Brazilian society, more so than the American society, is extremely observant of social differences and it is commonly accepted that within the society there are superior and inferior people. This can be traced back to colonial days when the Portuguese court escaped to Brazil and were immediately accepted as "superior" to everyone else, a ranking was established and has remained in place ever since. To this day the descendants of the royal family who remain are spoken of with a great deal of deference; here the name Bragança is spoken with awe and admiration even though they no longer have royal titles.
There is a formality in Brazilian Portuguese that is specifically designed to separate the classes. You address a superior person formally and conjugate the verbs in the third person to show -they call it 'respect', I call it - 'submission to their obvious superiority'. Here is where I run into trouble. I spent most of my life in the US where the language has no such distinction, and whenever I spoke Portuguese it was to family and friends who required no such distinction. I'm incapable of altering my manner of speaking in order to satisfy the egos of a pampered population that thinks highly of itself, and what's more, to acknowledge some social convention that stipulates that some people have the right to be superior to others. So I go around offending everyone who is accustomed to being shown deference by people who dress like me. (I don’t buy brand names and even though I would fit in at a movie theater in the US, by Brazilian standards I dress like a poor person. The Brazilian middle class dresses to impress each other, people wear what's in fashion, not what they like. (It's a permanent pissing contest.)
I realize that every society is based on a hierarchical model and that members are judged by specific characteristics. But Brazilians have it ingrained into their personalities, it's almost part of their DNA. A person who is the product of an upper middle class Brazilian upbringing will not deign to speak to a doorman or a baggage man or a street sweeper or a truck driver. Here the more money you have the more superior you are, and thus you expect a certain amount of deference from those who have less than you. Once during a visit I commented on the horrific living conditions of some people who were camping under a bridge and the Brazilian who was with me retorted that they weren't really people, they were rats and so they lived like rats. He meant it, from his position in society those people were in the position of rats and in his mind his superiority to them was proportional. In another instance I was in the car with my brother looking for a parking space, I told him to slow down because the man walking between two cars might have been leaving. He looked at the man and without slowing down told me "nah, he doesn't have a car". This lead to a discussion on how in his mind did he possibly think he could tell whether a person was affluent enough to own a car, or not, simply by looking at him for a split second!
A 'normal' middle class Brazilian is able to gauge his superiority to another person at a quick glance. It's a superpower that apparently never fails. Or maybe it's something in the water... Either way, I don't think they realize they are doing it. Most of the time I have a hard time adjusting to Brazilian society, the rest of the time Brazilian society has a hard time adjusting to me. At all times we are at odds on this issue. Oh well.
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