This news, coming from Brazil, would substantiate what many more familiar with the world had said for many years: namely that discrimination existed everywhere and often in the very places that, on the surface, appeared to be the most accepting.
Beyond that, what personally I had seen my own wife's experience as an African-American woman in show business, was that some of the discrimination and racism existed in the least expected areas, such as the world of fashion, the cinema, places full of educated people who were sophisticated and professed themselves as being beyond past prejudices.
Further, our own experience was that many of the countries most critical of the US for its apparent racism, were, in fact, among those who failed to live up to their professed ideals.
Sometimes we derived this impression from our own experiences and sometimes anecdotally from our friends and acquaintances from different countries.
My wife experienced more incidents of racism in three years in Rome in the late '80s then in a decade in Los Angeles. Italians were very surprised, but we were only a bit surprised.
In the '70s in San Francisco, the top modeling agencies had only one black model. There were emerging trends.
Givenchy, one of the greats from the world of French haute couture, was a pioneer in using black women and used all black models in the '70s and '80s. Then there was a sudden drop-off in the use of black models in the '90s that, personally, I have never understood.
Latin America's top fashion event, the Sao Paulo Fashion Week (SPFW) to be held in Brazil next month, has agreed to boost the number of black models on its catwalks after being targeted by anti-racism campaigners.
Under the terms of the deal, signed Thursday with prosecutors in the state of Sao Paulo, the number of black and indigenous models have to meet a set quota, otherwise fines could be levied against labels taking part.
"The management of the SPFW is going to indicate to all the labels that at least 10 percent of the casting has to be composed of black, African-descendant or indigenous models," it said on its website.
The move came after the prosecutors threatened legal action against the SPFW's organizers unless they increase the number of black models.
In the last SPFW, in January, just eight of the 344 models were black.
An anti-racism group, Educafro, last week warned it would hold a rogue black fashion event in front of the SPFW if the number of black models was not increased.
Advocates of the quota system say the fashion event should be more representative of Brazil's population.
According to official figures, just seven percent of Brazil's famously varied population consider themselves purely black -- but another 43 percent see themselves as mixed-race of African descent. The other 50 percent call themselves white.
What is "different" sets the stage. It still blows my mind this prejudice by these "progressive" people, all of whom, I will venture, are for "gay marriage".
____________________ "The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
