Sorry, it’s in English today.
After writing yesterday’s blog, I looked at some more posts by the same Instagram account. The guy’s missus, who is Brazilian, has a video here in which she talks about a shitty, racist flyer that was being handed out in downtown Lisboa. She makes a lot of good points, but she seems to have caught some negative attention from social media bottom-feeders, as you can see from the follow-up post here.
In some cases, the critics have dressed up their nonsense as a complaint about non-standard Portuguese, but obviously, the underlying problem here is just straight-up xenophobia. There are racists in every country, of course. This is as true in Portugal as it is anywhere else, and weirdly Portuguese racism even extends to Brazilians, which is surprising when you consider that Brazilians are not natives of a former colonised country, they are largely the descendents of Portuguese settlers (and their slaves). Brazil, as a state, only exists because the territory now known as Brazil was colonised by the Portuguese. In short, they are you, lads! They’ve been away longer than your sobrinha who moved to Luxembourg last year, but it’s the same principle, just with a bigger time lag.
Now, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be an immigration policy that works for the country as a whole, but it has to be one that treats people as people. The minute people get into this kind of hatred, they’re on the road to a very, very bad place.
This is all by way of getting to my main point, which is that I’ve made cracks about Brazilian Portuguese on here a few times and I’ve even shared the odd meme (here for example). But I hope it’s clear that it’s not meant to be hostile. As you know, I mostly try to stick to European Portuguese as much as possible so as not to get confused, so some of the gags are about that desire to keep the other dialect at bay. But there’s also some friendly intercontinental rivalry between Europe and America, which is, at root, born of the inferiority complex of smaller less powerful countries seeing their former colonies doing more business and having more fun than us. Taking the piss out of our erstwhile cousins’ spelling and accent helps us cope with the shame of being efete and irrelevant on the world stage.
Anyway, I thought I’d better get that clear in case anyone thought I was like these pamphlet yahoos. This is a European Portuguese blog, but we love our transatlantic friends too, despite the occasional bit of teasing.
Luso 