Brazil’s brutal inequality is so ubiquitous that those who live here simply stop noticing it. An unexpected message from abroad serves as a reminder of the topic that is so rarely discussed here, in society or the media. // But of course it shouldn’t have been shocking. When I arrived here, I was constantly taken aback by elements of a culture that often seemed from another time. Two separate doors for apartments (one for the family, one for the help). Upper middle class youth who had never washed their own clothes or bathroom (let alone held down a job before graduating university), and who could casually drop classist or racist remarks – of the kind that would get you permanently expelled from polite society many places elsewhere – as if it were nothing.

inequality