Some years ago I developeded a website for a company and after a few months the owner of that company invited me to teach English to him and his family. They were very wealthy people, their wealth included a elegant apartment in Manhattan, New York city, yet they lacked common courtesy. Well, it was election time in Brazil, and in the city of Sao Paulo Fernando Haddad from the Labor Party won the elections. The same politician who is running for the presidency in this election.

I became very close to that family of three people who I taught English because the classes were taught at their home and we always had coffee breaks, and just as my parents raised me I told them about the poverty we lived, how difficult it was for my parents to raise twelve children, and the hard times I faced when I was in the college, all racism, prejudice, and so on. The wife of the man who hired me claimed to be Christian, and at first she seemed to be a person sensitive to the social problems we live here in Brazil. But shortly after the election, with Haddad’s victory at Sao Paulo City Hall, that woman who claimed was  a good Christian and generous to the poor turned into a demon. She became indignant and began to rave that all poor people were lazy, illiterate, ignorant and that is why Brazil would never be the country of the future.

While she spoke she was looking directly at me because she already knew my story, she tried in every way to belittle me before her life that seemed successful and that my family and everything that I believed and still do was a mentality of “senzala”(a place where the slaves lived at the time of slavery), as well that we should eat grass like horses and donkeys. I did not say a single word, I just watched as she freaked out in her reveries of this racist bourgeois class with an archaic mentality and no human respect at all. I was thinking to myself as she could not stop talking; silly womam, you have a super apartment in New York,  which costs more than 10 million dollars  and you have no politeness, you spend half the year on American soil  and you lack the necessity to learn their language, English, you hire an afrodescendant , daughter of a simple man and an honorable woman who had much more elegance and human values than you who stand on the pedestal of your ignorance. I stopped teaching them that very day and never kept in touch with them again.

At these times of big social polarization in Brazil and all this political scenery, it is not about the war against corruption, it has nothing to do about building a strong and egalitarian nation, it is an old war, they hate the poor population, the minorities, it is about this elite that wants to keep the power at all costs.

#EleNão