Brazil has now gotten its own form of BET to give a voice to its large population of Black Brazilians of African decent. Let’s hope they learn from the mistakes of BET & truly serve as the voice  of its Black people in their totality & not just become the exploiters of Black stereotypes. As the battle of race & race relations in America looms on, Brazil is going thru its own battle with color that separates the Brazilians into Black & White.  The Black Brazilians however have kept, celebrated & maintained their African heritage close to their hearts & have incorporated it to mainstream Brazilian life beyond the many years past from the slave trade that brought their ancestors to Brazil as slaves for their Portuguese masters.

I have known many Brazilians in my lifetime, but never really felt the need to differentiate them as Black or White, just Brazilians. I guess as an outsider looking in I just saw the difference in treatment of different Brazilians along the lines of socio-economic class not color, as it exists in the continent of Africa & other third world countries. In this day & age of what I see as our common global fusions, where sometimes I can not tell apart a White or Black person from Africa, America, Europe or Brazil until they speak or make me aware of their cultural background, is there a real need for such differentiation along color lines especially in the media? Channels like BET to me have rather done a disservice to Black people by giving mainstream media an excuse not to incorporate , look for & attain programming that appeals to Blacks because after all we have an entire network solely dedicated to serving the Black community without having to consider the general population of Americans, even though BET still does not provide the type of programming that the vast majority of Black Americans want to see on a daily basis as representative of them. This has become a hinderance in the bettering of race relations & inclusion of Blacks in the mainstream media rather than serving as a true hub & model for mainstream media to be able to serve Black America as a whole in the balance of serving Americans in general. Does the ends truly justify the means? To me this type of separation in America has allowed mainstream media execs. to automatically characterize any TV/film or music done by Black people or with a majority Black cast as solely & specifically for a limited Black audience while it is not done to Whites. You can go to theaters in Black neighborhoods & see films with solely White casts while often theaters in White neighborhoods don’t show films with predominately or solely Black casts. You can listen to so called Black radio & hear songs by White artists like Justin Timberlake, but many Black artists do not get the same opportunity on White radio stations which they do not even categorize as White radio stations even though they do not play any Black artists’ music. While there may be a demand for specific niches in media, we must be careful of our own self-separations along color lines when the ultimate goal is for equality amongst one people of one nation! I am waiting to see if this station dedicated to solely serving Black Brazilians will run into the same issues as we see here in America.

Black Pride in Brazil- Salvador de Bahia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZctDfysuhg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj8lP-yg04U

Black TV Channel Ignites Ire in Brazil

Some accuse the ‘Our Channel’ initiative of racism

Ana Maria Brambilla (brambilla)         

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?menu=c10400&no=269277&rel_no=1

A Brazilian TV channel dedicated especially to black people has been provoking controversy. Not only Brazil, but parts of Europe, the western U.S., Asia and Angola have been watching “Canal da Gente,” or “Our Channel,” since Nov. 20, 2005.

The owner of this enterprise costing 12 million Brazilian Reals (U.S.$5.2 million) is the Brazilian singer Netinho de Paula, well-known for singing “pagode,” a kind of music similar to samba that is very popular in Brazil.

The focus of the controversy is the accusation that the channel is racist. All the programming is aimed toward black people; the presenters are black and 50 percent of the company’s staff are composed of black people.

“I think it’s legitimate that a channel specialize in sports, politics, sex, religion and any another type of segmentation. I don’t agree with a channel segmented for race, color, or religion. Therefore, this means racial discrimination for me,” argues Flavio Porcello, a journalist with a long experience in Brazilian TV and television education, in an interview with OhmyNews.

Surfing on the Internet, it is possible to find many forums and blogs talking about the controversy of “TV da Gente.”

Created as a space for black people to identify with and, according to its owner, to promote racial diversity in Brazilian television, this channel began with a violent incident. On the day of its inauguration, when Brazil was celebrating the “National Day of Black Conscience,” a comic reporter called Rodrigo Scarpa — nicknamed “Vesgo,” who works on a program called “Panico na TV” — asked de Paula, “So, Netinho, does this mean you will open your channel to everybody?” The question, full of meaning, annoyed the singer and he physically attacked the reporter.

He then said: “This is a black party!” and expelled the reporter. During the party’s speech, de Paula admitted that he beat up the reporter and said if necessary, he would do the same again.

Brazil’s first black television channel tackles legacy of 300 years of slavery

With non-white faces a rarity in media and politics, a new station aims to bridge racial divide

Tom Phillips in Sao Paulo

Monday November 21 2005

The Guardian

“Is it on air? We’re on the air!” With the push of a button and these hesitant words, Brazil’s first black television channel came into existence yesterday.

TV da Gente, which means “our TV”, has been heralded as giant step forward in the country’s fight against discrimination, and to mark the broadcast high-ranking politicians, celebrities and civil rights activists gathered at the Casa Verde studio in north Sao Paulo.

“This will turn out to be the most important development ever in terms of communication for black communities all around the world,” a veteran American civil rights activist, 72-year-old James Meredith, told the Guardian. “Unlike the United States and South Africa, Brazil established a system of white supremacy without the obvious signs like segregation or apartheid. Until Brazilians start to face up to this reality the legacy of slavery will continue.”

Mr Meredith’s ideas are far from universally accepted in Brazil where, despite the social chasm between Afro-Brazilians and their white counterparts, many still insist on the idea of a “racial democracy”, first expounded by the anthropologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s.

Statistics tell a different story, of a country split along racial lines. Afro-Brazilians form almost half Brazil’s 180 million strong population yet account for 63% of the poorest section of society. The 2000 census found that 62.7% of Brazil’s white population had access to sanitation compared with just 39.6% of its Afro-Brazilians, while a new UN report found that black men earned on average 50% less than their white counterparts in Brazil. Human rights campaigners underline the racial dimension behind Brazil’s staggering murder rates. The majority of victims are young black men aged between 15 and 24.

The sprawling redbrick favelas that engulf large urban centres are predominantly, if not entirely, inhabited by black Brazilians. And barring a few high-profile politicians such as the culture minister, Gilberto Gil, Afro-Brazilian faces remain a rarity in politics.

In the nightly blockbuster soap operas – perhaps the best indicator of how things stand in Brazilian society – black actors are generally restricted to playing the roles of maids and porters who work in the glitzy apartment blocks inhabited by the wealthier, white characters. Indeed, while slavery was abolished more than a century ago in Brazil, many believe its legacy is harder to shake off.

This week a leading economist estimated that for Brazil’s black population to have access to the same standard of public services as their white counterparts the government would have to invest 67.2bn real (£17.6bn).

TV da Gente’s aims to change at least part of this. Its mission statement, mimicking the former president Juscelino Kubitschek, is to achieve “50 years progress in five” in black Brazil’s fight for visibility. The man behind the media revolution that seeks to overturn this divide is Jose de Paula Neto, better known as Netinho de Paula, a media-savvy 35-year-old who rose from the housing estates of Sao Paulo to become a household name, first as a samba popstar then as a television presenter.

In recent years Netinho has become the favela’s answer to Jimmy Saville: in his weekly show Dia de Princesa he roams Brazil’s deprived periferia (outskirts) in a limousine, bestowing gifts upon impoverished families while dressed in his trademark dinner-jacket.

Netinho says his latest project – which sports a logo of an eye in the yellow and green shades of the Brazilian flag – aims to redress the racial imbalance in Brazilian television and society as a whole. “Our country is marked by racial mixtures. But the actual model of TV does not represent the majority of Brazilians. We are trying to help our own people, given that nobody else seems to want to do it. This is where the real fight starts. Those who say they want an integrated Brazil will really have to start showing their faces now,” said Netinho.

Some believe it will be an uphill battle. For Joel Zito Araujo, campaigner and director of the documentary Denying Brazil – the Black Man in the Brazilian Soap Opera, the widespread exclusion of black actors from television reflects deeply ingrained prejudices in society.

“The [Brazilian] soap opera carries as its aesthetic and cultural discourse the ideology of whitening. This denies that which should be our greatest heritage: our cultural and racial diversity,” he said. “The inclusion of black actors has improved with each decade. However, Brazilian society, in the main part, remains very prejudiced. Television and society are connected in terms of these racial taboos.”

Yet despite the startling racial gulf, many point to recent advances for the black population, notably the partial introduction in 2002 of university quotas for black students. “Securing university quotas was the first real achievement of black society in Brazilian society. For the first time in our history being black brought some kind of advantage,” said Araujo. “Only by developing talent within the black population, and them achieving positions of power will we be able to bring about structural change.”

Initially the new channel, in which around R$12m has been invested, will be broadcast for six hours a day on terrestrial television in Sao Paulo and the north-eastern city of Fortaleza. People in other areas will be able to tune in via satellite, while viewers in Angola, from where a quarter of the investments have come, will be able to follow daily programmes, which include news, sport and a Brazilian hip-hop slot.

As Brazil marked its annual black pride day yesterday, black activists at the launch of TV da Gente celebrated the new channel. “TV da Gente will reproduce, for the first time, the true image of the people,” said Netinho de Paula. “It’s a huge victory for us all: for the black movement, for the white movement, for the red movement and for the Brazilian people.”

Backstory

From 1550 to 1888 the Portuguese shipped at least 3 million slaves into Brazil. Most came from the African colonies of Angola and Mozambique. They were put to work in the north-east’s sugar plantations, but thousands managed to flee and set up quilombos, autonomous cities lived in and run by former slaves. The most famous of them – the Quilombo dos Palmares – was led by Zumbi. Brazil was the last state to officially abolish slavery – in 1888.

To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/nov/21/race.brazil