good – a fact illustrated in the graph presented earlier in this chapter. Historically excluded groups will therefore never be able to catch up. Under such circumstances, education becomes a means to create and protect social prestige, potentially losing all of its emancipating potential and its ability to produce knowledge and reducing educational degrees to mere emblems that are displayed as a marker of social distinction and status. Applied to the Brazilian scenario, it becomes evident that although educational levels of the historically excluded are rising, so are the levels of included groups and with them the requirements for finding a job. It is therefore not enough to evaluate the improvement of public education in isolation from its context of rising demands and generally rising educational levels and especially those of traditional elites.

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Public Schools: Leading Nowhere

Statements about the “decay of public schooling since the 1950s” were frequent during my research. An ex-municipal secretary of education explained: There is a lot of talk about how good public education was. I, for example, studied in a public school all the way to 8th grade. Public schooling was great, but it only served 30 percent of the age group it should, so it was a public school for the elite and it was great for the elite who were in it, but it did not serve everyone.22

Indeed, until the 1950s, the Bahian public educational system offered satisfying quality education to only 40 percent of the population in school age.23 As this privilege became more accessible to the broader population, the educational quality dropped so significantly, that once nearly universal coverage was achieved (in the late 1990s) it had become meaningless as a means for social mobility. Analyzed historically, it becomes evident that as public education became more accessible to the historically marginalized, it also dropped in quality, therefore perpetuating the exclusion of the historically excluded and consolidating the privilege of the historically privileged. The maintenance of privilege was shifted away from formerly exclusive and elitist public schools to private schools at the same pace that public schools opened their doors to the excluded. During this shift, private elite schools became “white spaces” for the reproduction of privilege and public schools “black spaces” for the reproduction of exclusion. Although the Bahian education reform initiated in 1999 raised the educational levels of historically marginalized groups, most interviewed high school students from public schools thought that they will face difficulties when competing with graduates from private elites schools for highly competitive university entries without significant additional prep work (which, needless to say, most cannot afford). They were also acutely aware that their chances to compete successfully for desirable jobs were extremely slim. One student’s statement was typical and represented the general outlook of most public high school students I interviewed: “I think it’ll be difficult to compete, because of the bad quality of the teaching here.”24 But the division of Brazilian society not only influences whole school systems. The class-based, racialized, and gendered

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reproduction of inherited privilege also structures everyday school realities and especially the relationship between schools and surrounding neighborhoods. In the following section, I will take a closer look at how extreme inequality impacts schools and their immediate environments. Several organizational issues had a strong negative impact on learning in all the public schools I visited – from 1st grade to 11th. One factor was that teachers were burdened with too great a workload. One teacher explained: “I teach 30 courses every week and I am responsible for 15 different classes and so the quality of my teaching is compromised.”25 Another was limited compensation and support; teachers and principals in Bahian public schools are left on their own, often working in distant and sometimes dangerous neighborhoods, earning sub-standard salaries, offered little institutional support from a system that does not recognize or compensate any of their efforts and little recognition from society. Salaries remain low (under 1,000 Reais per months – less then 400 dollars) and teachers and principals seem to get worn out systematically by a system that does not valorize or even recognize their effort and does not provide for special compensation or even structural support. Most public schools I visited were in desperate need of social workers and psychologists to assist teachers and staff with oftentimes frustrating and corrosive situations (e.g. drug use, child pregnancy, illiteracy among parents, gun possession and related violence inside school walls), but the only schools that could count on such support were private elite schools that hardly needed them. Faced with such precarious conditions, teachers and principals need extraordinary motivation to keep committed to such difficult tasks, but the Bahian school systems, both at the municipal and the state level, hardly provide for any incentives to keep teachers and principals committed and motivated. In fact, the opposite is the case. Both systems are designed so that teachers receive no compensations for performing well and no sanctions if they perform badly. Almost no mechanisms of teacher-performance evaluations exist and teachers are hired on a life-long basis, as civil servants. This lack of incentives adds up with the fact that for many teachers a position teaching in a public school is not their first choice, but rather a lastresort, a default option in case nothing else works, producing a situation of under-performance and under-commitment. During all my visits, I was consistently confronted with empty classrooms, absent teachers, and a general atmosphere of abandon-

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ment and lack of commitment. One visit to an urban state school was again especially telling. The school, just like most other public schools I visited, was in very bad physical conditions, dirty and rundown, and surrounded by fences and gates, so that it resembled a prison, with iron bars on every window and guards at the entrance, so that people could only enter or leave with permission. The walls of hallways and even classrooms were covered in graffiti and several chairs inside classrooms were broken. There were numerous leaks and puddles were to be found in some classrooms. The school was without a library. While walking through the hallways, it became obvious that a lot of classes were not being taught and teachers were absent. Every second classroom seemed without a teacher and students were running around in the hallways, making noise and interrupting classes where they were happening. Students had revolted against the prison-like environment, tearing down some of the iron bars and fences. During another visit at another school, I encountered many students standing around in hallways during class time and when I asked if they had no class, most statements resembled the ones reproduced here:26 Student A: Man, there are almost no classes for anyone. Many teachers just don’t show up. This is bad. BR: Do you think this school helps you achieve your goals? Student A: Nope. BR: What is your plan for the future? Student A: To achieve something good, but this school is not helping me. There are no classes. BR: Do you think this school prepares you for the vestibular (university entrance test)? Student A: Man – I don’t think so. BR: And for the job market? Student A: (laughing) also not. BR: So the main problem is that teachers do not show up? Student A: Exactly.

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BR: How many times do they miss – give me an example. Student A: Five or six times. BR: Every week? Student A: Yes. BR: So today is Friday. This week, how many classes did not happen? Student B: This week I didn’t have class at all. Student C: I only had one class today, Portuguese. Student A: During this week, I only had classes today – five classes. BR: Is this how it is always? Student A: Yes. That’s how it is normally. I have one or two classes per day, almost never all the classes I am supposed to have.

A study carried out in 1997 for the World Bank and UNICEF27 found that on average, Brazilian students in grades one to eight effectively spend only 2.5 hours in the classroom per day. My participant observations confirmed this finding. In many occasions, private obligations were used to justifying absence. Even if teachers were present, it became clear that to a significant degree they did not effectively teach, but spent their time assigning works to the class while engaging in other activities. To the observer it appeared that teachers used every possible occasion not to teach – Secretaries’ Day, Teachers’ Appreciation Day, Students’ Day, and similar unofficial holidays (Hug Day, Earth Day, etc.) – and regularly assigned simple tasks to students in order to keep them busy while freeing themselves from their teaching duties. But even if they effectively taught, I found that many teachers directed their teaching to only one part of the class – the group they had previously judged as “deserving.” More often than not, the process of grouping students into “deserving” and “undeserving” relied on un-reflected and unadmitted racist stereotyping, particularly aimed at young black males. Instrumental Enrichment: Attacking the “Cultural Problems” of the Excluded and Perpetuating Paternalism

In 2000, the state of Bahia became the first place in the world to integrate a program developed to address the special needs of

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children with learning disabilities into its plan to reform public high school education on a statewide level. The “Instrumental Enrichment” Program (IE) was developed by Israeli psychologist Reuven Feuerstein in the late 1940s and aimed to improve the cognitive skills of children who were orphaned or separated from their parents as a result of the Holocaust. On Feuerstein’s webpage, his approach is described as an intervention program, based on “the belief that intelligence is modifiable and not fixed, and it is designed to enhance the cognitive skills necessary for independent thinking. IE aims to sharpen critical thinking with the concepts, skills, strategies, operations, and attitudes necessary for independent learning; to diagnose and correct deficiencies in thinking skills; and to help individuals ‘learn how to learn.’”28 The Bahian high schools I observed in 2001 and 2003 dedicated two hours per week to the application of IE. In order to be able to do so, the Bahian state trained selected high school teachers to apply special test-like drills that aim at improving the students’ cognitive abilities. During my classroom observations, wherever the special class was applied, I found the same rule, insisting that two teachers be present if there were more than 25 students (which was normally the case) followed, indicating the significant effort the schools participating in the IE program were making. In an IE training session for teachers I attended, the trainer, who was working for the Bahian secretary of education, emphasized that “a lot of money” was spent to train each teacher so that they could apply the technique. Apparently, the Bahian state administration shied no effort and even brought in international consultants in order to assist with the implantation, execution, and evaluation of this pilot project. The statewide application of Instrumental Enrichment at Bahian High schools provides a unique opportunity to analyze the mind-set of Bahian political elites and state bureaucracies. It represents a similar scenario to the email hoax described in chapter Two, because it allows us to see how political elites and the included groups working in the state-apparatus depict and evaluate their excluded compatriots and their children. IE allows us to get a glimpse of the analysis which included Brazilians make of the excluded, as the massive, and thus very costly, application of IE rests on a thorough diagnosis of the needs of the excluded, conducted by the included bureaucrats working for the state’s department of education. To be sure, Bahian educational policy-makers thought it adequate to address school failure by applying a program that was developed to raise the cognitive skills of traumatized and

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handicapped children. Accordingly, in their analysis, the most salient problem of Bahian public high school education and the one that demanded the most urgent attention was the cognitive inability of the students. This deficiency of cognitive skills was deemed so severe that it warranted massive action, represented here by the hiring of an international specialist and the first-ever application of his program, a program developed to attend the cognitively handicapped victims of the Holocaust, in all Bahian high schools. IE was made the preferred strategy to improve public high schools despite the fact that teachers had to be specially trained and other classes had to by cancelled, given that IE required two teachers in each classroom of 25 or more students. By choosing IE, Bahian educational policy makers made the statement that they deemed Bahian public high schools students to be “cognitively handicapped.” Given that most Bahian public high school students are poor and black, this choice of approach tells us more about the mindset of the included policy-makers than about the true needs of the excluded high school students. In the eyes of the included, “there is something wrong” with the excluded, and they are blamed for their bad performance in school. With this strategic move, the victims of a system that fails them systematically are transformed into the ones to be blamed for this failure and school failure becomes student failure. Most interviewed teachers, principals, and educational policy makers were in agreement in blaming the socio-economic conditions of students for their bad performance and ultimate failure at school. Blaming the victims included both students and parents. Poor, AfroBrazilian students were habitually blamed because, in the words of a principal, they “don’t want anything” from school, which meant that they were not motivated and engaged in schooling. In sum, the application of IE provides a strong indicator for the deep division that runs through Brazilian society and it represents the attitude of included Brazilians towards their excluded counterparts. In the eyes of the included, the excluded are rather problematic, disruptive, threatening, and potentially dangerous, not willing to work hard enough, or at worst: cognitively impaired. One side of the population, the one in power, looks at the other with suspicion and contempt. Historically included groups control the state and its agencies and they use the state as a tool to control or “help” those whom they should represent.

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Private Schools: Becoming a Doctor

Included Brazilians send their children to selected private schools. These schools aim at preparing their students for brilliant futures. A local researcher and professor of education, Rita de Cassia Jesus, who had compared the learning students receive in a Bahian public school with that of an elite private school summed up the difference between these two school types. She explained: “In my research about private and public high schools in Salvador, I found that the private school was mostly for elites. The curriculum prepared them to become doctors and lawyers and the whole school was geared toward preparing them for their professional careers. In the public school, which is a model school and supposedly one of the best in the city, when a student was interested in medicine, the teachers advised him to think about becoming a nurse. If he was interested in law, they suggested a career as legal secretary. Both the official curriculum, as well as the ‘hidden curriculum,’ were designed to maintain everybody in their place.”29 The main function of private schools, according to Jesus (2001), is to guarantee the transfer of status from parents to their children and to ensure that the family’s assets will be maintained. Elite parents chose the school for their children most suited to guarantee professional and patrimonial continuity. In her comparative research between an elite private school in Salvador, Bahia, run by Jesuits, and a public high school administered by the state, Jesus found that, “The careers of the children are directly connected to the careers of their parents and the inheritance of the name implies also inheriting the clientele and the business of the family. These need to be maintained competently and the competences are legitimized by the school system.”30 Jesus finds that the name and prestige of the school, more so than its actual academic potential, is central to the reproduction of status and cultural capital that elite parents seek when choosing the right school for their children. Although these schools typically seek to provide their students with social competences, a conflict between curricular goals and the function of reproducing privilege is almost inevitable. One teacher explains, “Despite our discourses and attempts to provide a critical stance toward society, I think that our school satisfies the interests of the parents, because at the end it prepares the student to reproduce the workings of the society where he comes from. The rich have no solidarity, the rich are charitable [emphasis mine]. The attempts that the school makes to transform

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our students into solidary persons [that is, persons who express solidarity, the author] end up transforming them into charitable persons.”31 A few selected private schools in the city of Salvador provide included groups with the means to defend their inherited privilege. Everybody in the city can list the names of these schools and students and alumni tend to know each other, if not from school, then from shared membership in exclusive clubs and from frequenting the same restaurants, bars, and other leisure facilities. Private middle and high schools serve the main purpose of transferring status from one generation to the next. Sending their children to these schools represents a primary goal for many middle-class families and oftentimes necessitates difficult economic sacrifices. But these efforts tend to pay off, as the status bestowed on the students graduating from these schools provides them with a critical edge on the extremely competitive job market, as well as on the scarce market that regulates the access to public universities. Conclusion: Cada Macaco no seu Galho

32

The low degree of recognition that public teachers receive from society as a whole, reflected by low salaries and a general lack of institutional incentive structures that reward outstanding performance and sanction under-average performance, have transformed Bahian public education into a desperado system, where the motivations of teachers and students are systematically ground down and their hopes frustrated. With few exceptions, public schools, similar to public hospitals and public transportation, offer poor services to the poor and the excluded. The excluded are denied access to what really dominates the society: private service. Private services not only offer better service, but entitle the user to become the protagonist of his or her own life. Paying for services transforms a client into an owner of the service in question and it even offers the possibility of making the rules instead of having to obey them. The students of private elite schools feel and behave like owners of the establishment and the teachers. The students of public schools feel victimized by a system that systematically fails them. This system is out of their control; it is not theirs, but belongs to the “powerful” – the “barons” in local slang. Barons design and control a system for the poor black masses, but they themselves never use it. Public services become a means of controlling the excluded.

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Education functions as one of the central societal places for the reproduction of inequality through the active defense of privilege by the historically included. Brazilian schools ensure early on that the capabilities to live the kind of live one deems worth living are distributed very unequally in society. In a reversal of its original function, failing schools blame their victims for their failure and stigmatize them as being unwilling or unable to improve their lot. Education thus provides a very revealing portrait of how Brazilian society undermines the very potential to provide its democracy with democratic legitimacy. Its public sphere, the basis upon which democracy must be constructed, is disjointed at its very root and split among the privileged and the excluded. Instead of providing opportunities to invest their legal citizenship with meaningful content, public schools frustrate the hopes of their students and contribute to their continued marginalization. Even worse, systematically failing public schools add to the already widespread discrediting of the public sphere as a place of no value and status. In order to maintain such an extremely unfair distribution of future prospects, inequity needs to be anchored into the minds of the excluded, so that they accept their unfair lot. Included groups also need to ensure the socialization of their offspring into positions of “justified” and “naturalized” privilege and superiority. One of the most salient places to achieve this is within the households of the included. The following chapter demonstrates how the very common and widespread practice of employing a domestic servant serves this purpose. The daily interactions between employers and maids must be seen as one of the central and most consequential places of Brazilian society to reproduce inequality and to anchor the distinction between included and excluded Brazilians into the common sense. More than any other institution of Brazilian society, domestic service teaches and socializes both the included and the excluded into their opposing roles and teaches them how to conform to the role expectations of their counterparts. 1

Hirsch 1976: 53. Some of my more specific findings about Bahian school reform have been published in specialized journals. For more details on the Bahian School Reform, see: Reiter, Bernd. 2008. “Education Reform, Race, and Politics in Bahia, Brazil,” Revista Ensaio, No. 58; Reiter, Bernd. 2008. “Inequality and School Reform in Bahia, Brazil,” International Review of Education; Reiter, Bernd. 2005. “The Shortcomings of Democratic School Management in Bahia,” Gestão em Ação, V. 8, N. 2, Mai. / Ago., pages 207-221; Reiter, Bernd 2

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and Rita Dias. 2005. “Reforma Educacional, Exclusão e Racismo na Bahia,” Gestão em Ação, V. 8, N. 1, Jan. / Apr., pages 97-116. 3 Gutmann 1999:14. 4 In the South and Southeast this rate was only 8.1 percent. 5 The Northeast also has the highest income inequality. In some northeastern states, more than 50 percent of the families live with half a per capita minimum wage per month, meaning less than 100 Brazilian Reais, less than 40 US dollars in 2001. In the rural areas, this number was as high as 70 percent. 6 Marcelo Paixão 2004: A ABS das Desigualdades Raciais: Um panorama o analfabetismo da população negra através de uma leitura dos indicadores do Censo 2000, in: Teoria e Pesquisa N. 42/43, Jan / Jul 2004: 245-264. 7 The book title of Birdsall’s and Sabot’s 1996 work on education in Brazil is emblematic of this lack of action: “Opportunity Foregone.” 8 Data from Rodrigues, Maristela Marques and Monica Giagio (eds.) 2001: PRASEM III. Guia de Consulta, MEC, FUNDEF, Brasilia. 9 Hanushek, Eric A., Joao Batista Gomes-Neto and Ralph W. Harbison 1996: Efficiency-Enhancing Investment in School Quality, in: Birdsall, Nancy and Richard H. Sabot (eds.) 1996. 10 The Age/grade distortion measures the difference between the age that a student should have in a certain grade and the age he/she actually has. 11 The Brazilian school reform initiated under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and coordinated by minister of education Paulo Renato Souza was successful in broadening access of the Brazilian population in school age (E.g. Bolivar Lamounier and Rubens Figueiredo, A Era FHC. Um Balanco, São Paulo: Cultura Editores Associados, 2002). In 2000, 97% of this population was attending school, compared to 85% in 1989, although rates for the northeast were significantly lower, where school attendance reached 90 percent by 2000 (Data from IBGE). The FUNDEF law turned out to be a very effective tool for decentralizing and bringing order into a system that has been suffering from many overlapping responsibilities and blurred boundaries for municipal and state action. FUNDEF was so successful because it guaranteed minimal financial conditions in schools, as federal transfers are calculated based on the number of students enrolled (In 2002, this minimum amount was RS $415 per year for each enrolled student in municipal and state public schools). President Cardoso was also able to counterbalance the undue weight given to university education, which consumed over 50% of the Brazilian educational budget before his reforms and led to severe under-financing of primary and secondary education (compare, e.g. Caixeta in Lamounier and Figueiredo 2002, p.548f , op.cit.). Overall, high school attendance rose by 71% from 1994 to 2001 – which must be seen as another significant success of the Cardoso reform (Data from MEC / INEP). The elaboration and application of new national curricular guidelines are another important achievement of the Cardoso administration, although the high standards of those guidelines mostly met very distant local realities. In most schools of my sample, teachers openly admitted that they were unable to teach at such high standards. From my analysis of Bahian public schools it also became clear that the teacher-training

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programs that are part of this school reform are gradually improving teachers´ qualifications. The new law requires that all newly hired teachers of primary and secondary cycles hold university degrees. Teachers without university degrees were offered opportunities to attend university. This requirement will impact the quality of Bahian public schooling gradually, as newly hired teachers are better prepared than the already working personnel. The same is true for the qualifications of principals. It is part of the Bahian school reform that in the municipal system, the school community (defined as being composed of one representative from each of the following: parents, community, teachers, staff, and students) elect principals. In the state system, principals must pass several competitive tests in order to be eligible for the job. Comparing schools with active and well-informed principals to those with disinterested ill-prepared ones clearly shows that well-informed, well-trained, and committed principals can make a difference for their students and teachers. Such principals have been able to make use and effectively apply educational reform programs, whereas others did not carry out certain parts of the overall reform because they ignored their existence or were unwilling to make the effort. 12 Plank in Birdsall 1996:122. 13 Plank in Birdsall 1996:122. 14 Plank in Birdsall, 1996:123. 15 In Birdsall 1996. 16 Plank in Birdsall, 1996:127. 17 Plank in Birdsall, 1996:124. 18 PED RMS (1999) SEI/SETRAS/UFBA/DIEESE/SEADE. 19 Plank, David 1996. 20 Hirsch, Fred 1976. 21 ibid.:41. 22 Interview with the ex-secretary of municipal education, carried out on 09/06/01. 23 Mariza Abreu in Rodrigues 2001: 19. 24 Student at a State school, 5th to 11th grade, July 8, 2005. 25 Interview conducted on July 8, 2005 at a State High School. 26 Interviews conducted on July 8, 2005 at the entrance of a State High School. 27 Villela, Francisco 1997. Chamada a Açao. Combatendo o Fracasso Escolar no Nordeste. Brasília, Projeto Nordeste / Banco Mundial / UNICEF. 28 Available e.g. at: http://www.icelp.org/asp/Professional_Team.shtm. 29 Interview conducted on 11/20/2001. 30 Jesus 2001: 156. 31 Quotes from Dias 2000: 159. 32 Brazilian saying, meaning literally “every monkey his place.” It is used to express something similar to “to each his own.”

5 The Domestication of the Excluded For inequalities to be maintained, they need to be anchored in the minds of the excluded and the included alike. This chapter argues that it is in the private and intimate spheres, inside Brazilian homes, that the distinction between the included and the excluded, between those that have rights and those that depend on favors, is planted in minds of the participating individuals and also in the collective consciousness. The household constitutes a central place for the normalizing and institutionalizing of unjust orders, because it is in our homes and the homes of others that we become accustomed to social realities, thus elevating our everyday reality to the status of common sense. In order to structure the perception of reality, social hierarchies must be rendered unproblematic, so that they appear normal. They need to be “normalized” and elevated into our taken-for-granted stock of interpretative patterns about the world, our common sense. Gramsci (1999) explained that common sense is characterized by uncritically taken-for-granted beliefs that reflect dominant interests and that thus serve to maintain hegemonic control. What passes for common sense is indeed historically constructed and its content is a reflection of prevalent power structures. Not any reality can become common sense, but only those that find enough support and acceptance. Once accepted, common sense appears as unproblematic, normal, and the way things have always been and indeed how they must be. In the words of Stuart Hall, “common sense does not require reasoning, argument, logic, thought: it is spontaneously available, thoroughly recognizable, widely shared (…) It is precisely its ‘spontaneous’ quality, its transparency, its ‘naturalness,’ its refusal to be made to examine the premises on which it is founded, its resistance to change or to correction, its effect of instant recognition, and the closed circle in which it moves which makes common sense, at one and the same time, ‘spontaneous,’ ideological and unconscious.1 In other words, once normalized, oppression is no longer visible and thus becomes difficult to change. Gramsci introduced the concept of “cultural hegemony” to refer to the ability of societal fractions who benefit from an unjust order and have enough power to 73

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elevate this order to “the reality” of all the people sharing one system of reference. Current orders and widely accepted “ways how things are” disguise their historically constructed character and the powerful interests that have brought this order into being. Nevertheless, these orders need to be constructed and reproduced in daily interaction so that they remain part of common sense. Norbert Elias (1978) has shown how the exercise of power and distinction in everyday relationships constitutes and reinforces the separation of social groups. Among the central places where social hierarchies and oppression are normalized and anchored in the Brazilian common sense are the private spheres, where included groups reproduce a framework of inequality in their daily interaction with excluded groups. Inside the houses of the included, in their routinized interaction with their subordinates, the skewed frameworks of who counts as included and who doesn’t, as well as the related dichotomy of who has rights and who doesn’t, are played out on a daily basis. Domestics

In Brazil, the employment of maids is a widespread practice, making it the norm among included Brazilians. A survey conducted by Datafolha, a renowned Brazilian research institute, discovered that, in 2002, domestic service employed some five million. This survey also found that 21 percent of all employed females work in the domestic service sector, making it the most important female employment sector in Brazil. This number appears to have changed little over time; in 1989, Chaney and Castro found that in Latin America and the Caribbean, no less than 20 percent of the female work force worked as maids. The Datafolha survey found that of women employed in the domestic service sector, 37 percent were brown and 24 percent black. In an assessment of domestic employment in Rio de Janeiro, Pereira (in Chaney and Castro, 1989) found that over half of Rio’s domestic workers earn from nothing to one-half of a minimum wage and that 79.5 percent work longer than the legally regulated 40 hours per week. Sherriff (1997), who conducted several years of field research in the Rio de Janeiro favela Morro do Sangue Bom, stated that she did not encounter one single woman who had not worked as a maid in a middle class home during some period in her life. Sheriff explains that, “a girl may begin her first full-time job at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Many of the women I knew had spent at least a part of their

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adolescence as ‘live-in’ maids, i.e. they lived with their employer families and went home only on weekends or Sundays.” 2 Rollins (1985) traces the origins of domestic work back to domestic slavery. Comparing several countries in historical analysis, she points to the fact that industrial revolutions led to a pull and push effect, pushing the rural poor into industrializing cities where a new middle-class emerged, able to afford domestic servants. In Brazil, high rates of urban unemployment nurtured by rural migration and industrialization allowed for an expansion of the urban middleclasses starting in the 1940s. Taking advantage of the huge numbers of unemployed, domestic labor in middle and upper class households expanded to become the country’s most important female employment activity.3 The poverty and high illiteracy that particularly affect Afro-Brazilians leave many excluded with only very few options. With other employment opportunities in short supply, and confronted by the fact that regular unskilled work offers merely a low salary and not food and lodging, as domestic service often does, many excluded women are pushed into domestic service. Describing the work-relationship and the rituals created within it, Rollins points to the extreme inequalities that characterize this job, along with the vulnerability produced by a lack of co-workers, total dependency on the employer, and the isolating character of this work. As domestic work has very low prestige, employers take pains to distance themselves from their servants, using several symbolic mechanisms to stress this distance. Upholding the invention of racial inferiority is one of the most salient strategies to maintain the distance between employer and maid. Kofes (2001), studying the relationship between domestic servants and their employers in São Paulo, calls attention to the vocabulary commonly used in this sphere, where the employee is habitually referred to as doméstica (domestic) and the employer as patroa (patron). In her ethnographic material Kofes shows how being a domestic in a Brazilian household implies being constantly “domesticated,” stereotyped, and abused. In a similar way, Twine (1997), during her ethnographic research, found Brazilian servants being treated as children even if they were adults. Twine demonstrates that such infantilization goes hand in hand with the creation of paternalistic dependencies, as maids are oftentimes not even paid the minimum wage but are instead offered a bedroom, food, and other material compensation. Gill (1994), in turn, points at the gender dynamics of the patron – domestic relationship. Studying Bolivian female domestic workers,

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she concludes that it is mostly female employers who exploit female servants, justifying their behavior through the invention of the “inferiority” and racial otherness of the maid. Gill also highlights the extreme vulnerability of female domestics, especially the ones that live-in, as they are extremely dependent on their employers. According to Gill, sexual abuse is frequent and is part of the way upper- and middle-class women, who typically define themselves as “white” and construct their own identities by setting themselves apart from the “low moral standards” of the racialized other. Gill further argues that male employers’ predatory behavior and abuse towards servants is oftentimes tolerated or ignored, as long as such relations do not lead to entitlements for the servants.4 Focusing on the situation of domestic workers in Latin America and the Caribbean in general, Chaney and Castro (1989) find similarities among the several countries they study. They argue that wherever it is practiced, domestic employment is an underpaid and depreciated activity. Most of the time, maids migrate to their workplaces, coming from the countryside or from other regions or countries. They also find that in Latin America and the Caribbean most maids have a different ethnic background than their employers, an ethnicity their employers consider “inferior.” Most maids work alone, which further enhances their vulnerability and increases the chances of falling victim to physical and emotional abuse. The authors conclude that, “domestic workers in most countries remain among the most oppressed and neglected sector of the working class.”5 Even in countries like the United States, where maids find more support structures and a more effective legal systems than those in most Latin American countries, Colen (in Chaney and Castro 1989) finds US employers using similar techniques to dehumanize their maids. These include not allowing them to share the same table and the same food with their employers, nor the same bathrooms, toilets, or even seats. In addition, most employers address their maids by the first name or refer to them as “the girl,” even if they are grown adults.6 All these techniques contribute to widen the gap between the employer and the employed, based on a constant and systematic infantilization and ultimately dehumanization of the domestic worker.

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Domestication

Although analyses taking the maid’s perspective into account are rare, the autobiography of a Peruvian domestic worker and activist Adelinda Diaz Uriarte provides some important insights.7 The available literature on domestic service allows for the conclusion that Uriarte’s experiences are typical and characterize the general ways domestics are treated by their patrons. Uriarte describes the techniques her employers used to hold her in a slavery-like dependency. Starting out as a child and cut-off from potential support structures, her situation resembled the ones described by Bales (2000) in his analysis of contemporary slavery.8 Her total isolation, together with the creation of absolute dependency and the constant physical and emotional abuse do not fall very short of the situation African slaves had to endure in colonial times.9 Very similar stories are told by Brazilian domestics in the September 2002 edition of the UN feminist journal Maria Maria, dedicated to domestic workers.10 According to Branca Maria Alves’ editorial, “five million Brazilian women work as domestic servants. Some sleep at their workplace, having infinite workdays. Others - the majority - live infinitely far from their workplace. Many are single mothers and they do the possible and the impossible, the imaginable and the unimaginable to sustain their children. (…) This is an extremely de-valorized activity: many do not even earn a minimum wage and only 24 percent have a work contract.”11 The testimony of domestic servants, reproduced in Maria Maria, provides ample evidence of the constant de-humanization resulting from the extreme power disequilibrium that characterizes this profession. Maria José Moreno Ruiz, for example, a 32 year old Chilean domestic servant working for the same family for twelve years, ponders about what would happen if she were to die tomorrow: If I were to die tomorrow, Mister Julio would immediately be annoyed. When he arrived at home at night, nobody would have laid out three different shirts on his bed for his choice. The Mistress would also be affected. Nobody would place, at exactly 6 pm, the aromatic stones next to her bathtub for her well-deserved bath after coming home from work. Can it be that my friends and I do not deserve this as well? The children, little George and Inez, would feel it the most, because they do not have many people to hug them, listen to their stories and show interest in their daily routines, dedicating time to them with selflessness and professionalism. The next week would be

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different. The inconvenient body would have been removed and with it the memories of death. An acquaintance or a friend would have already recommended some “girl” (they would not call her a woman, even if she were 60 years old and could only move her soul) to cook, iron, clean, keep silence, embrace, get up before daybreak, stay up without sleep. Better even if she had no children, “because these days families that have domestic servants already make a big enough effort to give them work and cannot afford any extra expenses.” They can also not study, because that would limit the work hours. She should attend like a servant, smiling softly and submissively. Obviously, if Mister Julio or even the Mistress would die tomorrow, they would have much marble on their tombs and they would have paid a priest to commemorate the funeral and they would reserve a beautiful place at the cemetery. But among the dead there are many that never thought that they would be replaceable, that the fucked up world of theirs, so important and cryptic, would continue without them. I doubt that someone would comment, during the final minutes of Mister Julio or the Mistress, that they were not very human toward their domestic servants. I do not only want bread and Sundays off. I also want dreams, love, autonomy, power, beauty, theater, aromatherapy, caressing, sex, respect, and a future.12

A Bahian maid, 23 years old, describes the powerlessness experienced when working as a domestic servant and points out some of the typical mechanisms used by patroas (female employers, literally “patrons”) to control and infantilize their maids: The first years were very difficult and it still is. I worked in four houses and the best patroa I had moved to Curitiba. After that I only worked in bad houses. There was one patroa who made my plate, I could not serve myself, and I had to stay quiet when her grandson was hitting me. Another one only paid 100 Reais because I lived in her house. Where else could I live? Now I am working for a couple and his mother. The two apartments are very big and I get very tired. I work everyday in one of the houses and I earn 350 Reais [minimum wage at the time-- the author] together, from both patroas.13

The life stories collected in Maria Maria, as well as the testimony of Adelinda Diaz Uriarte, all express similar sentiments of isolation, abuse, de-humanization, and rage. They all point to the dialectic relationship that welds together the domesticated and their domesticator. As pointed out by Hegel much earlier, one constitutes the other and the weakness to which the domesticated is condemned provides the source of strength for the domesticator. At the same time, most statements given by maids also testify to the unstable

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nature of this relationship. Although constantly told that they belong to the family, they do not believe such bedazzlement and most maids recognize that their employers are also their oppressors. The words of Maria Ruiz are again typical: “Again, I spoke with more rage than resignation: In a world that unjust, the maid even gets used to walking around with her head down if they ask her to.” At the same time that they are employed and earn money, the social conventions and abuse that customarily accompanies this work transforms it into one of the key societal institutions responsible for upholding inequality and for the mutual constitution of inclusion and exclusion. Rights and Favors

Paternalism negates autonomy and undermines the very possibility of democracy. According to Kant, it is “the greatest despotism imaginable.”14 When a patron hires a domestic, she takes away the domestic’s voice and reduces her to the status of a child. This degradation finds expression in the infantilization described above by Maria Ruiz and analyzed in more detail by Twine (1997). Calling an adult employee a “girl” reduces her to the legal status of a minor and robs her of the status of being an autonomous person that knows best what is good for her. By reducing an adult to a child’s status, patrons not only rob domestics of their autonomy; they also elevate themselves above their clients and make decisions for them, oftentimes justifying such action by stating that, “they don’t know what is best for them.” If such paternalistic structures become successfully institutionalized, they channel further expectations and actions on both sides. Patrons “really believe” that they know best what is good for their maids and decide for them; and domestics accept “the fact” that they do not know what is good for themselves and that their patrons know better. What plays itself out as an adult – child relationship in the private sphere translates into a differentiation between those that have rights, based on their perceived autonomy, and those that do not have rights, because of their child-like status and lack of autonomy. To further instill a sense of inferiority into their maids and to elevate themselves into the position of caring patrons, patrons oftentimes give presents and goods to their maids and help them with small favors, expecting loyalty in return. At the same time that a maid has no access to rights, she is required to be thankful for the “favors” bestowed on her by her patron. This institution is at the heart of constituting paternalist power structures and it is also one of

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the core mechanisms used to differentiate between those who have rights and those that depend on favors and must demonstrate deference in return. A commonly used framework to create such a structure is to tell maids that they “almost belong to the family.” The Bahian maid quoted above provides an example: Sometimes I think that I am exploited and enslaved, but there is nothing I can do about it. They always say that I almost belong to the family, but I don’t believe it. Patroas mostly say that when we ask to settle the bills. They are scared of ending up without a maid. But I know that I do not belong to the family, because if I did, I could sit down with them at the same table and I could enter the house through the front door. Whenever they say that, I just pretend I am listening. 15

At the same time that the rights of maids are reduced to those of a minor, the very constitution of the rights of their patrons depends on this negation of rights; domestic service must thus be understood not just as a mechanism to exploit and control the poor. Even more importantly, at least within the context of the discussions advanced in this book, domestic service constitutes a central place for the construction of inclusion. Maids free their mostly female patrons from domesticating housework and enable them to act as full citizens and professionals in the public sphere. The following statement of a 34-year-old São Paulo female professional provides some hints at this mutual constitution of having rights and depending on favors: I work in three shifts. I am the principal of a kindergarten, I attend cases of clinical psychology in my private clinic, and I am active at the Nonprofit Center “It’s the Law,” dedicated to AIDS / STD prevention and treatment of drug abuse. I don’t have the slightest possibility of coming home at midnight and start washing, cooking, cleaning, and ironing…16

In a society where domestic work is relegated almost by default to females and males are not even included in the equation of household duties, professional included women free themselves from the domestication inherent in domestic work by shifting it over to other women. This shift not only reinforces the existing differences between included and excluded women, it actually aids in the constitution and consolidation of it. Racism plays a core role in this mutual constitution of inclusion and exclusion, as we shall see.

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Racism

Sheriff’s (1997) ethnographic work among Rio de Janeiro favela dwellers reveals the racism inherent in the patron-servant relationship. In a typical, yet very telling statement, one of her informants, who works as a maid in the home of a French woman, tells the researcher that her employer is not racist, because she “even drinks from the same glass.”17 Statements like these point to the high degree to which exclusion and oppression have been internalized by the oppressed. Another informant explains that the building has two separate entrances, one for the white middle-class dweller, and one for the mostly black service personnel. She explains that, “if you are black (pretinho) you have to go up in the service elevator, but if you’re white like you, they let you go the other way. It’s like that almost everywhere.”18 Several of Sheriff’s informants gave evidence of the prevalence of racial stereotyping, referring to blacks as being dirty and smelling bad. One informant, herself a maid, explained that white middle-class families preferred lighter skin maids, especially for childcare. Dark complexion blacks could only find cleaning and cooking jobs.19 Sheriff highlights the fear many white middle-class patrons have of racial contamination and “pollution” from contact with their black maids. She concludes: “In describing the racialized nature of many everyday encounters, in framing such encounters as examples of boundary-maintaining incidents that occur ‘all the time,’ and in accounting for racism in the language of a structured and structuring hegemony, my informants reveal what is ‘embaixo do pano’ or under the concealing fabric of the dominant narrative of race (and silence about racism) in Brazil.”20 Modernity

In Rio de Janeiro, as in any other Brazilian city, almost all modern high-rise apartment buildings have two separate entrances and domestics have to use the service elevator, even if they are in street clothes. Sheriff finds that “nearly all of the older and larger middleclass apartments and houses in Rio have very small rooms with a tiny bathroom attached, usually located next to the kitchen.”21 In Sheriff’s evaluation, having these small maid rooms “is still considered a standard appurtenance in middle-class dwellings.”22 It also points to the fact that domestic service in Brazil is expected to continue into

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the foreseeable future, at least by the architects who design apartment buildings for the included. An illustration of this fact is provided by contemporary advertisements in Brazilian newspapers, offering middle, and upperclass apartments for rent and sale. Even in São Paulo, which is considered Brazil’s most modern city, almost all apartments advertised have rooms for the domestic servant. Most servant rooms are just big enough for a small bed, not offering ventilation or natural light. In addition, the invisibility of the domestic worker is furthered by a strategic design that links the servant’s room to the kitchen and the washing room, but keeps it distant from rooms where the patrons socialize. Bigger apartments, for the more affluent, typically have separate servant entrances, but even smaller, middle-class apartments find some room for the maid – or at least they include a servant room into the architectonical plan in order to evoke “upscale living.” Having a servant is not the exclusive privilege of the elite, but a widespread practice of included groups. At the same time, living in an apartment with a servant room evokes privilege and thus serves the purpose of reproducing inclusion by referencing exclusion, even if the maid’s quarter remains empty. The fact that even the most modern apartment buildings in the most modern city of Brazil - São Paulo - include quarters for the servant points to the modern character of this institution. Domestic servitude, at least in the eyes of those architects and developers catering to the included, is an institution that is here to stay. Yet even if the importance and magnitude of domestic servitude declines, living in an apartment with servant quarters bestows important symbolic capital upon those able to afford it and serves to demarcate the symbolic terrain upon which disjunctive democracy is constructed. Conclusion: Normalizing Difference in the Private Sphere

An analysis of the dynamics of the employer-maid relationship as they are enacted routinely in Brazilian homes leads to several conclusions. First it points to a continuity of domestication within Brazilian households. It is no exaggeration to compare the precariousness of the social condition of a maid to that of a bonded feudal servant or even to that of a domestic slave. This is especially the case considering that until 1888 (and sometimes longer) included Brazilians had domestic slaves (mucamas) to serve them in their homes.23 The continuity that links domestic slavery to domestic service contributes to the negative stigma of this activity.24

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Furthermore, the magnitude and economic importance of this work transforms it into a typical everyday practice, and contributes to the maintenance of a distinction in Brazilian common sense between who counts as included and who as excluded. As such, the private sphere constituted by Brazilian middle and upper class homes must be seen as constituting one of the main societal places where the dichotomies of exclusion / inclusion and having rights / depending on favors are recreated and institutionalized. With its specific racialized dimension, domestic servitude is also among the central places where the children of the included learn and are socialized into the knowledge of how to distinguish and treat “inferior” people. The systematic infantilization and dehumanization of Afro-Brazilian adult women in white middle class households must be seen as a crucial process that perpetuates the institutionalization and normalization of the “inferiority” of the racialized other. The docility of the maid, resulting from extreme patriarchal dependency and precarious status, provides the counterpart to this dichotomy, resulting in the typical image of the benevolent black nanny who raises the children of white middle class parents. According to some analysts, domestic service keeps growing in Brazil, indicating that domestic service in Brazil is more than a premodern legacy.25 The modern high-tech apartments for sale offered in contemporary Brazilian newspapers point to the fact that domestic service is indeed intimately linked to modernity and capitalist development in Brazil, allowing one part of human kind to climb up to the heights of enlightenment on the backs of others that are condemned to remain in the dark. The highly routinized institution of domestic servitude in the households of included Brazilians thus serves as one of the central societal places to anchor an exclusionary common sense into the minds of the involved, as well as into the broadly accepted common sense. Being part of “how things are” does however not necessarily imply that the excluded readily accept their lot. Although repeated dehumanization certainly penetrates the lifeworld and value systems of the excluded, the statements of maids reproduced above also point to their continued rebellion and moral outrage at the abusive actions of their employers. Uncritical acceptance is more likely to be found among the exploiting employers, who seem repeatedly outraged how “unthankful” their maids are or how “ungrateful” a maid acts when seeking legal support against her abuse.

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The knowledge of who counts as included and who does not is reproduced systematically within homes, as it is in schools, as we saw in Chapter Four. To be effective, however, the institutionalization of inequality produced in the private sphere must reach the public realm. In the following chapter we will analyze how the system of social stratification thus created in the private realm spills over into the public sphere, where it threatens to undermine the possibility of democratic legitimation. 1

Hall 1979: 325. Sheriff 1997:215. Goldstein 2003. 4 Gill 1994: 146f. 5 Chaney and Castro 1989:4. 6 Colen 1989:180f. 7 In Chaney and Castro 1989. 8 See Bales’ definition in Chapter One. 9 Several descriptions of Brazilian slavery are available, such as Antonil, Andre Joao 1976 [1649]; Freyre, Gilberto 1990a; Gorender, Jacob 1988; Ramos, Arthur 1934 and 1979; Reis, Joao Jose 1986; Rodrigues, Nina 1988; Schwartz, Stuart B. 1988; Verger, Pierre 1992, 1981, and 1987; and Viana, Luis Filho 1988, amongst others. The descriptions these authors provide about colonial slavery very much resemble the characterizations of contemporary serfdom in Brazil. 10 Maria Maria, Year 4, No. 4 (2002), available online at 2 3

http://www.undp.org.br/unifem/mariamaria/ano4_n4/sumario4.html Maria Maria, editorial. 12 Maria Maria, Jurnal published by UNIFEM, no page numbers available. 13 Elvira, 23 years, domestic servant, single, no children, Feira de Santana, Bahia. 14 Quoted in Berlin 1998: 208. 15 Elvira, 23 years, domestic servant, single, no children, Feira de Santana, Bahia. 16 Naime, 34 years, social psychologist, no children, São Paulo, SP. 17 Ibid: 220. 18 Ibid: 221. 19 Ibid: 226. 20 Ibid: 251. 21 Ibid: 223. 22 Ibid: 223. 23 Gilberto Freyre has described the special situation of domestic slaves in his book entitled The Mansions and the Shanties: the making of modern Brazil, New York: Alfred. A. Knopf (1963). This is the North American edition of the 1936 Brazilian original entitled Sobrados e mucambos: decadência do patriarcado rural e desenvolvimento do urbano. 24 Kofes 2001:21. 11

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25

Hildete Pereira de Melo, professor of economy at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Maria Maria, year 4, N. 4, 2002.

6 Civil Society as Civilized Society In order to be considered a full member of the citizenry, citizens must be recognized as autonomous individuals, able to make their own decisions. In a democracy, no decisions can be made for other adults. This chapter will analyze the Brazilian public sphere as the place where democratic legitimacy needs to be reproduced - but where the division of society into included and excluded groups ultimately undermines such legitimation. As pointed out by Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta (1987a) and James Holston (2008), being a citizen is a role that requires learning and ultimately relies on mutual recognition. Holston employs the term “everyday citizenship” to highlight the everyday experience that led people to understand what it means to be a citizen – and act accordingly. According to Holston, “The quality of such mundane interaction may in fact be more significant to people’s sense of themselves in society than the occasional heroic experience of citizenship like soldiering and demonstrating or the emblematic ones like voting and jury duty. Everyday citizenship entails performances that turn people, however else related, into fellow citizens related by measures specific to citizenship.”1 Yet, encounters between included and excluded Brazilians are heavily pre-structured and each party conforms to very specific role expectations, especially with regard to the effectiveness of each other’s citizenship rights. Whereas some people are perceived as people whose rights have to be respected, others – the excluded – are perceived as people who rely on favors. These role expectations have become widely shared common knowledge and are indeed so “naturalized” that they escape scrutiny in most occasions. Concretely, in Brazil everybody “knows” how to approach and treat different people, as roles and role expectations have been anchored into the common sense inside the homes of the middle- and upper classes, as the previous chapter sought to demonstrate. Brazilians thus learn early that the included require a different treatment than the excluded. The excluded, in turn, evoke fear and suspicion if encountered by the included in public places. Because of the overdetermination that skin color exercises, blacks are almost automatically associated with lower status, whereas whiteness provides a 87

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symbolic capital and thus bestows status onto its bearer. As explained by Bourdieu (1984), different capitals, and patterns of consumption, work together to determine the social location of an individual within the structure of social hierarchies. Skin color serves as the most immediate and consequential determinant for one’s position within these social hierarchies. As such, skin color is highly over-deterministic, as it alludes to the presence or absence of other capitals – especially financial and cultural. Afro-Brazilians are perceived almost automatically as belonging to the excluded. The literature on civil society and democracy (Habermas, 1998; Cohen and Arato, 1995; Avritzer, 2002) points to the public sphere as the place for the reproduction and renewal of democratic legitimacy, but in order to life up to its promise, this public sphere needs to be democratic itself. Among the most salient actors in the public sphere are civil society organizations and social movements. If excluded groups lack full access to civil rights and liberties, civil society, understood as a potentially independent societal realm of free association, is likely to reflect this exclusion and, as a consequence, it runs the risk of forsaking its emancipatory potential. For many authors, civil society is the main driving force behind Latin America’s democratic consolidation (Escobar, Alvarez, and Dagnino 1998). Some (Avritzer, 2002) argue that civil society is the only place where democratic consolidation can originate. But according to Avritzer, in order to accomplish democratization, civil society organizations need to establish a new democratic practice, able to transcend the traditional political repertoires of clientelism and patronage. He argues that, “democratization is the result of transformations at the public level and that full democratization is the capacity to transform new practices from a societal innovation into a public form of decision-making.”2 For him, Latin American social movements, neighborhood associations, and other secondary associations have invented new, more inclusive and more democratic practices. These practices, if institutionalized, bear the potential to deepen existing democratic regimes. Similarly to Habermas and Arendt, he sees the public sphere, or “participative publics,” as the main source for deepening the quality of Latin American democracies. For all these authors, even if a complete society-wide transformation of a racist and exclusionary reality into a just reality is utopian and will not be achieved at once, these steps towards deliberative democracy seem the most theoretically plausible. In my own research, however, I have found that civil society is only very rarely able to establish such new practices, because civil

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society, instead of constituting an autonomous realm of society, is actually more likely to reflect the exclusionary practices that characterize the broader society into which it is embedded. As my empirical analysis will demonstrate, most civil society organizations are indeed dominated by the included, who have taken it upon themselves to make decisions for their excluded clients instead of with them. Considering the racialized character of exclusion, the included commonly justify this tutelage by referring to their superior moral capacities, or to their superior education, or their higher social status. Doing so, the included effectively undermine the moral autonomy of the excluded by treating them as minors. Through the same maneuver, they elevate themselves to the heights of moral superiority. Civil society thus runs the risk of becoming a sphere dominated by those claiming to be more enlightened, and thus “more civilized,” than their excluded clients and actually further consolidating unequal social hierarchies. The Importance of Civil Society

Organized civil society played a major role in most Latin American transitions to democracy and the growth in the number of non profit organizations in the region seems to testify to its importance as a force in bringing about democracy. According to Salamon and Anheier (1997) more than 5,000 non-profit organizations and NGOs existed in Brazil in 1996, where even the term “NGO” was unknown some 20 years before. Adulis (1998) has identified 800 NGOs in the Amazon region alone. Salamon and Anheier (1994) have spoken of an “associational revolution” that started all over the world in the 1980s.3 According to Landim (1997), in Brazil, the post-1985 years saw a boom of civil associations that grew up under the military regime and were in opposition to the state. These groups frequently shunned business and governmental support, and looked for support from international nongovernmental sources. Landim also argues that “NGOs form a distinct category in the Brazilian nonprofit universe, mingling Christianity and Marxism, militancy and professionalism. They were born in the seventies, with strong influence of Marxist and Christian ideologies. During the eighties they passed through a diversification of conceptions, themes, and activities, which range from popular movements to AIDS-related projects, to environmental protection, and to problems concerning women, ethnic minorities, street children, etc.” For Landim, in the Brazilian context, the designation “NGO” indicates a commitment to civil society, social

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movements, and social transformation. Fernandes and Carneiro (1995) list 1,010 registered NGOs in Brazil in 1994, whereas Landim, based on more detailed and extensive research, counted 5,000 Brazilian NGOs in 1997. None of these authors provides a clear definition of what a “NGO” is, although according to Landim “NGO is not a juridical term. It has connotations which are quite political; these do not, however, suggest that it is linked with any particular political ideology.” A total of some 200,000 non-profit organizations were registered with the Brazilian Federal Treasury in 2001, classified as dedicated to leisure, sports, and scientific, religious, and social assistance. Worker associations and trade unions were included, although they accounted for only 4.4 percent of the total.1 But although NGOs present themselves as large public entities, they are in fact rather small and do not really represent Brazilian society. Fernandes and Carneiro (1995), surveying the 102 NGOs who were represented at the first national assembly of Brazilian NGOs, held in Rio de Janeiro in August 1991 and attended by the directors of 102 NGOs, found that 68 percent of the NGOs had a budget of less than $500,000 USD and that 85 percent had fewer than 35 members, in fact over half of the groups at the meeting had fewer than ten members. Fernandes and Carneiro also found that NGO members, rather than representing the diversity of Brazilian society, come primarily from the intellectual elite; 85 percent of NGO members held college diplomas and 39 percent held graduate degrees, whereas less then four percent of Brazilians held a college degree at the time of this conference. Furthermore, of the 102 NGOS represented at the meeting 42 percent reported that they did not work with volunteers, which suggests a lack of integration into the lives of average Brazilians. Despite the pronounced growth in the number of registered civil society organizations in Brazil, and before the question of institutionalization becomes even relevant, the democratizing potential of civil society groups hinges on the degree to which their practice is democratic. Put simply, only inclusive and democratic organizations can reproduce and spread a new democratic common sense and gradually alter an exclusionary common sense. The democratizing potential of a civil society organization therefore crucially depends on its ability to shield itself from dominant discriminatory and exclusionary practices that characterize not just the broader society in which civil society organizations are embedded, but also the equally discriminatory market. In other words, civil society’s democratizing potential critically depends on

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its autonomy and its internal democratic practice. The emancipatory, and thus democratizing, potential of civil society is grounded in an understanding of realty as socially constructed through meaningful human interaction and its potential to change reality thus lies in its ability to help construct a different, more democratic, reality. The Making and Changing of Common Sense

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) explained that individuals have access to different realities, but that the most salient and most present reality is that of everyday life. This is the reality that is shared with fellow individuals and continuously reconstructed through social interaction. It is the reality that most people perceive simply as “reality,” implying that it is “normal.” These authors have shown how this reality is in fact a construct of people sharing a “lifeworld,” which refers to sharing the same everyday reality and interpreting it as meaningful and ordered. Based on the assumption that human beings create their world rather than that they are determined by it, Berger and Luckmann argue that humans must order their world and make sense out of it, as human nature does not bind them to a closed world. Rather, the world of human beings is open and has to be created, reproduced, and learned. But making sense out of the world is not a process that each newborn individual has to start from scratch. Instead, we are born into a world which has been ordered and structured before us, by those who have preceded us. Nevertheless, the openness and complexity of the world leaves us with an immense number of possibilities of how to understand and interpret it, and, most important, how to reproduce or to change it. To be able to deal with such complexity, humans reduce the infinite available possibilities by creating patterns. These patterns, if they prove successful or helpful, become “sedimented” into what is then perceived as an unproblematic everyday reality. Institutions therefore are patterned ways of doing things. They become “the way to do things” if they have proven successful and if they are supported by power. Berger and Luckmann called the consolidation of institutions into everyday reality “reification.” These authors have also pointed to the fact that once an institution becomes reified, it tends to persist. Ways of doing things become traditions and are hard to change. Recognizing that any reality is a social construct provides the theoretical key that opens the door to understanding and analyzing how individuals are connected to their societies. It gives the ability to

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locate the places where change must necessarily start: with agents. And it provides for the possibility of evaluating the necessary scope of change, because it shows that change must not stop at the individual level, but needs to become institutionalized in order to affect the broader society. Institutionalization can lead to reification and once this is achieved, it has the potential to go full circle and reflect back on individuals, as reification translates into internalization of a new normality.4 Seen in this light it becomes evident that the gendered and racialized oppression that characterizes the Brazilian everyday reality described earlier must be constantly and violently supported and sustained so that it can defend its claim of remaining “the way things are.” The systematic exploitation of women, children, wives, indigenous people and African descendents all are persistent Brazilian institutions, difficult to change as they are perceived as “normal,” “the way things always were,” “tradition,” or just “right.” Institutionalized inequality develops into roles and identities that become consolidated and reified within individuals who, in turn, construct their identities around role expectations. Once a patterned way of doing things has become institutionalized and elevated into common sense, it not only structures behavior, but also thinking and the perception of reality, limiting otherwise available options. Furthermore, as the state is one of the most powerful holders of power and violence and is indeed strongly influenced by elite interests, it becomes clear why the Brazilian state has been accused of actively participating in the oppression of its own peoples.5 To many analysts, the Brazilian state defends the interests of included Brazilians against the interests of the excluded.6 The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) has integrated this understanding of normalized oppression into his writings on education for liberation. Oppression, in Paulo Freire’s words, echoing those of Frantz Fanon, has denied the oppressed their very humanity. As a result, the reaction against this oppression must recognize and address this denial. Groups that claim to advance the interests of the excluded must empower excluded groups and individuals in such a way that they can regain their humanity. This can only be done by working with them, and not just for them, and it requires a breaking with Brazil’s institutionalized and normalized paternalism that has always denied the poor, black, and similar exotic “others” a say in the formulation of their own destinies and justified this exclusion by holding them at the bottom of social hierarchies. For Freire (1989), only through the conquest of “head positions” within the corporatist

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body of the nation can the perpetuation of this type of exclusion be ultimately overcome and the oppressed regain their humanity. Freire’s strategy is one of “revolutionary praxis.” Freire’s use of the concept “praxis” is rooted in Marxist tradition, especially the writings of Antonio Gramsci.7 According to Gramsci (1999), an oppressive reality, anchored in the way people define their common sense, can only be overcome through revolutionary praxis. Such praxis unites theoretical and critical reflections with practical action and is aimed at challenging the status quo. This is done by questioning the common sense and working towards a new and just reality. Democratic praxis also relates to the way Laclau and Mouffe (1985) have defined change. They argue that democratizing change requires to “deepen and expand [liberal-democratic ideology] in the direction of a radical and plural democracy.”8 These authors further argue that change results from “the multiplication of political spaces and the preventing of the concentration of power in one point.”9 In other words, the gradual expansion of democratic spaces, where power is not organized hierarchically but is diluted formally and procedurally, holds the potential for a “truly democratic transformation of society.”10 The Democratic Potential of Civil Society

Although many authors have used the argument that a free and lively civil society is able to consolidate existing democracies,11 most do not make clear why and under what conditions civil society can deliver on these promises. The most helpful framework for an analysis of the democratic potential of civil society is offered by Jürgen Habermas. For him, the process of entering into dialogue and discursively agreeing on moral statements has the advantage of allowing for a democratic, anti-authoritarian, and critically selfreflective way to find mutually acceptable agreements, which is the only way of finding moral agreement under conditions of modernity.12 He finds that neither the economy nor the state can host such “ideal speech situations” because the aim of dialogue within these two societal subsystems is coordination, not understanding. Within these arenas, instrumental rationality must prevail. Civil society is the only place where potentially free and uncoerced dialogue can take place systematically, constantly renewing the moral bases of human social interaction. Habermas also shows that communicative action works not only through the decisions made in ideal speech situations. Very importantly,

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communicative action constantly renews and actualizes the “lifeworld” – defined by him as a “context-forming horizon of social action, the implicitly known, taken-for-granted background of our everyday reality, [a] culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretive patterns.”13 Applied to the Brazilian case, Habermas’ approach leads to the diagnosis that racialized exclusion has been anchored deeply in people’s lifeworlds, as they perceive white privilege and black exclusion as “normal.” This, in turn, sets the standard for the task of Brazilian civil society. Groups acting within the realm of civil society have to create inclusive, critical, self-reflective ideal-speech situations, and be particularly sensitive to the question of racialized exclusion if they want to overcome Brazilian exclusion. The strong emphasis Habermas places on procedures also suggests that for racialized exclusion to be ultimately overcome, different everyday realities and race-conscious, just, and equal lifeworlds have to be established in the course of collective decision–making. Institutionalization of Democratic Praxis

Applying these insights to the concrete situation of racialized exclusion that characterizes Brazilian reality shows that organized groups within civil society have the potential to constitute democratic realities by gaining access to formerly exclusive spaces for those who had previously been excluded. Excluded non-, or second-class citizens can create lifeworlds within civil society organizations that work against prevailing institutions of normalized exclusion, constituting what Nancy Fraser has called subaltern counterpublics (Fraser 1997), or black counterpublics, in the words of Michael Dawson (1994). To gain voice and the status of being a full citizen whose opinion is respected in a group is an experience that empowers the individual, enables excluded groups to regain their humanity, and has the potential to reshape and democratize broader society. This experience can have two impacts: it empowers participating individuals beyond the limits of the one organization where this empowerment is produced because it provides participating individuals with opportunities to practice and experience a different kind of role, namely one of “being a citizen,” where one’s voice is heard and one’s opinion respected. It also empowers entire organizations and bears the potential to influence the ways reality is defined and upheld in the entire society. The successful redefinition

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of what is “normal” and “right” depends on how strongly supported or opposed this alternative reality is by power. Proponents of social change therefore need powerful support in order to transform prevailing realities. Habermas approaches this issue by introducing a concept of power taken from Hannah Arendt. Instead of understanding power as the ability to influence the action of others (Max Weber), Arendt had defined power as “the potential of a common will formed in noncoercive communication.”14 For her, “communicative power” results from social movements and democratic will-formation.15 Communicative power has the potential to expand and influence other societal spheres, including the state. For both Habermas and Arendt, the medium through which communicative power translates into state power is the legal system, as communicative processes taking place within the public sphere provide the basis for the legitimacy of law. Means, Ends, and Praxis

Several conclusions follow from the discussion above. First, it becomes obvious that there is a need to distinguish among groups that act within the realm of civil society. It has by now been broadly accepted that different civil society groups advance different goals. Secondly, in addition to focusing on aims and strategies, it is also important to analyze the internal structure of a group and the means it applies in order to advance its goals. This is important for evaluating the democratic quality that characterizes a given group. As the German and Northern Italian cases show, in the same way that democracies can be shallow and weak, formally democratic civil society organizations can be lacking in democratic quality and content, or even be hostile to democracy. Berman (1997), in her discussion of German pre-1933 associational life, provides an example of civil society organizations that actually were detrimental to democracy. Although strong networks were built, German participants in civil society groups did not have democratic learning experiences, so no robust democratic realities that could resist the populist lures of fascism were institutionalized. Instead, the dense German civic networks were left intact and they became neatly integrated into the organizational structure of the German Nazi Party. A third, complicating factor that calls for consideration springs out of the necessity to assess the quality of representation of a given group. As the discussion about democratic praxis has shown, no democratic change can be achieved for someone else. Democratic

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praxis requires not only democratic procedures of decision-making and the horizontal dilution of authority, but also participation of those groups that have been historically excluded, misrecognized, and marginalized. This is especially the case for Brazil. The notion of democratic praxis also points to another important classification. The process of having dialogues across cultural and social differences must be considered as more than a democratic means to reach a policy decision. If democracy is understood as a way of collective decision-making, then it is also an important democratic end in its own right. Although deeply rooted and highly normalized exclusion justify exclusive association as a strategy for excluded groups to raise their collective voice and gain visibility in a public sphere, ultimately democracy requires overcoming any form of exclusionary practice. Bystydzienski and Schacht (2001) have pointed to the need for dialogue in order to forge alliances among marginalized groups. Such dialogue must aim at overcoming beliefs in essentialized identities in which cultural, ethnic, or gender group differences are taken to be absolute. NGOs

Brazilian NGOs have assumed central a position in Brazilian civil society. Their “vanguard” character points to the fact that NGOs have been replacing other, more traditional, forms of organizing. The analysis of NGOs therefore allows for an evaluation of the changes that are occurring within contemporary Brazilian civil society and it points to future trends. I chose the city of Salvador, Bahia, as the main site of my empirical research for two reasons. Bahian race relations and racial distribution provided the first and more important rationale behind my choice. At least 70 percent of the 3 million inhabitants of the city of Salvador are non-white. Accordingly, Bahian civil society should ideally reflect this proportion in their active memberships. Secondly, I was already familiar with several Bahian NGOs before I started this study, having lived in Salvador from 1995 to 1998 where I worked as an NGO consultant. This facilitated my research, as I already knew most of the groups and was also known to them. From June 2001 to January 2002, I conducted systematic research on civil society organizations in the city of Salvador, Bahia.16 From my previous work experience and the contacts I had maintained since that time, I was familiar with some 12 NGOs active in Salvador. The Brazilian National Association of NGOs, ABONG,

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provided another list of groups, some of which I had not known previously. Not all Bahian NGOs were registered with ABONG, but together with the groups I knew from previous work and the groups I found while conducting research, I identified a total of 29 groups that called themselves NGOs and were headquartered and active in the state of Bahia. Of this total of 29 Bahian NGOs, 12 groups were active in cities other than Salvador or in rural areas, refused access for research purposes, or were temporarily inactive during my fieldtime, leaving me with a sample of 17 active NGOs in Salvador. Although Landim (1997) has estimated a total of 5000 Brazilian NGOs only a total of 251 NGOs were associated nationwide with ABONG in 2002. Compared to other states, Bahia has a relatively small contingent of associated NGOs, 21 associates. Pernambuco, a neighboring state to the north of similar population size, has 30 ABONG associates, the state of Rio de Janeiro has 54 associates, and the state of São Paulo has 47. The wide gap separating total numbers of NGOs from the number of registered NGOs with ABONG is due to the fact that ABONG membership requires the payment of a annual membership fee of 0.15% of the previous year’s budget, a consolidated and publicly recognized continuity of action over at least 2 years, and the regular provision of documents certifying legal statute, objectives, activity-plans, and other documents. ABONG associates, therefore, are the most effectively institutionalized NGOs. I asked all NGOs members in higher decision-making positions about their color and their race. Because of the ways race issues have been framed in the Brazilian discourse, the only relatively unambiguous indicator of self-association with the group of misrecognized Afro-Brazilians is self-identification black (“negra/o” and “preto/a”). Less complicated was the problem of deciding what counts for an NGO. The most practical way to address this problem was to follow self-designation. I established a threshold of 50 percent to determine black representation in decision-making positions. In other words, if 50 percent or more of those individuals that were entitled to participate in collective decision-makings were self-declaring “negras/os,” I categorized the group as “representing blacks in positions allowing for participation in routine collective decision-making.” I put strong emphasis on everyday praxis and daily routines of decision-making. I used participant observation and informal interviews to detect if important decisions were in fact made by a single person, by a core group, or collectively. Through this, I determined if routine decisionmaking approximated ideal speech situations. Democratic praxis

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requires that targeted populations be actively involved in routine collective decision-making processes. In order to assess democratic praxis I inquired about the targeted population of each group and determined if a group acted with or for its targeted population. The theoretical framework outlined above does not allow for an assessment of the general efficiency, efficacy, or external impact of a group. It is restricted to analyzing the contribution of these groups in addressing and overcoming highly normalized racialized exclusion in Brazil and thereby, I argue, their contribution to the consolidation of Brazilian democracy. In other words, a group can be a very efficient service provider, or be instrumental in advancing highly desirable goals, such as environmental protection or progressive AIDS policies, but if such a group scores low in its democratic means, ends, and praxis, it contributes to a consolidation of racialized exclusion rather than to the deepening of Brazilian democracy. All 17 NGOs of my sample worked almost exclusively with full time and part time paid staff. In this research I therefore focused on the active staff-members as the people that interact routinely in a group. All regular staff-members were paid. Although some groups worked with volunteers, the volunteers’ presence and participation was not continuous and they were not part of the group that made collective decisions. All NGOs shared similar organizational structures, with a general assembly that meet once or sometimes twice a year to elect a board of directors. The directors, who in most cases held honorary positions, sometimes included local notables. Overall, directors had very little influence on the everyday activities of the NGOs I studied. Most groups had a “coordinator,” hired by the board of directors, to effectively manage the group. Executive managers had different names, such as “president,” “superintendent,” or “manager,” but they were always the ones that in the structural hierarchy sat below the board of directors, which in turn was legitimized by elections in the mostly yearly general assembly. Executive coordination was in most cases carried out by a single person, but some groups had a more horizontally diluted organizational structure, where different coordinators were responsible for their specific fields of activity, and they formed a council of coordinators. From the total of 17 NGOs, only four groups, less than one fourth, had a participation of at least 50 percent race–conscious AfroBrazilians in their decision-making positions. Further scrutiny of these four groups showed that three of these were historically linked to the Brazilian Black Power movement. In these three, active

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membership was exclusively Afro-Brazilian. The other group was a relatively new NGO with no direct historical links to prior Brazilian social movements. Of the four groups that employed self-declaring Afro-Brazilians in positions that de jure allowed them to participate in collective decision-making, only one group created and maintained daily routines that came close to an ideal speech situation. This was also the only group where the targeted population – poor, Afro-Brazilian youth – had an active say in the course of action taken by this group. In this group, weekly meetings were held to evaluate the activities of the past week and to plan the activities of the coming week, allowing for collective deliberation. The group was entirely managed and maintained by local youth. This NGO had the greatest resemblance to the neighborhood associations of my sample of 17, because of its location within a poor favela and because it received only relatively small amounts of external funding. In the other three groups that reached the threshold of 50 percent Afro descendents in decision-making positions, decisions were made by one or two individuals with central authority, which in these cases were all men. None of these groups allowed for a broader collective to participate in deliberations and none included them in effective decision-making. In none of these groups was information distributed equally, and power was always concentrated in very few hands. None of the NGOs of my sample pursued anti-democratic goals. The mission statements and declarations of all 17 NGOs declared as one of their main goals “education for social justice.” Four NGOs originated in the cultural and artistic activities of the Bahian carnival and had close links to the national Black Power movement. Three NGOs were institutionally linked to different Christian churches. Two of those were working as intermediary funders for other local groups. One NGO was dedicated to environmental protection, and one to communication and media. A total of nine groups offered professional training courses for poor, marginalized youth in theater, construction, carpentry, the handling of computers, and musical education. Of these, musical education, especially percussion, was the most frequent. Six Bahian NGOs offered musical education as a means to “raise self-esteem” of poor black youths and as training for job opportunities in the local employment market. One group worked for HIV / AIDS prevention. Although some NGOs favored service provision over advocacy, almost all groups declared that they were advocating for social justice, citizenship, and against exclusion.

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Conclusion: The Failed Promise

The great majority of NGOs I observed did not follow a democratic praxis and they therefore did not constitute democratic or counterhegemonic spaces within Bahian society. Only one group constituted something even remotely similar to an “ideal speech situation.” Instead of being independent from the structural and normalized inequalities that characterize the broader society, these organizations mimic the society in which they are embedded in the ways they reproduce inclusion and exclusion. Paternalism was the order of the day among most groups of my sample. Instead of providing forums where the historically marginalized can find a voice, these groups consolidate inequality in that they provided spaces for historically included groups to make decisions for the excluded, thus undermining the very basis of democracy, namely individual moral autonomy. Doing so, the great majority of NGOs I analyzed perpetuated the exclusion of some and further consolidated the inclusion of others. Applying Sen’s framework it becomes clear that the NGOs of my sample did not provide for spaces where all citizens could influence equally those collective decisions that affected them. Because NGOs represent the vanguard of contemporary Brazilian civil society, these findings shed a critical light on the ability of Brazilian civil society in general to counteract the prevailing mechanisms that perpetuate inclusion and exclusion in Brazilian society. My findings therefore demonstrate that the domestication practiced in Brazilian private spheres spills over to the public realm and limits civil society’s potential. If NGOs do not invest their participants with civil rights and rather reproduce notions of associating civil rights with belonging to the historically included segments of society, then Brazilian society loses one of the most central spaces where inequality and its consequences on delimitating citizenship could be successfully counteracted and democracy loses its most important space for its legitimation – a democratic public sphere. The Bahian civil society organizations I analyzed, instead of functioning as spaces for liberation, reproduced a moral framework inherited from the colonial past, namely that decisions must be made for all of those not enlightened enough to take them for themselves. This framework not only reproduced paternalism at its worst, it also transforms civil society into a space dominated by those who think of themselves as more enlightened and “civilized.” Given the highly racialized character of exclusion in Brazil, most civil society

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organizations I analyzed thus transformed their clients into childlike “barbarians,” who do not know what is best for themselves and left to themselves, will make “wrong” choices. Not surprisingly, the running joke among included NGO activists is about the supposed “stupidity” of the excluded – evidenced, so goes the tale, by the fact that the excluded would rather buy a new TV instead of something deemed more relevant by the included. NGOs, although private, claim to act in the public interest. As such, they function as important mediators between the private and the public realms of society. Civil society organizations bear the potential to democratize the public sphere, but as my analysis demonstrates, in most cases, they forsake this potential. Instead they are more likely to further advance the disjunction of Brazilian society into included and excluded groups. The process of dividing Brazilian society into two opposing parts thus comes close to full cycle. It is socialized into people’s minds in households and schools and through civil society, exclusionary practices are carried over to the public sphere. To close this cycle, the following two chapters will focus on the public realm itself. Chapter seven analyses participation in local politics and policy-making, and chapter eight focuses on the continued importance of paternalism and clientelism among the Brazilian “political class.” 1

Holston 2008:15. Avritzer 2002:5. 3 Although it is not entirely clear what qualifies as an “NGO” and what differentiates NGOs from other, apparently similar, groups of civil society, the “structural-operational definition” used by Salamon and Anheier (1996) in order to define the nonprofit sector worldwide, provides a first guiding line. These authors rely on Karl Deutsch's criteria of economy, significance, and explanatory or predictive powers for the selection of the best definition. According to the structural-operational definition, NGOs fall into a sector that is 1. Organized, i.e. institutionalized to some extent; 2. Private, i.e. institutionally separate from government; 3. Non-profit distributing, i.e. they do not return any profits generated to their owners or directors; 4. Selfgoverning, i.e. capable of controlling their own activities; 5. Voluntary, i.e. involving some meaningful degree of voluntary participation, either in the actual conduct of the agency's activities or in the management of its affairs. 4 Alexander Wendt (1999) points out that it is not individuals, but collectives, that constitute “social kinds,” and he also points to the fact that individually held ideas can develop into collective ideas that then constitute a reality, which reflects back on the constituting individuals. If the human condition is such that people have to learn and be socialized into societal structures, then individual learning and socialization are the necessary, 2

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although not sufficient, starting points for change. Anthony Giddens (1986) has called this process “structuration.” 5 By Caldeira 2000, Pinheiro 1997, Hanchard 1999, and others. 6 E.g. Caldeira (2000) and Pinheiro (1997). 7 In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx (1846) had accused Feuerbach of not grasping the significance of “practical-critical” activity. In thesis three he explains that “circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself.” Furthermore, “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally only understood as revolutionary practice [revolutionäre Praxis, in the German original]. 8 Laclau and Mouffe 1985:176. 9 Laclau and Mouffe 1985:178. 10 Ibid. 11 E.g. Linz and Stepan 1996: 7. 12 His Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1989) has been evaluated as an effort to carry on the older project of the Enlightenment. Habermas’ starting assessment of reality is taken from Max Weber (1922). Weber followed the older Enlightenment tradition of German idealism (Kant), arguing that the process of development consists of the expansion of reason and the gradual rationalization of the world. Compared to the traditional positive assessment of this continuous movement, Weber showed that modernity fosters only one kind of rationality – “Zweckrationalitaet”, a purposive, calculating kind of rationality (later called “instrumental rationality” by Max Horkheimer). As a result, in Weber’s opinion, the spread of instrumental rationality has not led to more justice, based on a more reasonable organization of society, but rather it has eroded the unifying moral grounds that were once grounded in a divine order. He labeled this trend the “disenchantment of the world.” Weber thought that the rationalization of societies has not brought more freedom and justice, but instead has led western societies into a new form of domination, executed by an impersonal, extremely rationally organized, bureaucracy. For Weber, the future is an inevitable “iron cage.” Habermas criticizes Weber’s pessimism by elaborating on the possibility of an ongoing rationalization which escapes the iron cage. For him, different kinds of rationalization coexist, depending on the inner logics of the societal subsystems where they occur. Building on Hegel’s (2000) distinction of civil society, state, and economy and Talcott Parsons’ systems theory (1968) he argues that the state and the economy foster the spread of instrumental rationality, but that civil society has the potential to host free and uncoerced “communicative action.” He justifies this possibility using the works of Durkheim (1953) and George Herbert Mead (1974). From Durkheim he takes the concept of “collective consciousness,” expressed through different kinds of solidarities. Using Mead, he argues that modernity has led to a “linguistification” of the sacred roots of morality. In the Theory of Communicative Action he agrees with Durkheim that rationalization has eroded the sacred bases of morality. Using Mead’s work on identity formation, he argues that the only possible substitute for a divine grounding of moral standards is to democratically and discursively agree on a

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binding morality, based on a dialogue of all those potentially affected by any decision (the so-called “ideal speech situation”). Habermas argues that this is possible, as language per se is based on understanding each other. 13 Habermas 1989, Vol. II: 124. 14 Habermas 1998b: 147. Habermas wrote an article about Arendt’s concept of power, entitled “Hannah Arendt: On the concept of power,” in: Habermas 1985: Philosophical-Political Profiles, Cambridge. He uses several of her writings (The Human Condition, On Revolution, and On Violence) to demonstrate her concept of power, called “communicative power.” 15 Arendt, 1970. 16 I was assisted by Barbara Souza who collected data for me.

7 The Limits to Citizen Participation If Brazil’s broader society is structurally unequal and reproduces this inequality in daily interactions, and if Brazilians are socialized into perceiving the world and the people around them as separated into two distinct categories, namely included and excluded, then it comes as no big surprise that civil society organizations reproduce this distinction. After all, even if one is active in voluntary associations, it is difficult to escape the widely accepted common sense and perceptions of the world, and thinking about the world that is structured and limited by available frameworks of reference. As stressed before, this common sense does not imply that the excluded readily accept their lot. To the contrary, the degree of daily violence that characterizes Brazilian life testifies to the constant need to uphold and defend such a skewed and unfair reality. In addition, the routinization of exclusionary practices that at the same time serve the purpose of upholding and actively defending the privileges of the historically included affect the included more than the excluded. Because the excluded frequently work in the homes of the included as their servants and maids, they are very familiar with even the most intimate details of their lives, as we have seen in chapter five. The included, on the other hand, know very little about the lifeworlds of the excluded, as their lives are constantly rendered invisible by their very exclusion. The excluded live in neighborhoods unknown to the included and their voices are deemed unworthy of consideration, as we have seen in the previous chapter. The excluded, however, constantly press for change and seek to migrate into the camp of the included, which is why conspicuous consumption plays such an important role in upward mobility. By mimicking the lifestyle of the included, the excluded seek to “pass.” The strategies to achieve upward mobility are, however, not limited to individual action. Collective action by the excluded is one of the main tools available to the excluded to contest the powerconstellations of Brazilian society and its politics, even more so after the re-establishment of formal democracy in 1985, provided the excluded with political opportunities to act in concerted ways. Yet, as in the situation in education already discussed, the gradual advances of the hitherto excluded threaten to erode the competitive advantage 105

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of included groups on different, but typically scarce, markets. Included groups thus seek to fend off the advances of the excluded. We have already seen how this defense affects democratic consolidation in the areas of education and within civil society, but nowhere is this strategy so far-reaching as in politics. To study state-society relations, Migdal, Kohli, and Shue (1994) suggest that states must be disaggregated and attention paid to the concrete interactions between state agents and local communities. Migdal, in his follow-up book (2001), reiterates that in order to study state-society interactions and related issues of governance, the state “must be stripped of its myths of unity and omnipotence.”1 This can only be achieved by carrying out qualitative research at the local level. Furthermore, I contend that social forces and states depend on their specific historical and institutional structures. An accurate understanding of democratic governance requires a description and analysis of the specifics of state-society interaction, not some broad general assessments of state and society roles. Accordingly, the places where societies meet and interact with state agents allow for extremely relevant observations about the workings of democracy. By zooming in on those places, we can observe and analyze the workings of power, domination, and the ways rulers, be they elected representatives or appointed state officials, relate to the ruled. In this chapter, the book focuses a microscope on Brazilian politics. Broad assessments of Brazilian politics will not suffice to provide the insight we desire into exactly how the struggle over privilege and access affects Brazilian society and thus its democracy. In order to allow for an understanding of the causes and mechanisms at work, we need to focus on the concrete interactions and struggles over democracy and participation in politics as they occur in daily life. To achieve this goal this chapter presents another case study, this time about the efforts of excluded citizens to reach, penetrate, and influence the state apparatus and thus influence politics and policymaking. Salvador, Bahia will serve, again, as a case, for the same reasons already mentioned above. Since 1996, the Brazilian education law requires that communities actively participate in the democratic management of public schools. The participation of communities in public school management provides a micro-site where state-society interaction can be observed and analyzed. During my field research in 2001, 2003, and 2005 I researched six Bahian public schools, paying special attention to the involvement of parents and communities in school management.2 The most recent Bahian school reform, initi-

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ated in 1999, could already count on existing “community schools” – private schools created and maintained by neighborhood associations. I included two such community schools into my sample in order to learn if the state-led school reform took advantage of the already existing community participation in community schools. In 2005 and 2006, I researched two additional sites of state-society interaction, namely the state-led program of participatory urban planning (PDDU) and the newly implanted “participatory budgeting” initiated in Salvador in January of 2005. Participation in Brazilian Politics

As we have already seen, civil society organizations, in the eyes of many scholars, represent the bridging element that links the private sphere to the public realm and to the political system. In civil society organizations, private citizens, through the medium of communicative action, connect to the political system. After all, it is in the public sphere that democracy can renew its legitimacy and it is there that concerned citizens can get together in order to monitor governmental activity. As stressed by such authors as Abers (2000), Baiocchi (2005), and Avritzer (2002), public participation in local governance presents one of the most important ways in which engaged citizens can hold governments accountable and change clientelistic governmental practices. The widely discussed case of Participatory Budgeting in the city of Porto Alegre has become the prime example of this possibility. According to Abers, in Porto Alegre, “Participatory Budget directly targeted clientelism by transforming the way city revenues were distributed.”3 But although much is claimed about the positive influence of participatory publics in Porto Alegre, most authors rely on very few empirical examples to uphold their claims. Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, are the two empirical examples upon which most claims about democratic change rest. My own research on public participation in the city of Salvador cannot invalidate the claims made by such authors as Abers, Avritzer, and Baiocchi, but the failed attempts to achieve public participation in local governance I found in Salvador cast some doubts on how generalizable the experiences of Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte are. My case study of public participation in Salvador also allows us to qualify some of the sweeping assessments about democratic public spheres made by these authors and it points

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to some of the conditionalities of successful citizen participation in local politics. This chapter demonstrates that the Brazilian public sphere is as divided as its general society. The inequalities and racialized social hierarchies that so profoundly mark its society equally structure its pubic sphere. As a result, the Brazilian public sphere often fails to function as a source for democratic consolidation. Instead, the public sphere functions as yet another societal place where inequalities and the division between included and excluded groups is reproduced. This conclusion was reached after conducting research on three sites of civic participation in Salvador, Bahia, namely community involvement in democratic school management, participatory urban planning, and participatory budgeting. 4 Brazil: The Ideal Type of Participatory Democracy?

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, many analysts of Latin America’s re-democratization in general, and of Brazil’s transition in particular, believed that civil society had gained significant strength all over Latin America, and especially in Brazil, being the main force behind successful re-democratization.5 Alvarez and Escobar (1992) even heralded the arrival of a new model of Latin-American democracy, characterized by direct participation of individuals and secondary groups. For these Latin American authors, a participative model of democracy, deeper and qualitatively different from both liberal democratic models and from party-state Marxist socialism, was surging in Latin America, and the global South was taking a head start in innovative social praxis. Inspired by European theorists such as Alberto Melucci, culture and identity were declared the new battlefields for citizenship, participation, and “the right to have rights.”6 According to some, a Latin American model of democracy was arising – “better” than anything the old European models had to offer. Perhaps the strongest cases for such an optimistic assessment of the power of Brazilian civil society were made by Rebecca Abers (2000) and Gianpaolo Baiocchi (2003), who both analyzed the participatory budgeting process of the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, and by Leonardo Avritzer (2002),7 who studied Brazilian neighborhood associations in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Belo Horizonte. Both authors provide empirical evidence for the power of civil society to effectively impact and change local and state branches of government. In particular, the case

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of Porto Alegre seems to demonstrate that local civil society is able to change municipal politics and to initiate democratizing change from below. The Brazilian Workers Party (PT) was able to gain control of the municipality of Porto Alegre in 1989.8 Once in power, the PT enacted a process of “participatory budgeting” that invited already existing neighborhood associations into a complex process of citywide collective decision-making that further strengthened local civil society, the Workers Party, and the connection between the two. Brazil, it seems, provides a showcase not only for strong civil society, but also for state-society synergy. The resulting model of participatory democracy seems especially responsive to the needs the poorest sectors of society, providing for mechanisms to counterbalance their historical marginalization from the public sphere. Bahian Counterfactuals

The state of Bahia, located in the poor, predominantly black Northeast of the country, provides an opportunity to gain some more insight into the dynamics of state - society relations in Brazil. In Bahia, every branch of the state has been, almost without interruption, dominated by traditional political elites since 1985.9 In November of 2004, an opposition candidate of the Democratic Worker’s Party (PDT) was elected mayor of the state capital, Salvador, winning 74.69 percent of votes. Although political power has therefore changed in Salvador, at the time of my research the state was still controlled by traditional forces (Paulo Souto, of the former Liberal Front Party (PFL), which represented the legacy of the military-backed ARENA Party and now has changed its name to “Democratic Party” - DEM), and politics were still heavily influenced by the most influential Bahian strongman and neocacique of Bahian affairs, senator Antônio Carlos Magalhães.10 Magalhães is the head of a powerful political dynasty, whose power is based on his long political career rooted in the military regime and his ownership of the biggest Bahian TV channel “TV Bahia,” (the Bahian branch of “TV Globo”) and one of Salvador’s biggest Newspapers (Correio da Bahia).11 Senator Magalhães’ political ways came to represent an ideal-type of political behavior and thus entered the repertoire of political analysts – academic and popular – in the form of “Carlismo,” a term that refers to extreme forms of personalism and an extreme form of paternalistic clientelism.

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Carlismo, however, is not merely an element of traditional Brazil that survives only in those regions where modernization has not yet transformed society; rather as demonstrated by Leonardo Avritzer (2002), the logic of clientelism is an integral part of Brazilian modernization and indeed a national phenomenon. The Bahian political scientist Paulo Dantas Neto (2006) demonstrates in his book on the political career of senator Magalhães that his rise to power was indeed articulated on the national, not the regional, level. Giovanna Veloso (2006), in turn, describes the clientelistic practices she observed among federal legislators of all Brazilian regions, states, and political parties. Far from exceptional, the way politics is done in the state of Bahia represents an extreme case of the general modus operandi of Brazilian politics. The apparently endless chain of political scandals and the steady unveiling of clientelistic and paternalistic practices provide further evidence of this fact. Understanding Bahia thus helps one understand Brazil and other countries constructed upon similar premises. Citizen Participation in Democratic School Management

Social theorists working on education and schooling from John Dewey to Amy Gutmann have stressed the interdependency of democratization and education. Democracies rely on schools to reproduce the core values of democratic citizenship. Democracy cannot be taught in authoritarian ways, which is why schools have to be democratic in order to achieve this goal. The second aspect implied in this relationship is that school governance has to be democratic not only for students to learn democracy by practicing it, but also to guarantee that disadvantaged groups get their fair share of resources and high-quality training. Fantini, Gittell, and Magat (1970)12 have pointed out the rationale behind this reasoning when describing community schools. Community schools should “[serve] the community as a center for a variety of educational, cultural, recreational, and local social-development activity, for youngsters and adults. Ideally, such a school also uses the community as a laboratory for learning and organizes the curriculum around the processes and problems of living.” The purpose of a community school is to be a place to “practice and promote democracy in all human relationships by encouraging citizens, parents, teachers, pupils, and administrators to work together in the formulation of policy.” Community schools should also “remain open day and night and provide a center to which adults can come for advice and

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training.”13 These authors use the term “community control” to refer to the accountability schools should have to the community in general and to parents in particular. Article three of the Brazilian education law (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases, 1996) states in paragraph VIII that public education be democratic and in Article 12 (VI) it specifies that schools have to cooperate with families and communities, creating processes of integrating society with schools [criando processos de integração da sociedade com a escola]. Article 14 further specifies that democratic school management should involve the participation of school- and local communities through councils and similar institutions.14 But by passing a law, the Brazilian state is not automatically creating social reality. In my research, I was interested in determining if a law that originated at the federal level became a reality at the local, i.e. the state and the municipality levels. In order to assess this question, I expanded my research on schools, described in Chapter Four, and paid close attention to community and parent involvement in school management in the schools I described above. I used participant observation and interviewed leaders and participants of neighborhood associations about the role of communities and local associations in the management of the schools in their neighborhoods. In none of the public schools of my sample had community and parental involvement through direct participation or through councils translated into practice. The school council meetings I was able to visit all followed a similar pattern. Parents of very low educational levels (the average Bahian adult has around 4 years of education, and the parents in my sample, residents of underprivileged neighborhoods, likely had less) almost never influenced decisionmaking. Instead, principals and teachers exercised very strong authority and used elaborate language codes, which clearly distanced them from parents. During my participation, I observed that decisionmaking always followed the recommendation of the principals and parents acted not as active deliberators, but had secondary roles. In one school, the principal had effectively selected a parent whom she judged most suited for participation. Historically, parent participation in public schools had not resulted from parental pressure for more involvement, but was introduced as a “new requirement” of the education reform of 1996 and thus created a situation where parents, communities, and schools looked for ways how to best respond to this legal requirement. Conforming to legal frameworks was especially important for

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schools, as it opened the door for special privileges and rewards, because “successful” schools were given more financial and administrative autonomy by the responsible city and state administrators. In this way, social realty had to find a way to conform to a legal norm and successful adherence was rewarded by the state, while reluctance to conform to the new law was sanctioned, thus creating a scheme of institutionalized tutelage. The general pattern I detected was that parents did not have enough time and information to be able to participate effectively in school management and school management remained a hollow exercise, done mostly to satisfy the new legal framework. Further inquiry revealed that in those neighborhoods where neighborhood associations were already present and active, they had pressed for participation in the management of local public schools, but had become frustrated because public schools offered no institutionalized ways to allow for their participation. As one neighborhood association leader explained: “We want to participate in school management, but there is just no way how to do it.”15 In sum, although in some cases neighborhood associations were present and active, it was clear to neither principals nor neighborhood association leaders how such cooperation should work in practice. After observing the same pattern in different neighborhoods, I came to the conclusion that popular participation, although required by law, is not encouraged in practice by state and municipal administrations. The same law that requires “community participation” also provides only one institutionalized way to achieve this goal, namely the participation of one parent representative on the local school council.16 A former municipal secretary of education hints at the trade-off that arose when all school participation was reduced to one parent, represented in the school council: “The question is if a father, who is a member of the school council, represents all the parents or if he is just an active parent. The model of representation through a council can distance the community, as other parents delegate their powers to one representative and retreat from school.”17 My observations also led me to conclude that effective parental participation requires access to information as its basis. In the cases I observed, asymmetric distribution and access to information translated into an equally asymmetric distribution of power and authority. Parent representatives were perceived as outsiders to the system and stood in a difficult position in a council that was dominated by paid school personnel (principal, staff representative,

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and teacher representative). The effective exercise of decisionmaking power was limited for both the parent representative and the student representative by the reluctance of the rest of the group to recognize their authority. They were perceived as being uninformed on account of their lack of access to information (parent representative) or their youth (student representative). By making democratic school management a legal requirement without providing for the necessary structural elements on which such management must rely, Bahian education administrators showed very little substantive commitment to democratic school management. Under such circumstances, it came as no surprise that the lone parent representative in public school councils functioned as little more than a token. But the supposed cooperation among schools and communities was further complicated by very deep-seeded perceptions of poor neighborhoods as “bad” and dangerous places, from which schools need to seek distance. Instead of bringing schools closer to parents and communities, the school administration of most public schools I visited made every effort to distance themselves from the “bad neighborhoods” that surrounded them. Doing so, a false distinction was created and sustained between “bad” neighborhoods and the “good” schools that needed protection from those neighborhoods. Fencing and higher investments in security were the common measures taken against parents and communities. Students, who lived in these neighborhoods, were affected by this strategy of symbolic and effective distancing, as they were easily stigmatized and transformed into suspicious and potentially dangerous individuals. One visit to an urban state school, already referenced in Chapter Four, was again especially telling. When asked how the school interacted with the neighborhood, the principal explained that “they were building higher walls.” This school, paralleling most other public schools of the sample, sought no interaction with the neighborhood and demonstrated no comprehension of local issues or concerns. It is worth noting that this urban neighborhood had no leisure or cultural facilities at all, no playgrounds and no parks. The only such facilities in the neighborhood belonged to the school and they were fenced off. Furthermore, the principal’s speech and attitude clearly located the causes for school failure with the students and the surrounding community. Although race was never mentioned, it also became evident that the very common reference to the “socio-economic

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background” of some students was in fact a racialized concept, as all students and residents of the neighborhood were black. The principal engaged in strong symbolical distancing from this reality. When asked if she lived in the neighborhood, she vehemently asserted that she lived “in a good neighborhood” far away from this one. Her attire and hairstyle further contributed to this symbolic distancing. Her new car was parked within the school grounds like a reminder of her superior social position. Although most interviewed principals and teachers thus blamed the students, their parents, and their communities for failing schools, the evidence I collected during my field research points to another interpretation of the prevalent causes of school failure. Against the prevalent accusations so readily voiced by teachers and principles, parents and students instead seemed highly motivated to learn. The high repetition rates alone indicated high motivations to learn and go to school, as it takes high motivation to insist on coming back to schools that consistently fail to teach and promote students. One educator explained this phenomenon: Parents identify school as being extremely important for their children. It’s strategic, they can’t afford to not attend school, and this is so obvious because of the high rates children enter and leave school. If you have a kid that repeats the first grade eight times, it’s because it is very important to him or her. No one repeats anything for eight times without thinking that it is very important. (…) Parents put a lot of responsibility on schools, to the point where they go to schools and ask: “What do you think I should do with my kid? My son is taking drugs, what should I do with him?” The school is an important reference for parents.18

These motivations and expectations of parents and students were not adequately addressed by any of the public schools I researched. Instead, the prevailing poverty of students and parents was used as an excuse for failing schools. Parents saw schools as points of departure to a better life for their children, but most public schools distanced themselves from parents and their concerns and hopes. In such a way student expectations were not met and dreams were systematically frustrated. This frustration found very strong and clear expression and voice. I interpreted the very common spraying of graffiti on walls, the destruction of chairs, and the damaging of iron fences as loud cries for help and attention. But most schools chose to ignore these voices.

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The creation of distance from students, parents, and communities that I found so consistent in most Bahian public schools translated into a strategy of blaming students and their parents for school failure. This strategy had influenced Bahian school policies significantly. It provided the central rationale for not changing the educational system, but to rather supplement it with special skilltraining programs, aimed at improving the cognitive skills of supposedly “problematic” students with “difficult backgrounds,” as already explained in Chapter Four. Overall, I found very consistent strategies, especially voiced by principals, to block surrounding communities out of “their” schools. The discursive strategy typically used to justify such distancing was one of projecting danger and threat onto the surrounding neighborhoods. To most interviewed community members, schools represented “the state” and were not perceived as a part or extension of the community. I did not detect any sense of ownership or coresponsibility of school governance among community members. The limited scope of community and parental involvement I found in Bahian public schools points to the fact that effective community control was not a priority goal for the Bahian State and its municipal branch. It was rather a federal requirement and a condition for a significant World Bank loan. No real commitment seemed to motivate Bahian state elites to shift power and money to communities and to let them effectively participate in school management. State administrators remained suspicious of too much participation, justifying their position commonly by making reference to the “lack of capacity” among the people to participate and the “lack of culture” to participate. The wide gap that separates the Bahian state and its agencies from its predominantly poor and black population becomes even more evident when analyzing Bahian neighborhood associations and the “community schools” that some of them had created. Community Schools

Community schools are defined as small schools growing out of popular movements, situated in poor neighborhoods. Independent neighborhood associations created the first documented Brazilian community schools in the 1940s. They sprang out of a National Education Campaign and were designed to help poor children into middle schools (LaBelle and Verhine 1981). During the 1970s, the Brazilian popular movement for education grew and by the end of

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the decade, the state began to recognize the movement. Since then, community schools have been recognized by the state and are eligible for financial support, although to a more limited degree than state schools. Most scholars agree that the first community schools in the urban Northeast appeared in the 1970s, in response to concrete necessity and an experience of neglect and exclusion. In 2002, about fifty community schools were active in the city of Salvador. Community schools became vehicles of the popular struggle for education and social justice, creating educational opportunities for a population that is often left unattended by the state (Campos 1982, 1985 and 1992; Gohn 1985, 1991; Lazarotto 1990; Rosa 1995; Serpa 1990; and Sposito 1983, 1984 and 1993). Because of their historical association to protest movements, community schools have generally been reluctant to cooperate too closely with the state, as they fear state interference and co-optation. I focused my research on two groups that were located in an area known as “Alagados,” the bay area on the outskirts of the city of Salvador, where people have constructed houses over the water, standing on wooden poles and interconnected with improvised wooden bridges. Both neighborhood associations, the “Luisa Mahin Community School” and the “First of May Neighborhood Association” worked almost entirely with volunteers. Although the associations also employed schoolteachers and health professionals, their salaries ranged well below the salaries of public school teachers, 19 and, when interviewed, most employed participants in associations stressed the voluntary character of their work. My knowledge of the literature on civil society and participatory democracy in Brazil led me to expect to find community schools exercising a positive influence on the education reform underway, especially in terms of democratic school management. Both associations were already in place before this latest reform started and state and municipal administrations could count on already existing structures of community and parental participation. If the state was interested in facilitating popular participation, it would find in community schools the perfect partners, given that they already have a high degree of organization. To my surprise, the opposite was the case. Both neighborhood associations of my sample had opted out of participating in any stateled efforts of reform. Most interviewed members explained that they preferred to remain in opposition to the state. To them, a relationship with the state was a zero-sum game and interacting with the state could only lead to a loss of independence; most of the activists I

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interviewed explained that their opposition to the government was categorical and that they resented state interference, perceiving it as a threat to their autonomy. Some activists also said that they disagreed with state policies. One community schoolteacher’s statement is typical: “Look, I am in opposition. I always fight defending the position of the opposition.” 20 Upon further inquiry, I found that this suspicion had a history, going back to the 1980s, when then-president José Sarney (1985 to 1989), a member of the traditional Brazilian political elite, used neighborhood associations to distribute milk and food baskets. The politics of co-optation, control, and coercion towards popular movements of President Sarney started on the federal level. An interviewee explained: The community movement in all Brazil confronted a severe crisis after the government of President Sarney, because Sarney instituted a social program that consisted of distributing milk, right? And food baskets. And the government of Sarney chose the neighborhood associations to distribute the milk and the food baskets. So what happened? The associations that were created to advocate and struggle for the improvement of their neighborhood relegated their advocacy to a second level, because the need of the communities was so great that they had to go for the immediate goals.21

As a result of the perpetuation of semi-authoritarian politics at the state and municipal level before 2005, a politics of co-optation had survived, effectively blocking fruitful state-society interaction. As a result, I found that Bahian neighborhood associations are left with only two options, namely to remain in opposition to the state, which condemned them to be bypassed by state and municipal programs and financial transfers; or to cooperate, which curtailed their political independence. The price those associations paid for maintaining their autonomy was high. Community schoolteachers were on average even less qualified and more underpaid than the publicly employed schoolteachers in municipal and state schools. Because of the private character of community schools, community schoolteachers were also excluded from any work-related social security programs, such as health care or retirement insurance. My research on community schools thus confirms my findings about parental and community participation in public schools. Statesociety cooperation remained difficult even though both sides schools and communities - would gain from cooperating. Instead of cooperating, the Bahian state and its representatives made great

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efforts to distance themselves from its poor, black majority and a cynical suspicion between these two actors characterized their relationship. I found further evidence for this conclusion through my participant observation of the incipient processes of participatory budgeting and participatory urban planning, initiated by the new mayor of Salvador in January of 2005. Participative Urban Planning

Since 1988, federal law demands that each city of a certain magnitude elaborate a plan of urban development (Plano Diretor de Desenvolvimento Urbano, commonly known as PDDU) with the active participation of the local citizenry. According to this law, states and the municipalities have to provide mechanisms that ensure adequate access to information and promote public hearings to jointly elaborate this plan with the general public. In the case of Salvador, this plan was developed in 2002 without any citizen participation, leading to protests from several organized sectors of civil society. In his 2004 campaign, future mayor João Henrique promised to provide for deliberative spaces where the general public could receive information about this plan and voice their opinions. I attended two such meetings and carried out several interviews with participants. The state agency responsible for executing this plan organized public meetings, inviting citizens of each of the 18 sub-regions into which the city of Salvador is divided to join in an evening of information about the urbanization plan of their sub-region, as well as to get feedback from citizens and representatives of associations. On July 11th 2005, such a meeting was held for the sub-region of “Itapagipe,” the lower part of Salvador, an area marked by a traditional lower middle class and several very poor neighborhoods that lack almost any basic infrastructure. The sub region has a total population of about 160,000 inhabitants. At the meeting, 75 people appeared, of which about half represented local civil society organizations. The meeting lasted 2.5 hours, and the first two hours were spent by listening to the very technical presentation of the engineer who represented the state agency. After the presentation ended, the podium was opened up for questions and comments and a very vivid discussion followed, in which local residents and representatives

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from neighborhood associations voiced their concerns and made suggestions. However, at the end of the meeting it remained unclear if and how these recommendations would be taken into consideration and no mechanisms were mentioned that would enforce any accountability on this process. Instead, the participants I interviewed after the meeting had little conviction that their voices would indeed be heard. The fact that the state agency was represented by an engineer who focused in his talk on the technical necessities for the region, such as plans to build new roads and the need to expand the sewage network, created a sense that the plan itself was a necessity and left very little room for effective participation in defining priorities and even less in setting an agenda. The citizen participation in Salvador’s urban planning I was able to witness appeared to be an improvised token action that occurred after the main decisions had been already made by the state in 2002. Ultimately, no effective power was shifted over to citizens and their participation was a formality that resulted from election promises made by the new mayor elect. There was no institutional space where citizen participation could possibly have an impact, and after carrying out all the required public meetings, it remained unclear how popular participation would impact the process of urban planning. Parallel to the process of “participatory” urban planning, some local communities had elaborated a “plan of local development,” following an initiative of the United Nations Program for Development (UNDP). In 2006, I was able to attend one such meeting, where local activists and representatives of neighborhood associations met for two consecutive days to discuss their priorities for urban development. If the Bahian state had any interest in interacting with communities, this forum would have provided an ideal site for state-society interaction. But similar to my findings on community schools, I found no interaction whatsoever between the forum for local development and Bahian state agencies responsible for carrying out participatory urban planning. Participatory Budgeting

A last site to observe state-society interaction in the state of Bahia is provided by the process of participatory budgeting, initiated in January 2005. To gain some insight into the process of participatory budgeting in Salvador, I interviewed three delegates who had been

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elected by the population to represent their region at the assembly of delegates. One of the interviewed delegates was also elected into the position of “advisor” (conselheiro), the highest position a delegate can hold. In August of 2006, I was also able to interview the municipal secretary for the Promotion and Articulation of Citizenship (Secretaria Municipal de Articulação e Promoção da Cidadania).22 Participative budgeting in Salvador was initiated in 2005, inspired by the widely discussed example of Porto Alegre. In Salvador, neighborhood associations elected 436 delegates for the entire city of Salvador; each region had a number of delegates based on its population, and a total of 3 advisors, elected by the assembly of delegates. Delegates discussed, over the course of several meetings, the developmental priorities in three thematic areas: education, sanitation and environment, and infra-structure. The subregion of Itapagipe, where I carried out my research, home to 160,000, mostly poor, inhabitants, had a total of twenty-six delegates, each one elected in public assemblies. Itapagipe’s many neighborhood associations had created an umbrella organization in 1998 called CAAMPI – Comissão de Articulação e Mobilização dos Moradores da Península de Itapagipe – originally composed of 20 neighborhood associations. In July 2005, the number of participating associations had grown to 43. CAAMPI, in the words of one neighborhood association president, allowed the local residents to gain more visibility and power vis-à-vis the state and to represent the interests of that subregion in a stronger and more coherent fashion. In 2005 and 2006, I attended several CAAMPI meetings as a participant observer, interviewing several community leaders and taking field notes. Similar to the approach in Porto Alegre, participatory budgeting in Salvador involves the leaders of already existing neighborhood associations, but whereas in Porto Alegre participatory budgeting bypasses the city legislators, in Salvador decisions made by the representatives of neighborhood associations are merely consultative and have to be approved by the legislator. It remains to be seen how the 41 elected city legislators, representing 15 different parties, will receive the recommendations of the budgeting delegates and what weight the decisions of the budgetary delegates will ultimately have. A delegate that was also elected advisor, in an August 19, 2006 interview, explained: “In the first phase, we had thematic discussions about necessities: health, infrastructure, education, and transportation. In the second phase, we met and defined our

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priorities. Next, each sub-region handed over those priorities to the municipality. During the third phase, which is now, those priorities should be implemented.” Although by August 2006 at least some priorities should have been implemented, the delegate explained that the municipality had not even started its execution. During the interview with one of the highest ranking citizen representatives in this process of participatory budgeting, it also became clear that he did not know how much money could effectively be allocated to the different priorities that the participatory budgeting process had produced. Interviewing the municipal secretary responsible for guiding this process, I learned that in effect the municipal budget was already closed and no money was left for discussion. Asking the secretary about the composition of the municipal, budget, he explained that each month, the municipality spends some 150 million Reais (70 million US dollars in August of 2006). Of those, the municipality is required by law to spend 25 percent on education and 15 percent on health. In addition, according to the secretary of popular participation, Salvador spends 35 percent on personnel, 11 percent in debt payments, 12 percent on garbage collection, and 5 percent to the city council. Summing up these numbers, one reaches 103 percent - and the secretary pointed out that effectively the municipality spends more than it has every month. The resulting deficit was covered by the state administration in the previous administration, which was headed until the end of 2004 by Antonio Imbassay, of the then dominant “Carlista” Liberal Front Party, now known as Democratic Party. But since the municipality shifted to the oppositional Democratic Worker’s Party (PDT) in January 2005, the state has stopped this transfer, which, according to the municipal secretary, had amounted to, on average, 30 million Reais (14 million US dollars) per month. According to the municipal secretary of popular participation, “The difference between Porto Alegre and Salvador is that Porto Alegre has money to spend and Salvador simply doesn’t have any.”23 So, it appears that, the mayor of Salvador, following through on a campaign promise to implement a “participatory government” has implemented a process of participatory budgeting to which the population responded by organizing, electing delegates and participating in public hearings, but that the municipal budget for 2006 in no way reflected this fact. Salvador thus has a “fake” process of participatory budgeting. This way of “faking” is a phenomenon so typical of Brazilian reality that it has produced its own expression,

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namely “para inglês ver,” literally, “for the English to see,” meaning to pretend to follow a rule or law, while continuing to practice the exact opposite.24 Participatory budgeting in Salvador mobilized thousands of citizens to decide how to prioritize a budget that has already been determined and offers no possibility for change. Political Participation “Para Inglês Ver”

Bahian citizens responded very enthusiastically to the new political opportunities of direct participation that the new, nontraditional, mayor of Salvador has provided. Umbrella organizations representing several neighborhood and community associations were formed or expanded during the first months of 2005. The community leaders I interviewed, although reluctant, embraced the new opportunities and participated enthusiastically in the preliminary political activities geared towards influencing the decision-making of the Bahian municipality and state. Thousands of citizens participated in 2005 and 2006 in the meeting organized to decide budget priorities. This participation happened despite the many uncertainties around the processes of participatory budgeting and participative urban planning. At the time of my research none of the participants in the preliminary budgeting meetings was able to explain how this process would exactly work. No weighting system was in place to establish quotas for more needy neighborhoods like in Porto Alegre, nor was it evident to any of my interviewees how the state of Bahia, then still controlled by traditional elites (represented by Governor Paulo Souto, DEM) would receive and integrate the decisions made in Salvador. State adherence will be of crucial importance to the process, as about one fourth of the municipal budget comes from state transfers (484 million Reais in 2005) and several measures, especially infra-structure building, not only require massive state investment, but also fall under the co-responsibility of the state. The same was true for parental and community involvement in schooling. In fact, community involvement was so great that some communities decided to create their own schools in response to systematic state failure and neglect. Parents and communities also actively embraced public schools, seeing them as the one way out of poverty. Similar to the cases of participatory budgeting and participatory planning, the ultimate failure of substantive participation cannot be blamed on communities.

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In the cases of planning and budgeting, as well as in schooling, citizen participation remained consultative and citizen participation in Salvador had not gained real political muscle. It remained very unclear how the legislative city chamber will receive the recommendations made by the budgeting delegates, and it is not at all clear how the state of Bahia will integrate these proposals. The example of public school management and even more the case of the community schools both point to a reluctance on the part of the Bahian state to effectively shift over power and resources to communities. In all examined cases, a paternalistic attitude of the state towards its citizens prevailed, severely limiting the idea of popular sovereignty. Overall, my research on all three sites of statesociety interaction demonstrated that Bahian citizens enthusiastically embraced the new opportunities of participation given to them by the Bahian state and municipal administrations. Conclusion: The Weakness of Participatory Publics

Both Rebecca Abers (2000) and Gianpaolo Baiocchi (2005) agree that mobilizing the poor was possible in Porto Alegre, because participatory budgeting delivered tangible results in a relatively short time period. The case of Salvador points to the limits of this explanation. In Salvador, the promises of achieving improvements for themselves via participation – although very real - were overshadowed by the very pervasive power of historically included groups able and willing to defend their privileged access to the public realm, and - as a result - to the political system. In other words, participatory attempts in Salvador point to the continued force of social domination of the historically excluded. In Salvador, although the historically excluded mobilized and tried to wring power from the included and their governmental representatives, they have not succeeded. The reasons for this failure go beyond traditional explanations of changing political elites, as described by Tendler for the case of Ceará, and Abers for Porto Alegre. If my reading of Brazilian reality holds, not much will change once the state of Bahia has rid itself from its traditional political elites.25 The breakdown of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and the continued importance of extreme exclusion in the state of Ceará also allude to the fact that societal exclusion runs deeper than electoral politics. As long as conditions of scarcity prevail, and scarcity may well always prevail, given that once old necessities and wants are replaced with new, more sophisticated ones, included groups will

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fight to defend those privileges that provide them with better chances to live the kinds of lives they deem worth living. And mirroring this struggle for privilege, excluded groups are likely to continue in their struggle to “switch camp” and join the ranks of the included – as long as they encounter the political opportunities to do so. This is why we should not be surprised by the continued importance of clientelism, nepotism, and patronage in Brazilian politics even after the Brazilian Worker’s Party ascent to power at the national and so many state and municipal levels. In a system where being able to claim a status of inclusion is so consequential for one’s chances in so many different aspects of life, party-affiliation provides a far too weak predicator for structural chance. The main and most consequential cleavages that run through Brazilian society are not whether one belongs to the Worker’s Party or not. It is if one belongs to the privileged included or the stigmatized excluded. Included Brazilians, even those deemed “progressive,” have too much to lose if the historically excluded succeed in joining their ranks.

1

Migdal 2001:251. Reiter 2005 and Reiter and Dias 2005. 3 Abers 2000:3. 4 Data collection for this research was done during four exploratory research trips to Salvador, Bahia’s state capital, in 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2006. I conducted 30 semi-structured expert interviews with community leaders and neighborhood association members and I have spoken to city officials, school directors, and several local scholars who have written in this field. In addition, I attended several consultative forum meetings and neighborhood association meetings as an observing participant. Significant parts of this research were carried out jointly with Rita de Cassia Dias and supported by the Howard Samuels Center and the Graduate Center, CUNY, in New York. I am grateful for the generous support I have received from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. 5 E.g. Pablo Escobar and Sonia Alvarez 1992: The Making of Social Movements in Latin America, New York: Oxford University Press, and Sonia Alvarez, Evelyn Dagnino, and Pablo Escobar 1998: Cultures of Politics. Politics of Culture, Boulder: Westview. 6 Evelyn Dagnino 1998: 48, in: Culture of Politics. Politics of Culture, op. cit. 7 Democracy and the Public Space in Latin America, New Haven: Princeton University Press. 8 Abers 2000: 34. 9 With the exception of the oppositional city government of Lidice da Matta. 2

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10

In the 2006 election, this reign was broken with the victory of Jaques Wagner, PT. It remains to be analyzed what consequences this change of political power at the state level will produce in the city of Salvador. 11 Although Antônio Carlos Magalhães died in June of 2007, his “Carlismo” ways have taken deep root in Bahia, as demonstrated e.g. by the Bahian political scientist Paulo Dantas Neto, 2006. 12 Fantini, Mario, Mariliyn Gittell, and Richard Magat. 1970. Community Control and the Urban Schools. New York: Praeger Publishers. 13 Clark in Fantini, Gittell, and Magat 1970: xi. 14 Os sistemas de ensino definirão as normas da gestão democrática do ensino público na educação básica, de acordo com as suas peculiaridades e conforme os seguintes princípios: I - participação dos profissionais da educação na elaboração do projeto pedagógico da escola; II - participação das comunidades escolar e local em conselhos escolares ou equivalentes. 15 Interview conducted with Vera Lazarrotto, director of the neighborhood association “Primeiro de Maio,” on 10/3/01. 16 School councils are composed of one parent representative, one student representative, one staff representative, one teacher representative, and the school administrators. 17 Interview with Salete Silva, Ex-municipal secretary of education, conducted 09/06/01. 18 Interview conducted 09/06/2001. 19 During my research, full time public school teachers in the municipal and the state system earned a total of some 700 Brazilian Reais per month, (some 400 US dollars at the time), which included the so-called “benefits,” whereas fulltime teachers in the researched community schools earned on average less than 300 Brazilian Reais, doing the same job. 20 Luisa Mahin interviews, 09/24/01. 21 Interview conducted on 09/06/01. 22 Interview conducted on August 23 rd, 2006. 23 Neemias dos Reis, Interview conducted on August 23, 2006. 24 The expression “Para Inglês Ver” refers to the act of pretending and goes back to colonial times, when the British Empire pressured Brazil into ending slavery and Brazilian slave-holders formally agreed to end it. While paying lip service against slavery, they continued this practice for several more decades. A synonymic Brazilian expression labels this way of proceeding “fazer de conta,” best translated as “pretending to do something while doing the exact opposite.” 25 Which has in fact happened in 2007, with the election of a worker’s party candidate to the position of governor.

8 The Political Class and the Persistence of Paternalism This book has argued that certain groups have conquered, maintained, and defended privilege vis-à-vis popular sectors of Brazilian society.1 I have further sought to demonstrate that Brazilian society has never been sufficiently re-structured in order to break the social hierarchies that reach back to colonial times. Although much has changed in Brazil since its independence from Portugal in 1822, the basic division of its society has not. Some groups are still considered legitimate inheritors of the power invested in them by the Portuguese crown. They, and they alone, are full citizens and it is their homogeneous voice that populates the Brazilian public sphere and provides Brazilian democracy with only a partial legitimacy. Indigenous groups and blacks are still at the bottom of Brazilian social hierarchies and have not been able to achieve a status of equality vis-à-vis those fellow Brazilians that have used different methods to defend their privileges, most saliently racism, but also more subtle forms, such as elaborate language codes and distinguishing habitus. These methods all serve the same purpose: to first arbitrarily apportion and then to defend social status. Elevated social status, in turn, has served those same groups as an explanation and a justification of their privileges to the mass of excluded, and to themselves. To comprehend the full extend of this division, it is essential to understand the colonial roots of the Brazilian “political class.” To be sure, nothing like a political “class” should exist under any democratic regime, as the very idea of a class that dominates politics is adverse to the concept of democratic representation. In a democracy, everybody needs to be eligible for office and one group should not dominate political office. The “political class” is however a broadly accepted and widely applied concept in Brazil. Understanding the emergence and development of this political class will bring us one step closer to a comprehensive understanding of how democracy is negotiated among Brazilians. This chapter thus seeks to add a post-colonial component to the analysis of Brazilian reality and politics by tracing the development of what in Brazil is 127

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known as the “political class” to its Portuguese colonial origins. As background, I will first discuss some of the literature on the development of the Portuguese colonial legacy called “bacharelismo,” following the development of bacharelismo from the 19th century, when it first arose as a way of young, mostly urban, intellectuals to gain entrance into the sphere of power until then controlled by the nobility. These groups used education not as tool to analyze and change society and politics, but as a tool to gain status, setting a precedent and leading the way in institutionalizing this way of using education, as well as the institutionalization of perceiving public service not as a service to the public, but as a privilege that distinguishes its holder and sets him or her apart from ordinary society.2 This chapter seeks to demonstrate, in short, that Brazilian elected representatives and public servants perceive their job primarily not as “serving the public,” but as a way to advance their own interests and those of their family and friends. This tradition is so deeply rooted in Brazil’s history and so ingrained in the selfunderstanding of political elites that it surpasses party affiliation; Brazilian politicians and public officials all share a similar understanding of themselves and their role vis-à-vis the general public, and this shared understanding that unites them far outweighs their differences. And as pointed out earlier, it is not the narrow sphere of political institutions that explains the contemporary scenario of Brazilian politics as one of extreme and persistent corruption, clientelism, and almost endemic nepotism, but the very pervasive division of its society. State employment and public service emerged in Brazil as a way to join the ranks of the landed aristocracy and as such it never developed into a “service” to the public, or a “representation” of the masses. To the contrary, joining the ranks of politicians and high-ranking civil servants allowed one to “move up” in society, as it bestowed status onto those able to achieve this goal. Once there, “public service” remained so alien to the self understanding of one’s work and role, that the very concept of accountability never became part of the Portuguese language. Bacharelismo

Fernando Azevedo (1971) points out that the first social group to join the nobility after independence in 1822 was that of young intellectuals, those able to acquire law degrees from Coimbra, Portugal. According Azevedo, a new social class emerged in 19th

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century Brazil, a class of intellectuals that sought to join the ranks of the nobility via education. During the monarchy, education served the intellectuals not as a tool to better analyze Brazilian reality in order to adapt it to the changing historical conditions, but as a means to acquire social status. Elevated social status was the sine-qua-non condition to winning acceptance into the select group of nobles that had heretofore concentrated political power in its own hands. As Azevedo points out, the path these “bachelors,” who typically carried a law degree from the most important university of the colonial motherland, followed into the spheres of power was that of a government position.3 After the first schools of law were created in Brazil, national degrees started to gradually substitute those awarded at the University of Coimbra, although to this day, a law degree from Coimbra carries considerable prestige. The legal department of Coimbra however did not provide its students with technical skills that prepared them for the proper exercise of any legal profession.4 Instead, the education that the future Brazilian politicians received was eminently literary, putting great emphasis on the study of the classics, as well on the development of rhetoric and oratory skills. This belletristic influence on legal training crossed the Atlantic and set root in the colony, influencing not just the mindsets of future lawyers, judges, and prosecutors, but also finding its way into Brazilian legal codes. These legal codes, according to Prado Jr. (1996), were characterized by an “abundant verbiage, sometimes even containing literary dissertations.”5 The general orientation of these studies was humanistic and firmly rooted in Roman, i.e. Latin tradition and as a result, the universal and extremely generalist education received in Coimbra did not lend itself to the application of concrete problems of Brazil. Coimbra graduates normally finished their studies with the degree of “Bacharel,” i.e. a Baccalaureate that distinguished its holder and provided him with the almost noble social status that the aspirant sought. The etymology of the word “bachelor” alludes to the ennobling effects that this degree had on its carrier. “Bachelor,” in its historical development, derives from “a young knight serving under another's banner,” and its origin can be traced back to the French bas chevalier, literally ‘low knight,’ i.e., knight of a low order.”6 After independence, the first Brazilian schools of law took their academic orientation from Coimbra. Sergio Adorno (1988), in his study of the first and most important law school of independent

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Brazil, the “São Paulo Academy,” explains that from the very beginning, Brazilian schools of law were not meant to prepare lawyers and judges. According to Adorno, their aim was to form a class of political leaders.7 This is the same conclusion reached by Eduardo Campos Coelho (1999) who studied the training of medical doctors, engineers, and lawyers in Rio de Janeiro from 1822 to 1930.8 Adorno further argues that during the time of the Brazilian empire (1822-1889), the “secret” of the Brazilian schools of law was precisely that they taught almost nothing of the legal profession.9 The São Paulo Academy, during the 19th century, prepared the politician par excellence, elevating literature, art, and humanistic rhetoric to the center of legitimate politics, thereby justifying the exclusion of illiterates from suffrage.10 The conclusions reached by both Adorno and Coelho highlight the importance of bacharelismo for securing family prestige and passing it on to the next generation. Bachareis became strong allies of the conservative land-bound elites, whose main aim after independence was to preserve their own power and the status quo, in which they were dominant. Leal (1976) points out that, “these same doctors are either family, or protected, or political allies of the ‘colonels,’”11 that is the land-based elites. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (2002), in his classic study of “Brazilian Roots,” equally finds that Brazilian bachareis only apparently aimed at reform during the liberal reign of the old republic. First and foremost, their education served them as a tool for social distinction and maintaining a distance between themselves and the non-educated popular classes. In the words of Holanda: “the Byzantine love for books appeared to be a sign of knowledge and mental superiority similar to the graduation ring or the Baccalaureate diploma.”12 It comes as no surprise that Pang and Seckinger (1972) referred to 19th century Brazilian politicians as “Imperial Mandarins.”13 According to Pang and Seckinger, “recruitment into the Brazilian mandarin class was even more restricted to the upper social strata than was the case in China. Brazilian mandarins were not chosen by examinations given to qualified candidates, but by the process of university education, which entailed substantial expense and was therefore generally limited to scions of wealthy families.”14 These authors further demonstrate that this class of high-ranking politicians and officials was composed, in its majority, of the offspring of the landed aristocracy, import-export merchants, bankers, urban professionals, high clergy, and military officers. To all those,

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becoming a politician or a high-ranking state official offered a “gentlemanly career.” Pang and Seckinger find that the typical ambitious Coimbra graduate started his public career with a local position, such as that of a municipal judge, district judge, public prosecutor, or district police chief, and, if successful, worked his way up toward more central state and national positions. Mario Losano (2000), who studied the political career of the 19th century lawyer Tobias Barreto, reached a similar conclusion, namely that during colonial and imperial times, lawyers and other legal professionals “constituted a privileged class, almost a mandarin caste.”15 Gilberto Freyre (1986) has dedicated a whole chapter of his influential book The Mansions and the Shanties to “The Rise of the College Graduate and the Mulatto” that so profoundly changed Brazil during the 19th century. Freyre points out that the first national schools of law and political science, created after the Portuguese King, narrowly escaping Napoleon’s advancing armies, had left Lisbon behind and settled with his whole court in Rio de Janeiro, “were known, not as schools, but as academies, and their students as “gentlemen academicians” (senhores academicos). A real caste.”16 According to Freyre, this new and emerging political caste represented “a new aristocracy, different from the semi-rural or the commercial. The aristocracy of cap and gown.”17 Freyre shows how some of these urban intellectuals were of mixed descent and therefore considered “mulattos.” As they gained more power and visibility, they had to overcome the ideas of white supremacy and ethnic purity defended by the elder generation of political leaders. The social status that an academic title bestowed on them became the key to unlocking the door that provided access to membership in the political elite of the country. According to Freyre, “in 1845, when the Second Empire was in full swing, and the law schools of Recife and Sao Paulo were functioning briskly, trained men began to take over the administration of the provinces and the principal political and government posts.”18 Tobias Monteiro, who first published his analysis of Brazil’s excessive appreciation of honorific titles in 1916, starts his book with a diagnosis. According to Monteiro (1919), “Among us, the taste for titles has passed the German empathy and has transformed all those that have taken classes in a college or technical school into doctors without dissertation. As a sign of vanity or hierarchical pretension, this passion for titles was extended to the less literate classes, who content themselves with military certificates.”19 Monteiro complains about the widespread practice of his times of seeking social

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distinction by attaching an honorific title to one’s name. According to Monteiro, this practice was so widespread that all rich and influential individuals, although they had never written a thesis or dissertation, made ordinary people call them “doctor” or “colonel.”20 Education as a Tool to Defend Privilege

The practice using education and educational degrees as a tool for social distinction was observed and described thirty years later by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who had come to Brazil in order launch the University of São Paulo. Levi-Strauss found that, “our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for ‘the latest thing.’ Fashion dominated their interests: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige they could wring from them. (…) There was great competition, therefore, for the magazines and handbooks and ‘popular’ studies that would empower them to get a lead over their fellows. (…) Learning was something for which they had neither the taste nor the method; yet they felt bound to include in their essays, no matter what their nominal subject might be, a survey of human evolution from the anthropoid apes to the present day. Quotations from Plato, Aristotle and Auguste Comte would be followed by a peroration paraphrased from some egregious hack – the obscurer the better, for their purpose.”21 That purpose was to achieve social status and to set oneself apart from those deemed of less social worth. In that way, education served first and foremost a gate-keeping function. At the same time that it bestowed social status to some, it withheld it from others and it provided the criterion by which belonging to one group or the other was demarcated. Although education serves the primary function of training, it also necessarily sets the higher educated apart from the less educated. As such, education is a scarce good that bestows difference and as such it can be used as a symbolic capital, fulfilling the function of a “positional good,” according to Fred Hirsch (1976). The maintenance of the privilege of access resides on a better starting position and historically excluded groups will never be able to catch up – as long as general requirements keep rising. Under such circumstances, education forsakes its emancipating potential and becomes a sticker that is displayed as a marker of social distinction. In Brazil, this function became of utmost importance to all those that sought to join the ranks of the distinguished – even more so if

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and when they were of mixed origin and thus “wished to be white and feared they were not.”22 Bacharelismo Today

José Moreno (1969), who wrote about the prevalence of social hierarchies in post-independence Chile, detected societal practices very similar to those in Brazil. For Moreno, “in societies where distinctions rested upon modes of behavior rather than on racial classifications, it was important to keep an eye on Spain all the time. The only way of being Spanish was to behave like a Spaniard.”23 According to the same author, “Spanish settlers learned from the very beginning to be ashamed of their true ethnic and cultural composition and hide their Negroid and Indian features behind a European mask. Much of their legal and political histories constituted a ceaseless effort to be what they were not – an effort to make the real conform to the ideal.”24 Brazil is no different. Up to this day, the importance of holding and ostensibly displaying a distinguishing academic degree can be easily observed among Brazilian elites. Most politicians and higherranking government officials are of the liberal professions and demand to be called “doctor,” although they never defended a thesis or dissertation. Empirical examples of this phenomenon abound and include almost everyone with a college degree. State officials, even if of lower rank, instead of representing the people, present themselves as nobles that graciously receive the people, if and when they so please. While conducting research in Salvador, Bahia in 2006 and trying to schedule an interview with a city planner working for the state government, I was told that he had granted me an “audience.” The interview was confirmed by his secretary via email. The letter ended with his signature and credentials. His title was that of “Excelentíssimo Senhor Doutor” – “His Excellency Sir Doctor.” When analyzing the composition of the 2007 House of Representatives, of a total of 512 members, 123 are lawyers, 14 selfdeclare “bachelor,” 18 are medical doctors, and 112 are teachers. Together with the 12 journalists and 1 diplomat, 385, or 75% of Brazil’s federal representatives are liberal professionals. The two Bahian federal representatives to the national assembly with the most votes in the 2006 election were Antônio Carlos Magalhães Neto, the grandson of senator Antônio Carlos Magalhães (436,966 votes) and Fabio Souto, the son of former governor Paulo Ganem Souto (297,067 votes), both of the conservative DEM, PP, PL, PHS, and

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PTC coalition.25 Together, these two candidates garnered over 10 percent of all votes in the state of Bahia. Both federal representatives are “bachareis.” Antônio Carlos Magalhães Neto holds a bachelor degree in law and Fabio Loureiro Souto holds a bachelor degree in Economics, both from the Federal University of Bahia. Bacharelismo and the State

Florestan Fernandes (2006) demonstrates that when coffee became the most dynamic sector of the Brazilian economy, the interests of coffee planters became national interests and coffee planters were propelled to national importance. Although this sector started its ascension to national importance by emulating the social status of the rural aristocracy associated with slavery (maintained until 1888), the dynamism of this sector soon triggered the need for change and slave-owning coffee barons were forced to adopt a more rational organization of their plantations and cut back on the direct and indirect costs associated with slave-based production. When São Paulo-based coffee planters saw their social prestige reduced by the change from slaveholders and masters to commercial entrepreneurs, the only way they found to perpetuate their status was to embrace politics. In the political realm, their primary goal was to preserve social status for themselves, their children, and their clientele. According to Fernandes, the coffee planter, “favored political power to confront and control this risk [of losing social prestige despite the maintenance of economic power], at the same time that he started cultivating more and more new compensatory forms aimed at the preservation of status [italics in the original] (…) and looked for new channels for social, economic, or professional mobility for his children, relatives, or dependents (which led him to the systematic exploration of nepotism, not any more as a normal resource in the process of the bureaucratization of patrimonial domination, but as a tool in the struggle for survival within the socially dominant social strata).”26 Fernandes thus locates the origin of nepotism and clientelism and the associated abuse of the state as a means to achieve social status with the main agents of the Brazilian industrialization, the coffee planters of São Paulo. To preserve their prestige, threatened by the loss of the status of being slave holders, they transferred their masterly conduct to the public sphere and henceforth made poor and excluded Brazilians their slave-substitutes.

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Raymundo Faoro (2001) [1957] has probably produced the most far-reaching analysis of how the Brazilian state has served the purpose of maintaining privilege by upholding the distinction between included and excluded Brazilians. Tracing back the origins of the Brazilian state to its Portuguese foundations, Faoro argues that, “the stand (or status group), serving as the administrative rank for the exercise of dominion, configures a minority government. Few rule, control and spread their patterns of conduct to the many. The leading group does not exercise power by delegation or inspired by the trust that the people, as a global entity, irradiate. It is a sovereignty that cocoons itself, impenetrable and superior, in a restricted stratum, ignorant of the doctrine of majority rule.”27 According to Faoro, the patrimony of the King was gradually shifted over to the state and administered by an increasingly bureaucratic “stand” – according to Max Weber a social group distinguishable not based on their income or wealth, but their socially derived prestige. For Faoro, holding a state position, instead of representing a calling to serve the people, instead “transforms the holder into an authoritative figure. It gives him the mark of nobility.”28 The way a high ranking official envisions his or her governmental position, as a result, is not one of “representing” or even “serving the public.” The very concept of “public accountability” does not exist in the Brazilian vocabulary. Government officials not only perceive themselves as disconnected from “the people,” they feel superior to them, distinguished by the position they hold and by the honorific treatment it bestows on them. Patronage

In a society thus structured, patronage and clientelism are the main ways in which “doctors” relate to ordinary people. “Patronage relations provide discriminatory access to desired goods,” according to the classic definition of John Waterbury (1977).29 Waterbury further explains that “the nature of the resource, the number of people who seek it, the degree of the patron’s control over it (does he share it with other patrons?) will determine the strength of his links to his clients and the degree of their dependency upon him.”30 Finally, again according to Waterbury, “patron-clientele networks may be seen as strategies for the maintenance or aggrandizement of power on the part of the patrons, and of coping and survival on the part of the clients.”31

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Parting from this definition, we should not be surprised to find patron-client relationships to be the norm, rather than the exception, in the relationship between included and excluded groups. Richard Graham (1990) has demonstrated that patronage and clientelism not only survived the transition to electoral politics - their importance actually grew after the establishment of voting under King Pedro II (1840-89).32 Indeed, clientelism and patronage became the defining trait of the Old Republic (1889-1930). Both Albuquerque (1985) and Hagopian (1992)33 have pointed to the gradual transition to democracy, conducted under the auspices of the military and traditional elites, as the main factor for the perpetuation of clientelism and patronage in Brazilian politics. According to Hagopian, “Agreements negotiated at both the state and national levels smuggled into the new democracy, at least during the phase of consolidation, antidemocratic political practices inherited from both the military regime and its civilian predecessors.”34 Avritzer (2002) describes a process of “reclientelization” that started to characterize Brazil after its transition to democracy. According to Avritzer, the constitutional amendments of 1977 and 1982 led to an overrepresentation of rural states with clientelistic leaders in the national congress while the severe fragmentation of the Brazilian legislative branch produced a need for the executive to forge alliances and engage in pork barrel politics to obtain political support. This sort of pork barrel politics for political support was initiated by president José Sarney (1985-1990), who gave his minister of planning, Anibal Teixeira, the responsibility of forging political alliances.35 According to Avritzer, “throughout 1987, he transformed the Ministry of Planning into an agency devoted to getting support for the president in the Constituent Assembly. In order to do so, he set up a system for distributing resources on political grounds.”36 In an even more recent analysis, Giovanna Veloso (2006) finds that clientelism among federal deputies has become a well established practice among most congressman and women in Brasilia.37 The persistence of clientelism and patronage under Luis Ignacio Lula’s presidency is even more astounding, considering that the Brazilian Worker’s Party (PT) explicitly distanced itself from these practices and wrote the quest for transparency and crusade against corruption into its foundational documents.38 Nunes (2003) has pointed out that, “the party system does absolutely not operate under the universalism of procedures principle. This fact has forced the PT

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to make certain compromises in order to survive and compete for scarce voting success.”39 But the institutional “incentives” to engage in illicit behavior cannot account for the amount of corruption scandals that have plagued Brazilian politics since 1985, nor does it explain its persistence under changed institutional environments. This set of explanations is entirely unable to explain why clientelistic practices and systems of patronage are reproduced even at the local level, where institutional incentives are weak. To adequately capture this phenomenon, one must look beyond political institutions, and even beyond the perpetuation of traditional political elites at the federal and the state levels. An analysis of the ways privilege is defended at the societal level instead points us to the mechanism through which historically included groups maintain their elevated positions within social hierarchies and their privileged access to citizenship rights. One of the most consequential domains long captured and effectively defended by the historically included against the intrusion of the masses is the state. In Brazil, the state does not belong to the people. It belongs to “them,” and “they” are using it to advance their own goals. Anything received from the state is therefore not a right, but a favor - and as such an act that perpetuates and extends the logic of receiving favors from “patroas” in the private sphere. Conclusion: The Normalization of Hierarchy

Bacharéis have created a specific habitus and make use of sophisticated language that automatically excludes popular sectors from participating in public discourse. Language is functional in creating and defending exclusive access to public discussions and therefore in reproducing inherited privilege. In order to penetrate the spheres of power, Brazilians have to mimic the habitus of the powerful. Given the extreme gap that divides popular sectors from their elected representatives, popular participation is severely limited by the symbolic resources employed by state elites in order to defend their traditional fiefdoms and spheres of power. As a tool for the reproduction of privilege, this formalism has a racial connotation, as particularly white males are readily identified as “doctors,” whereas women, indigenous people, and blacks are almost never associated with the stereotypical image of an “educated man.” Brazilian democracy therefore lacks an embracing legitimacy, because its political system does not reflect the will of all Brazilians.

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Excluded Brazilians have not participated in the formulation of the public consensus upon which popular sovereignty must ultimately rest, because their voice is not given equal weight to the voice of the educated “doctors.” This very profound division of Brazilian society into deserving, educated sectors and undeserving popular sectors has made its way into the country’s legal codes. The Brazilian Penal Code, for example commands that all of the following shall benefit from special treatment while imprisoned:40 State Secretaries, Governors, Mayors, Members of Parliament, Citizens listed in the Book of Merit, Officials of the Armed Forces, “Magistrados,” Diploma-holders of any of the National Colleges, Priests of any denomination, Secretaries of the Judiciary, and Jurors. Brazilian “doctors” have been able to maintain a tight grip on public affairs, and popular sectors encounter tremendous difficulties when entering the public sphere, for entrance requires being judged worthy. Being deemed worthy, in turn, is reserved for doctors. Another, complicating, factor is provided by Brazil’s adherence to a tradition of legal idealism that finds its expression in a codified system of laws, not necessarily connected to the habits and traditions of “the people” and even less of all the people. As a result, Brazilian legal codes do not represent the consolidated norms of its society, in the way Emile Durkheim has described the emergence of laws.41 Instead, as Moreno (1969) has argued, Latin America inherited from its motherlands a tradition of legal idealism that found expression in the codification of idealized norms. The Portuguese tradition itself grew out of the melding of Roman law with Christian doctrine. The essence of this legal tradition resides in the fact that law does not reflect social reality, but an ideal type to which society should aspire. For Francisco Jose Moreno (1969), “the lack of correlation between what ought to be and what is, as reflected in the social and psychological patterns of the Roman-Spanish tradition, was transferred to the colonies.”42 Furthermore, according to the same author, “the concern with the abstract concept of justice rather than with the preservation of traditions as sources of law was in Castile, as it was in Rome, a demonstration of ineffective community integration. A society in which customs can be legally superseded by abstract intellectual ideas is one in which past collective experiences are not usually looked upon as a source of identification and security. Such a pattern of legal organization is indicative of a low degree of social cohesiveness. Adherence to ideal formulas is used as an artificial way of providing the social unity and identification that the institutions of the community do not supply.”43

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In final analysis, Brazilian sovereignty rests not on the collective sentiment and will of Brazilians, but on the will of a minority of “doctors,” because all those deemed unworthy are effectively excluded from the public sphere, their voices not heard and not taken into consideration. At best they are treated as clients of more or less benevolent doctors, who know what is good for them. It is worth remembering that to Kant, paternalism is “the greatest despotism imaginable.”44 At any rate, it is prohibitive to fostering democratic legitimacy. 1

I received very valuable comments for this chapter from Brazilian Federal Judge João Batista de Castro Júnior. 2 Using educational titles to create, maintain, and defend social status is of course a universal practice and not limited to Brazil. Brazil, again, only provides a very clear case that allows us to observe, and thus analyze and understand, how exactly this process works and how it affects the lives of citizens and the prospects for democracy. 3 “Do seio da sociedade colonial, heterogênea, dispersa e inculta, não tardou a surgir, com a instrução ministrada pelos jesuítas, uma nova categoria social, - a dos intelectuais, que feitos os estudos e formados mestres nos colégios de padres, iam bacharelar-se em Coimbra, para adquirirem, com o titulo de licenciados e de doutores, o acesso fácil a classe nobre pelos cargos de governo” (Azevedo 1971: 280). 4 Azevedo (1971) and Venancio (1982). 5 Prado Jr., 1996:333, my translation. 6 Oxford American Dictionary. 7 Adorno 1988:235, my translation. 8 Coelho 1999:92, my translation. 9 Ibid.: 236, my translation. 10 Brazilian suffrage was only extended to include illiterates in 1985. To set this information into perspective, it is important to know that in 1987 the illiteracy rate among nonwhite adult Brazilians was 36.3 percent, two times as high as the rate for whites (Hasenbalg and Silva 1999). 11 Leal 1976:20, my translation. 12 Holanda 2002:163, my translation. 13 Pang and Seckinger 1972. 14 Pang and Seckinger 1972:218f. 15 Losano 2000:98, my translation. 16 Freyre 1986: 358. 17 Ibid.:358. 18 Freyre 1986:364. 19 Monteiro 1919:13f, my translation. 20 Monteiro 1919:14, my translation. 21 Quoted in Mander 1969:289. 22 Stepan 1991:45. 23 Moreno 1969:16.

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24

Ibid.:17. Tribunal Regional Eleitoral. 26 Fernandes 2006:140, my translation. 27 Faoro 2001:108, my translation. Faoro explicitly applies a Weberian framework and thus leaves the German “Stand” without translation. I have thus also maintained it, but put it in parentheses. 28 Faoro 2001:197, my translation. 29 Waterbury 1977:332. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Graham 1990:7. 33 Hagopian in Mainwaring et. al 1992. 34 Hagopian 1992:261. 35 Dimenstein 1988:15. 36 Avritzer 2002: 119. 37 Veloso 2006:98f. 38 Abers 2000:48. 39 Nunes 2003:121, my translation. 40 Article 295 of the Brazilian Penal Code, law N. 3689, from October 3rd, 1941, enacted under the proto-fascist regime of then dictator Getúlio Vargas, known as “Estado Novo”. 41 The Division of Labor in Society, 1893. 42 Moreno 1969:12. 43 Ibid.: 11. 44 Quoted in Berlin 1998: 208. 25

9 Conclusion This book has sought to make several contributions, first, to the ongoing discussion about case studies and qualitative research methodology. By choosing Brazil and, in many instances, the state of Bahia, as cases, I chose to narrow my analysis to extreme cases on the independent variable, namely societal inequality. Although this choice limits the scope of the generalizations I can draw, it is intended to shed light on the causal mechanisms that are at work whenever stark societal inequality characterizes a society. Instead of searching for laws, I try to unveil causal mechanisms that are very likely to have great influence whenever societal inequality provides the background to the analysis. The logic thus established is one of if – then, rather then the quantifiable probability of correlation achieved with quantitative research. The second contribution I intend to make is conceptual and twofold. First, I argue that political science needs to “bring society back in” if it wants to explain the shortcomings of democracy. More than assessing the functionality of a democratic regime, democracy must be judged by the concrete and tangible effects it has on the lives of the people living under a given system. If a democracy does not enable its citizens to live the life they deem worth living, then it falls short of its promises. As such, my treatment of democracy parallels Benedict Anderson’s understanding of nationhood as an “imagined community,” in that it highlights the ways people experience and reproduce national belonging in their everyday lives. Democracy, similar to national belonging, must translate into everyday life for it to have any meaning.1 This insight is appropriately captured by James Holston (2008) and I follow him in his analysis. The second conceptual issue I seek to address is that exclusion and inclusion are intimately connected and indeed constitutive of each other. I thus argue that in order to understand why democracies fail, it is more fruitful to focus on the included then on the excluded. A focus on the included allows us to gain insight into the strategies they use to defend their inherited privileges and to fend off the attempts of the excluded to join their ranks. Of central importance in understanding this defense of privilege relies on capturing inclusion’s relational character. Inclusion secures 141

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access to privilege only as long as it works hand in hand with exclusion. Whiteness is of crucial importance to the constitution and defense of privilege and I sought to apply Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of distinction and amend it with an additional capital, namely “whiteness,” to capture its effect. The empirical contribution of this book thus lies in its analysis of the strategies employed by included Brazilians to uphold and defend their inclusion vis-à-vis the excluded. By focusing on several concrete life situations where the included interact with the excluded, this book seeks to unveil the oftentimes hidden, and sometimes even unconscious, attempts to uphold the value of inclusion by regulating the belonging to the group of the included. Education, as we have seen, serves a very central gate-keeping function in this process and skin color is by far the most immediate and consequential way how Brazilians recognize and categorize others. The maintenance of status through a distinguished and distinguishing habitus is also of central importance – be it in the form of elaborate language, dress, or behavioral codes. To the included, it becomes important to disassociate themselves from the lives and the lifestyles of the excluded. The framework of reference for this strategy still is located in Europe, although New York also serves the purpose of setting oneself apart. To justify their first-world lifestyles, the included frequently rely on comparisons of themselves with citizens of Europe or the United States, for example when they compare salaries and leisure options. From their own perspective, compared to European and US citizens, the lifestyle of included Brazilians is thus in most occasions described as “being middle class.” No included Brazilians I have encountered during my research ever compared their lives and salaries to those of their own maids – or even to the national average. It appears as if most included Brazilians still seek to appear as European, “civilized,” and white as possible and hence they continuously reproduce a profoundly postcolonial mindset, where they seem to live in denial of the fact that theirs is a poor country, whose majority is nonwhite, little educated, and of Non-European origin. Chapters four to eight all seek to apply the methodology and the conceptual frameworks thus developed to the analysis of different societal arenas. Instead of providing an objective diagnosis of Brazilian democracy based on statistics, I present extreme cases of situations that elucidate how Brazilians experience their democracy. Violence, real and imagined, has become central to experiencing

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Brazilian democracy and its shortcomings and it points at the deep division that is tearing Brazilian society apart. This division is deeply rooted in Brazil’s history and chapter three focuses on the history of European usurpation and African exploitation that later translated into the construction of white privilege and black exclusion. The knowledge of who counts as included and who does not was anchored early in Brazilian common sense. The frame of reference established during the Vargas regime integrated the older posture of skepticism toward black ability to achieve “higher civilization” developed by the spearheads of scientific racism and, I argue, was never altered thereafter. Instead it was during the 1930s and 40s that Brazil’s elites found in Gilberto Freyre the ideologue that provided a way of imagining a national community where whites could remain at the top of social hierarchies. Freyre’s ideas about Brazil’s “new race” cast away the stigma of racial inferiority of those Brazilians that had been exposed to biological mixing, as long as they held on to European models of culture and civilization. It also undermined the formation of a sense of groupness among the poor and exploited and robbed them of the very basis for political mobilization along very real cleavages. Brazilian elites thereby found a way to perpetuate the absolute division of society into haves and have-nots, powerful and powerless, citizens and non-citizens, people with rights and people depending on favors, while camouflaging it under the guise that “all Brazilians were the same” and therefore encounter the same chances and opportunities. One of the most consequential places where unequal life chances are reproduced is in the educational system. Chapter four analyses education as a tool used to defend privilege based on the structured reproduction of the knowledge on who counts as included and who doesn’t. Applying Fred Hirsch’s (1976) logic of “positional goods,” this chapter demonstrates how education is used not as a tool to analyze and change the world, but as a means to acquire social distinction and then transfer it to the next generation. The primary way this goal is achieved by historically included Brazilians is by sending their children to selected private schools. When basic public education became accessible to the masses after the 1950s and ceased being a means of reproducing privilege, historically included groups shifted their children over to private schools. Once this move was made, public schools became places where exclusion was reproduced, offering poor schooling for the poor. In cities like Salvador, they also became black spaces. The extreme devalorization

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of public schools I detected during my research has become symptomatic of the general devalorization of public services in Brazil and indeed the whole public realm. Historically included groups have long privatized the state and those public arenas that serve their purpose. Democratic legitimacy rests not with “the Brazilian people,” but with those that have made the state and the public sphere an instrument of the reproduction of their privilege. To serve as an effective tool of securing privilege, social hierarchies have to be anchored in people’s minds. They have to be integrated into Brazil’s common sense and become institutionalized so that they can be functional and guide people’s actions and expectations. This happens, I argue, first in the private sphere, in the daily and routinized interaction between excluded and included groups in their roles of employers and maids – domesticators and domestics. More than an estimation of its statistical relevance, the testimony given by domestic servants and their patrons alike are intended to promote an understanding of the perverse effects of this interaction on both parties. Civil society and the associations acting in its realm stand in between the public and the private. Associations are private but nonprofit seeking and as such act in the public interest. As such they have great potential to alter a given common sense and disseminate new and just ways of interaction among equals. In my research on Brazilian civil society, I focused on the case of NGOs and conducted empirical research in the city of Salvador, Bahia in order to determine the degree of democratic praxis of NGOs, arguably the most dynamic sector of contemporary Brazilian civil society, the one pointing toward general tendencies and future developments. I found Bahian NGOs falling short of their potential to alter the established common sense and form “counterhegemonic” public spheres. The great majority of observed NGOs spoke and decided for the excluded, not with them and by doing so perpetuated one of the core mechanisms responsible for the enduring distinction between the included and the excluded, namely paternalism. It does not come as a surprise that the inequalities reproduced daily in the private sphere and within civil society spill over to the public sphere. But my research on popular participation in local policy-making, conducted between 2001 and 2006, reveals that inequalities are actually renewed and strengthened whenever popular sectors of Brazilian society, those historically constructed as the excluded, seek to make their voices heard by the included. Despite the existence of formal mechanisms to allow for and channel public

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participation in school management, citywide budgeting, and urban planning, de facto participation is curtailed through the active use of discriminatory practices against all those deemed unable to participate. I was told more than once that, “the people lack a culture of participation,” which translated into excluding them from collective decision-making and justifying such action with reference to their supposed inability to do so. Observing such a great distance between formal mechanisms and de facto realities led me to conclude this chapter by giving some thought to the importance of the tradition of legal idealism and it provided the entrance point for the next chapter, the analysis of “bacharelism.” Chapter eight, then, delineates the continuous importance of this Brazilian tradition and its colonial origins. This chapter therefore ventures into applying a post-colonial framework to the analysis of contemporary Brazil. As such, it focuses on the importance of education and language for the reproduction of inherited privilege. The analysis of “who is a doctor” also intends to add to a further unveiling of the multiple dimensions that together compose “inclusion.” The central argument that this book seeks to advance and develop is that societal inequalities undermine democracy. This is not to say that they make democracy impossible. Much has been achieved over the years in Brazil and to some, the presidency of Luis Ignacio, Lula, da Silva represents the end of a long and arduous transition to democracy in Brazil. Although I agree with the optimistic outlook that many authors share when evaluating Brazil’s potential and its future, I am nevertheless more skeptical than most, if only because Brazil has been considered the country of the future ever since the 1950s. My analysis points me to the fact that the practices of clientelism and “Carlism” seem to have outlived the political changes of the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s. Their widespread survival not just in Brazilian politics, but in society, where they continuously structure inter-personal behavior, provides a clear indicator for the fact that Carlism did not die with its namegiver, senator Antonio Carlos Magalhães (popularly known as “ACM”), nor was it ever restricted to the party he dominated for so many decades (PFL, now DEM) or the state he so fiercely and ferociously controlled, some might say strangled, for so long. Nor is it the person of this senator that explains such a widespread common practice of clientelism and indeed a shared self-understanding of so many included Brazilians as “doctors.” Many practitioners of Carlism, I would contend, have never heard of the senator who

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coined this term. In fact, putting all the blame on him would give him undue salience and it by far overestimates the degree of agency of any politician, even the most powerful. ACM instead represents the much more general and widespread principle of reproducing one’s location within social hierarchies by constantly making reference one’s status as an included and thus contrasting it with the situation of the excluded. This is why understanding ACM helps us to understand Brazilian reality and politics, and this is also why focusing on the ways Bahians reproduce inclusion and exclusion tells us so much about how this is done in Brazil in general. Bahia is, after all, a place where the mechanisms used to defend privilege, while constantly employed amongst all Brazilians, have been allowed to blossom most vibrantly and extravagantly. Bahian “doctors” might be more extravagant in their expectations of deference and servility toward excluded groups, but included Brazilians use the same mechanisms everywhere and constantly. The constellation of Bahian society might be more dominated by the presence of Afro-Brazilians, but the racialized character of exclusion is present all over Brazil. In Bahia, despite their numerical majority, blacks are still treated by the minority of included as minorities and transformed into objects of exploitation, study, fear, and desire – as well as targets of more or less paternalistic public policies. The city with the largest number of blacks after Lagos, Nigeria, as many Bahians proclaim Salvador, is not only false, but has failed to confer a majority status upon them. Bahian blacks are still treated as a minority and Bahia is thus not at all different from any other Brazilian state. The power and the violence required to hold a majority at the bottom and the mobilization of ideology required to justify such an act demands probably more effort in Bahia then elsewhere. However, it allows us to detect the mechanisms applied for this endeavor with more ease. It is the extreme degree of exploitation that occurs in Bahia that makes this state such an interesting and fruitful object for causal analysis. In the end, all of the cases analyzed in this book point to one central place where Brazilian society reproduces the seeds of its own dysfunction – the stern effort of included groups to defend their privilege and thus secure an advantage over the different, yet commonly scarce, markets of their society. While struggling to secure their advantage, they constantly renew the exclusion of those upon whose shoulders they stand.

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1 This finds expression in Benedict Anderson’s (1991) concept of “imagined communities.”

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Index ABONG, 96, 97 Bacharelism, 13, 128-130, 133, 134, 139, 145 Budgeting (see Participatory budgeting) CAAMPI, 120 Carlismo, 109, 110, 125 Citizenship, 2, 3, 8, 17, 28, 45, 53, 69, 87, 99, 100, 108, 110, 120, 137 Civil society, 1, 13, 14, 45, 49, 87, 88-91, 93-97, 99-109, 116, 118, 144 Coimbra, 128, 129, 131, 139 Community schools, 107, 110, 115117, 119, 123, 125 Corporatism, 45, 46, 92 Cultural capital, 67 Democracy (discursive, deliberative), 8-12, 88 Doctors, 33, 67, 130-133, 135, 137, 138, 139, 145, 146 Domestic workers, 13, 69, 73-85, 100, 144 Education, 1, 8, 9, 13, 19, 29, 38, 41-43, 47-49, 53-61, 63, 65-71, 89, 92, 99, 105, 106, 110-113, 115-116, 120, 121, 125, 128-130, 132, 139, 142, 143, 145 Education reform, 1, 54-57, 61, 69, 111, 116 Elites, 2, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 24, 28, 32-34, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44-45, 46, 51, 57-58, 60, 61, 62, 65, 67, 68, 82, 90, 92, 109, 115, 117, 122, 123, 128, 130, 131, 133, 136, 137, 143 Eugenics, 33, 37-38, 43, 51 Exclusion, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 13, 15, 25, 26, 27, 32, 33, 46, 48, 54, 61, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 116, 123, 130, 141, 142, 143, 146 FUNDEF, 57, 58, 70 Freire, Paulo, 92-93

Freyre, Gilberto, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 84, 131, 139, 143 Habermas, Jürgen, 9-11, 12, 15, 17, 88, 93, 94, 95, 102, 103 Habitus, 4, 127, 137, 142 Inclusion, 3-4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 23, 24, 26, 31, 48, 54, 79, 80, 82, 83, 100, 124, 141, 142, 145, 146 Instrumental enrichment, 64-65 Law, 18, 21, 25, 34, 37, 40, 43, 57, 58, 67, 70, 71, 80, 95, 106, 111112, 118, 121, 122, 128, 129131, 133, 134, 138, 140, 141 Legal idealism, 138, 145 Legitimacy, 2, 9-12, 17, 69, 87, 88, 95, 107, 127, 137, 144 Maids (see Domestic workers) Middle class, 22, 24, 47, 48, 51, 74, 83, 118, 142 Military regime, 45, 36, 109, 136 Misrecognition, 4, 9 Modernity, 13, 37, 46, 81, 83, 93, 102 MST, 17 Neighborhood associations, 88, 99, 108, 109, 11, 112, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120 NGOs, 13, 14, 25, 49, 89-90, 96101, 102, 141, 144 Normalization, 51, 83, 137 Old Republic, 34, 136 Participatory budgeting, 13, 14, 107, 108, 109, 119-121, 122, 123 Participatory Urban Planning (see Urban planning) Paternalism, 49, 64, 79, 92, 100, 101, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 144 Patronage, 88, 124, 135-136, 137 PCC, 17, 18, 20 Police, 17, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 131 Political class, 13, 101, 127, 128, 129, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139 Political participation, 1, 8, 122

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Positional goods, 53, 58, 60, 143 Private schools, 13, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 67, 68, 107, 143 PT, 109, 125, 136, Public schools, 13, 28, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 68, 69, 70, 106, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 122, 143, 144 Public sphere, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 17, 28, 29, 69, 80, 84, 87, 88, 95, 96, 101, 107, 108, 109, 127, 134, 138, 139, 144 Racial mixing, 33, 34, 39 Rodrigues, Nina, 34, 35-37, 43, 47, 50, 84 Salvador, Bahia, 8, 13, 21, 24, 31, 54, 55, 60, 67, 68, 96, 97, 107, 108, 109, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 133, 143, 144, 146 Sanitation, 34, 37, 38, 120 Sen, Amartya, 8, 9, 12, 15, 17 Servants (see Domestic workers) Slavery, 31, 32, 43, 45, 75, 77, 82, 84, 125, 134 Slaves, 31, 32, 39, 40, 49, 77, 82, 84 Urban planning, participatory, 118119 Vargas, 38, 40-43, 46, 47, 140, 143 Violence, 7, 18, 20, 22, 23-26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 53, 62, 92, 103, 105, 142, 146 Whiteness, 5, 15, 31, 34, 43, 47, 51, 87, 142 Whitening, 38, 39

About the Book Do societal inequalities limit the effectiveness of democratic regimes? And if so, why? And how? Addressing this question, Bernd Reiter focuses on the role of societal dynamics in undermining democracy in Brazil. Reiter explores the ways in which race, class, and gender in Brazil structure a society that is deeply divided between the included and the excluded—and where much of the population falls into the latter category. Tracing the mechanisms of the profound cultural resistance to genuine democratization that he finds dominant among the elite, his theoretically and empirically rich analysis offers an alternative way of understanding both the nature of Brazilian democracy and the democratization process throughout Latin America Bernd Reiter is assistant professor of political science at the University of South Florida.

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