Viral and chronic

09/07/2015 - 02h00

You may have heard about the black American professor who was denied access to one of Sao Paulo's Five-star hotels where he was scheduled to deliver a lecture.

Within 24 hours this story went viral, in part, because the public was rightly outraged by the thought of a black man being denied entrance into a hotel based solely on his race.

Who was the black professor? That's me. I received an outpouring of support. Hundreds of people, of all races, sent their encouragement and apologies via social media. And, I can no longer walk the streets of Sao Paulo without someone stopping me to express their sympathy and sadness for how I was treated by the hotel staff.

Fortunately, the story as reported was not true. I was never denied entry by the hotel staff and was completely unaware of the extent of this drama until reading about it online.

My concern is that egregious racial discrimination that occurs daily in Brazilian society does not generate a fraction of the attention, sympathy, and guilt as was displayed in response to this fictitious event.

I have been fortunate to visited Brazil on several occasions and have learned quite a bit about the ongoing racial discrimination that exists in this society. In recent article published in a Brazilian journal I detail, for example, how the war on drugs is facilitating racial discrimination on a daily basis here.

What's worse is that at least two events that have occurred within the past week provide perhaps even more blatant examples of racial discrimination. It has been reported –and confirmed by the government– that the police are emoving groups of young black boys from buses in an effort to prevent these children from going to the beach.

Note that none of the children have been charged with a crime. Yet, this policy is being justified as a crime prevention technique. Remarkably, the majority of Rio de Janeiro residents support this racial discriminatory measure. What is particularly shameful is that I have yet to hear about people, including public officials, apologizing to these black boys.

Another recent relevant story is the protest in response to the massacre of 19 people (almost all were black) by a police squad. The protest took place a few blocks from my hotel and occurred on Friday, August 28, the same day as my lecture delivered to a group of mostly criminal lawyers.

Sadly, at least four times as many people attended my lecture as the number who attended the protest. It would have been my hope that the massacre story would have gone viral and many more people attended the protest.

Initially, I was puzzled by the tremendous amount of public interest in the alleged racial discrimination perpetuated against me. It's now clear, however, that the press and public are far more comfortable focusing on individual acts when the victim is a public figure compared to ongoing racial discrimination against voiceless ordinary citizens.

The discrimination against the voiceless does not appear to be viral material, but it is clearly a chronic and crushing condition. This event has taught me that I'm no longer "an ordinary citizen."

More importantly, it has intensified my desire to highlight the structure barriers, including draconian drug policies and unrestrained policing, that allow racial discrimination to persist. Ironically, this was the topic of my lecture, which has received far less attention than the hotel incident that never occurred.

CARL L. HART, 48, is Associate Professor at Columbia University and is the author of the award-winning book "High Price"