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Brazil, subtle racism and discrimination

Sao Paulo, Jun 9 (EFE), (Camera: Wallace Carvalho).- Despite a childhood of extreme poverty Liliane Rocha has forged a successful career as an executive consultant, entrepreneur and author.The businesswoman, 38, has also had to overcome another obstacle - racism, which is subtle in Brazil but often synonymous with early death.FOOTAGE AND SOUNDBITES OF LILIANE ROCHA:"I think that to be aware of the racial and social gap in Brazil, we need to have a parameter, and when you are in extreme poverty and your whole family is poor, in a childhood where there was no internet - very different from what happens today- news circulated slowlier. I think our place in society is not clear.""In my family there are blacks, in the places where I circulate there are blacks, in the subway there are blacks"Because there are blacks in my family, there are blacks in the public school, there are blacks in the bus and subway, there were blacks in the places I went to, but when I enter my first company, I think: 'my goodness, there are no black people'.""I asked if she (the manager) has any suggestion to improve my performance and stand out in the company, and she said to me: 'I think you should straighten your hair with the straightener and wear branded clothes because you are black.' Clear, it's gone." "Technical competence, intelligence, the experience is not enough. What was being put on me was somebody else, something else, which was hiding traces of my ethnic group." "The security guard grabbed my friend and started strangling him and I yelled 'Call the police. Call the police! We are victims in this situation, call the police.'" When the officers arrived, the first thing they did was takingour documents and they started asking whether we actually paid the bills, asking us to get into the police car. Although we were not arrested, we were forced to stay at the police station and we spent the whole night there, we could only leave the following morning.""I usually say: If the same situation happened today, I would not call the police. The guard would attack my friend and we would leave because the fragility of our rights would be the same, but later we wouldn't experience exhaustion and the fear we did then.""When we think of 'I can't breathe, I can't breathe', we're talking about the black population dying of Covid-19, which is a respiratory disease that hitting the lungs, and we're also talking about breathing being interrupted by a gunshot."