I launched a training program for black people only
Luisa Trajano, a billionaire who uses her fortune to fight racism in Brazil
Luisa Trajano has grown her family's business into a giant corporation.
archival
Training is limited to black people to compensate them for the injustice they have suffered.
archival
A black mayor on a white city.
From the source
Brazil is a mixture of many origins, including indigenous peoples, Europeans and Africans.
archival
picture
Luisa Trajano has managed to turn a small family store into a giant retail business.
Now, the company's policy, which limits its training program to black applicants only, is at once commendable and outrageous, and a lot of controversy in social and political circles.
Trajano, considered one of the richest women in Brazil, "thought for years about the racism of her country" and decided to do something about it.
Years ago, Trajano said, she heard a young black businesswoman never attended happy events with her colleagues, unless her boss explicitly asked her to join.
The woman explained that years of rejection, which many black Brazilians experience in predominantly white places, taught her to wait for explicit invitations.
Trajanu felt pain and sadness, and an uncomfortable thought crossed her mind.
"At Christmas parties, there weren't any black women," she recalled, continuing, "This is the racism that, in my case, was born not from rejection, but from a failure to look for it."
That moment helped this woman sow the seeds of a bold corporate affirmative action initiative, which elicited mixed reactions in Brazil.
Over the past two years, the public company, Mgalo, has restricted its executive trainee program for recent college graduates — a precursor to well-paid, top jobs — to black applicants.
The announcement, in September 2020, sparked extensive news coverage, much of it negative.
The hashtag "racist" has been circulating on Twitter for days, and a lawmaker close to President Jair Bolsonaro has urged federal prosecutors to open an investigation into the company, arguing that the program violates constitutional protections.
But Trajano called it a necessary and overdue step to diversify the higher ranks and to atone for the brutal legacy of racism, in Brazil, where slavery was not abolished until 1888.
Candidacy for the presidency
The wealthy businesswoman has emerged as the most vocal and vocal advocate of her company's policy.
“Besides the economic and social aspects, slavery has had a very strong emotional impact, and it is a community of colonizers and colonizers,” said Trajano, 70. “A lot of people have never felt that this is their country.”
The Brazilian billionaire has made waves beyond corporate realms by speaking out on issues such as race and inequality, domestic violence, and the failings of the political system.
Parties from across the political spectrum have asked her to run for office;
You see in her a rare combination of pragmatism, charisma and intelligence.
"I accepted the challenge of building a business giant while building a better Brazil," wrote former President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva last September, commenting on Time magazine's selection of Trajano as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Trajano was born in Franca, a mid-sized town in the highlands of São Paulo state, where an aunt opened a small gift shop in 1957. While the business was expanding to include a small group of retail stores, Trajano worked as a shop salesperson as a teenager The experience made her passionate about customer service and workplace culture.
“When I was 17 or 18, I made small changes to increase investment in employees,” she says. “I started bringing a psychiatrist to the store,” she says, and since then, she has focused on the factors that make employees motivated and loyal, and the negative ones.
Trajano took over the company's presidency, in 1991, and has overseen a massive expansion nationwide.
As Megalo, which sells everything including household goods, electronics, clothing and beauty products, has grown into a giant, operating 1,400 stores, Trajano said it has worked hard to build a culture in which workers are committed to the brand's success.
uncomfortable conversations
On Monday mornings, employees at all Mgalo sites gather to sing the national anthem, repeating a school tradition Trajano cherished as a child. Rituals to maintain a strong culture.
When retail sales began to shift online, Trajano invested heavily in creating a digital marketplace and distribution system as she prepared her son, Frederico, to take over the day-to-day running of the business in 2016, as CEO.
The 45-year-old says he learned from his mother to be a risk-taker and trust his instincts.
"She likes to say, 'Don't just watch a music band go by,'" he said.
It means learning to become the protagonist of your story.”
In addition, Trajano attributed the credit to her son, with regard to the black trainee program only, in 2020, but she indicated that it came after years when the majority of the trainee classes were white, and the program did not file lawsuits or any government action.
The controversy sparked by the program led to uncomfortable conversations among her peers, said Ana Paula Pessoa, CEO of Brazilian Business, who served as financial director for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
"Every company talked about it and everyone had an opinion about it, and discussing this issue is necessary, because in Brazil we tend to throw things under the table and keep these huge elephants in the room, which no one talks about."
Megalo has doubled down on its initiative by releasing a 23-minute documentary about the selection process that seems more realistic than promoting companies. When they learned that they had been accepted into the programme.
Sustainability analyst from Alagoas, Rice Ariadne de Andrade Lima, who was accepted into the inaugural apprentice class for black professionals, said the job was a turning point for her both personally and professionally.
"The best thing about the program was that it opened my eyes to the number of opportunities that were possible for me," she added.
• When retail sales began to shift online, Trajano invested in creating a digital marketplace and distribution system where she prepared her son, Frederico, to take over the day-to-day management of the business in 2016, as CEO.
historical roots
Translation: Awad Khairy for "Time" magazine
AMERICAN
/Brazil's denial of racism has historical roots. When Brazil emerged from the era of slavery in the 20th century, the country's elites promoted the idea of a "racial democracy" - a supposedly harmonious blend of indigenous cultures, white Europeans, and black Africans - but at the same time, politicians encouraged The media and academics also the descendants of enslaved Africans and indigenous communities to marry and have children of the descendants of white colonists, as well as an influx of European immigrants, in order to produce white generations and “whiten” the population, and some conservative Brazilians still consider their country a racist democracy, where there can be no discrimination or racial conflict.
Now, black Brazilians are increasingly looking to another side of history for lessons on how to deal with an apartheid state. Of the five million enslaved Africans brought to Brazil, tens of thousands managed to flee farms, settle in rural areas, and form communities. outside the white community.
In order to describe these new settlements, they borrowed the word “quilombo”, which is often loosely translated to mean “war camp”, and it is derived from the Bantu languages spoken by some communities in sub-Saharan Africa, says a cultural researcher in Salvador, northern Brazil, Stefan Soto "The word has many meanings, but it is primarily a social practice of nomadic warriors, and can refer both to the warriors themselves and to the lands in which they meet."
A brunette takes over the mayor of a mostly white Brazilian city
Translation: Awad Khairi for The Wall Street Journal
/ The inauguration of 32-year-old black Brazilian Suelen Rosem as mayor of her mostly white city, Borough, comes as thousands of black and mixed politicians from different The political spectrum holds their positions in municipal governments across Brazil, in what many residents view as a victory for people of color and a major step against racism in Latin America's largest country.
A growing appreciation of Afro-Brazilian heritage and the increasing visibility of influential black politicians brought about this transformation.
Brazil has more blacks or mixed races than any country outside Africa, nearly 120 million - more than half the population - but only 4% of politicians in Congress are black.
An October Supreme Court ruling that forced parties to allocate a percentage of their state campaign funds to black and mixed-race candidates raised the bar for politicians of color and encouraged more exposure to that capacity.
Follow our latest local and sports news and the latest political and economic developments via Google news