A New Color in Brazil TV

SAO PAULO, Brazil — The phone call from the budding station that launched Adyel Silva's television career seemed like a joke.

Sure, as a singer, Silva was used to the spotlight. But who would offer her a shot at fronting her own daytime show?

"I laughed when I received the invitation because I never dreamed of hosting a television program. You never see a black woman hosting a TV show" in Brazil, Silva said. "We were never thought capable. Maybe I'm the first."

It turned out that the channel extending the offer, TV da Gente, wasn't just taking a chance on Silva. The channel itself, which debuted in late November, is something of a gamble -- Brazil's first black-owned TV station featuring programming directed primarily at black viewers.

That it has the potential to be a lucrative venture seems obvious in a country with the largest black population outside Africa -- nearly half of Brazil's 180 million people. But the fact that it took so long to emerge, 25 years after African Americans first established their own cable TV network in the U.S., attests to attitudes about race that are pervasive in Brazilian society.

Surf the channels on Brazilian TV and a clutch of beautiful people quickly crowds the screen: bikinied models, stubble-cheeked soap opera leads, natty news anchors. All are svelte and good-looking. Virtually all are white.

When darker-skinned characters crop up in TV dramas, almost invariably they appear as maids and other domestic workers, or worse. "The soap operas here, the black people are always miserable, and they have an important role only when you're talking about crime," said Silva, 50.

"You grow up with the idea that if you're not blond and you don't have blue eyes, you're not beautiful," she said. "You switch on the television and you see Xuxa," the kittenish, blond former soft-porn actress who is now one of the most popular stars of children's TV in Brazil.

The mission of TV da Gente, or Our TV, is to try to bring a little balance to the scene. Executives at the station speak passionately of the need for the small screen to better reflect the reality lived by the 47% of Brazilians who claim some African heritage.

Yet what might seem a laudable or at least unobjectionable goal, at least by U.S. standards, has whipped up hostility in some quarters here. Critics and commentators swiftly came out of the woodwork to lambaste the new channel as racist in its own way.