Brazil's first Black TV channel on the air

Televisionpoint.com Team
Looking into the camera, TV hostess Adyel Silva smiles, greets her audience and turns to Martin Luther King for her "thought for the day."

"Even the most starless midnight may herald the dawn of some great fulfillment," Adyel Silva says, quoting from a 1967 sermon by the slain American civil rights leader.

This is TV da Gente, or Our TV, Brazil's newest channel and the first to be owned and directed by blacks. Launched in Sao Paulo three weeks ago, it's the brainchild of Jose de Paula Neto, an Afro-Brazilian pop singer and businessman.

"I was never able to identify with what I saw on television," de Paula Neto told The Associated Press. "What I saw was not part of my reality as a Brazilian black nor did it embody the racial plurality that prevails in Brazil. These realities are the mainstays of TV da Gente."

Half of this country's 180 million people are Afro-Brazilian the largest black population outside Africa. Yet few black TV reporters or entertainers host their own programs, and blacks in Brazil's highly popular soap operas invariably play housemaids, gardeners or doormen.

At TV da Gente, says de Paula Neto, "blacks will have starring and not just secondary roles as in other channels."

It will soon offer programs acquired from the Black Family Channel, the digital cable network owned by boxer Evander Holyfield, former Jackson Five member Marlon Jackson and former baseball star Cecil Fielder. The programs are being dubbed into Portuguese.

It could be "a media watershed," says Teresinha Bernardo, an anthropologist and race relations expert at Sao Paulo's Catholic University.

Blacks account for more than 60 percent of Brazil's poor and need more role models, she said in an interview. "Imagine a poor kid watching television and seeing a black actor in a major role, or a black professor being interviewed. Think of what this could do to improve his self-esteem."

Brazil's problem is that it cherishes the notion that it's a land of racial equality, "an image that has kept most blacks from questioning their reality, which is one of poverty and inequality," Bernardo said.

Emanoel Araujo, curator of Sao Paulo's recently inaugurated Afro-Brazilian Museum, says blacks rarely occupy high government positions. Those who do soccer legend Pele and singer Gilberto Gil are minister of sports and of culture, posts that carry no political clout.

Textbooks, he said, rarely mention the fact that great Brazilians like the 18th century sculptor Antonio Francisco Lisboa, better known as Alejadinho, or the 19th century author Machado de Assis, were black.

A report by the U.N. Development Program says that nearly 120 years after Latin America's largest country abolished slavery, Afro-Brazilians still suffer social and economic discrimination.

It cited figures on wages and education showing blacks lag at least a generation behind whites. They earned an average of $74 a month in 2000, less than half of what whites earned 20 years previously. Fewer black men had college diplomas in 2000 than white men had in 1960.

"Brazil lives in two worlds," Doudou Diene, the racism expert of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, said during a visit here in October. "It has a vibrant multicultural and multiracial street life, which is the image we get overseas. But Afro-Brazilian and indigenous communities are not part of the political economic, social and media power structures."

De Paula Neto has invested about $5.5 million in his station 70 percent from his own pocket and the rest from three businessmen in Angola, a former Portuguese colony in Africa. He preferred not to identify them.

This amount can keep TV da Gente on the air for six months, at the end of which de Paula Neto hopes to have attracted enough advertising to guarantee its survival. He says advertisers show interest but haven't signed up yet, and that it will take at least three years for his station to break even.

Besides Adyel Silva's three-hour live talk show a potpourri of themes ranging from cooking lessons to advice from psychologists TV da Gente's 11-hour daily broadcast includes newscasts, sports, children's fare, music and a quiz for students about Afro-Brazilian and African culture.