The relentless race of poverty – 06/12/2023 – Michael França

“If you shower and scrub hard, your color will come out,” some lighter-skinned children would say to the dark-skinned black girls at the public school on the outskirts where I studied. Many were hurt by it. I hurt myself.

My feeling was that they used violence as an outlet to release all the anger they felt at being systematically excluded not only by society but, in many cases, even by their own families.

I changed schools. I spent more time cycling to get to another one located in a better neighborhood. On the first day of school, a boy stuck a pen in another’s belly. I still remember all that blood. As he doubled over on the ground in pain, redness quickly engulfed his white school shirt.

I also left. I took an exam and won a scholarship to a private school to attend the second and third years of high school. Not long after, some students and teachers started to prefer to call me “negão” instead of my own name.

Despite that, it was there that I realized, for the first time, how different aspects of life could be. So I decided to study for real. At first, studying was just a way to try to escape a place I never wanted to be.

Years later, already at the University of São Paulo, I started working as a research assistant at Insper in a study by Naercio Menezes-Filho and Rodrigo Moita entitled “Running away from the poor: Bolsa Família and stratification across schools”. Study that, to a certain extent, was a reflection of my story.

The aim was to assess whether Bolsa Família had any effect on student migration. The income transfer program had as one of the conditions the enrollment of the children of the beneficiaries. This caused thousands of poor students to start attending schools. But at the same time, it had a negative impact on school performance. Thus, the best students migrated to other public schools and private schools.

As they migrated, they left behind those most disadvantaged and with the greatest learning disabilities. These, in turn, would miss out on the opportunity to learn from peers who performed better. Part of its future would be destined to be influenced only by poorly paid teachers who would need to perform almost a miracle to subvert all exclusion generated by Brazilian society.

In different dimensions, the lives of thousands of compatriots are marked by an incessant race towards poverty. However, those who think that it is just a monopoly of the poor are mistaken. There is also a lot of poverty among the richest. It exists because poverty is also synonymous with need and deprivation. And there is a lot of lack in a portion of our elites in relation to their worldviews. In part, this comes from their considerable deprivation of interaction with the rest of society.

This fact has repercussions on the understanding of the Brazilian reality. Racial bias in schools and society, for example, has long been neglected. However, when we look at school performance data, we realize that blacks, and especially blacks, have not been doing well for years.

When I look at these data, I remember all the racial and social violence I witnessed in schools and outside them. Currently, a large part of my time is still dedicated to studying. It consumes a significant portion of my days, early mornings and weekends. However, fortunately, studying is no longer just a hope of escape. I see it as an opportunity to be able to contribute so that others can also progress and escape the series of injustices to which they are subjected.

This text is a tribute to the song “Baltimore”, by Randy Newman, performed by Nina Simone.

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