By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2   

President Lula has been much criticized for his visits to Africa. Yet, their importance cannot be quantified in material terms. They are at least as much about Brazil recuperating its African inheritance, as they are about Brazil discovering investment opportunities in Africa. The complaints, much like the near hysterical response of the Brazilian intellectual establishment to race based quotas, shows just how deeply ambiguous attitudes remain in Brazil about its resilient and inescapable African inheritance.

But to an outsider the very odd element in the debate in Brazil about quotas is how profoundly disconnected it is in its perception of current racial realities in the U.S. The most striking development over the past thirty years in fact is how the old binary world of rigid segregation has changed. It is true, as Gilberto Freyre so clearly perceived in the 1920s from his experience in Texas, that segregation was based on a view in the U.S. that any African blood blackened, while in Brazil any European blood whitened; so that the color bar, most especially as it effected people of mixed racial origins, was placed at opposite extremes in the spectrum. Yet, one significant result of intense racial segregation was to make a recuperation of race pride and the pursuit of race based self-improvement a very powerful motivating force among American black leaders after the abolition of slavery.

When I first began teaching in the U.S. in the early 1970s, for example, at the height of the civil rights movement, this assertion of black pride was encapsulated by the phrase "black is beautiful', a recuperation of self value and self confidence that defied centuries of denigration, exclusion and scientific racism. Yet, when I returned to teaching three years ago, the very first poster I saw as I walked across the Harvard Campus proclaimed "multiracial is beautiful." And the single most striking element in the classroom to me has been the high level of self-confidence and social comfort among students of multiracial origins, taking about race and diversity, free of the old binary categorizations. This is a youthful America where the message of a political leader like Barack Obama, who is both African and American, without a hyphen, finds resonance, and where a young Gilbert Freyre would feel much more at home than he did in Waco, Texas in 1919.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper.