Be the only one without intimidating me – 09/06/2023 – Politics and Justice

Race and gender profoundly shaped my worldview. I grew up and matured in the heart of the anti-racist struggle of the black community in Porto Alegre. But, having attended economics at a mostly white federal university represented the biggest institutional attempt to whiten my activism.

Reading economists like George Stigler and Celso Furtado expressing their biases about the black population as inferior and more apt for manual labor sophisticated my analyses. Well, my analytical advantage was being part of a family governed by education and which taught me to criticize the status quo and decolonize my thinking. I had to leave Brazil in 2006 to learn how to use economic theory to effectively dissolve racial blindness in decision-making spaces.

I also understood the transversality of the themes of diversity, equity and inclusion. I understood that a convincing economic justification, combined with a culture of results in equity, improves performance and accelerates decisions.

My career in international development and a PhD in Economics of Discrimination reinforced my credentials for accessing spaces of power and influence, making me orbit a more nuanced form of activism based on evidence of the social profitability of affirmative action. This subtlety was intentional after tireless attempts to convince through the rhetoric of ethics and morality.

Intimidated by being the only one in spaces of influence and suffocated by the fear of being considered a sentimentalist, I leaned on the data to justify investments in racial equality. Today I consider myself a much more mature, confident and influential economist, as my focus is no longer on convincing white people: I currently seek to leverage the voices of black people.

Since then, I have traveled to several countries and negotiated national equality plans with government officials, mobilized millions of dollars towards international development in equity, and worked alongside black and indigenous communities to design solutions across Latin America. I live between worlds and cultures, but with the same purpose for over 20 years: to empower the voices of black people, decolonize spaces of power and increase the flow of capital where it is most needed.

Despite the many “no’s” I’ve heard along the way, I remain increasingly determined to tackle the most complex and important problems for the black population globally.

I strongly believe that it is possible to reach the level of a society in which discrimination and prejudice are unable to influence personal and professional decisions and paths. However, we have a lot of work to do, as the vast majority of companies need a greater sense of urgency. They need effective equity policies that direct them to the biggest economic gaps. The intergenerational economic justice that requires the upward mobility of an entire generation must be not just a public but a private goal. And we need to give prominence to the black woman, who even though she is the only one, wherever she is, fights for a better world without being intimidated.

The editor, Michael França, asks each participant of the space “Politics and Justice” of the Sheet suggest a song to the readers. In this text, the one chosen by Luana Ozemela was “O Que Se Cala”, by Elza Soares.

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