Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

AMY GOODMAN: With Lawrence Lessig? GILBERTO GIL: Oh, definitely. Yes, we are partners. He brought the Creative Commons project to Brazil. We helped them--we helped him and the whole group to find their ways in Brazil, to find the right people, to find the universities and institutions that back them in Brazil. So we became close friends. We are working together, yeah. AMY GOODMAN: How do you deal, Gilberto Gil, with the digital divide in Brazil, who gets use to the internet? GILBERTO GIL: That's one of the problems that we have, because when we talk about universal access that the new technologies allow, we-it's theoretically OK, but in practice, we face the divides that we have in the society, you know, the excluded people, economically and socially excluded from the past, you know, from previous periods of history. And now, to guarantee that you can universalize access, you know, to broadband, to computers, to digital facilities, in general, we have to address the old divides that we have in the society. So we have to fight for inclusion, a broad sense, not just digital inclusion. We have to still fight educational inclusion, you know, social inclusion, in general, economical inclusion. So it's something that will take us to a whole process of struggle and fight against the odds of the system that have charged so hardly the Brazilian society. This government now in Brazil is trying to address those things-I mean, the social issues-so that we can have social democracy in the very large sense of the word. AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about race relations in Brazil? GILBERTO GIL: Yes. AMY GOODMAN: You're one of the first black ministers in the Brazilian government. You were one of the leaders of the black consciousness movement in Brazil. GILBERTO GIL: We have in Brazil both-we have two things in Brazil. We have this general social racial divide that we have here in the States, that we have everywhere because of slavery and the status, the dehumanized status that the slaves had. And abolition of slavery didn't really work well, at least in many ways, like in Brazil, it didn't work. The slaves were freed, but they were not given land or opportunity to have education or inclusion. So the divide, you know, stayed. And as it stayed, it gave the base for the prejudice, you know, for the apartheid situation, for the rejection of the black by the white, and so and so. But at the same-this is one thing that we still have in Brazil. But at the same time, we are sort of more open in the sense of the race relations, individually speaking. So, racial marriage in Brazil is something more natural than in other places. And in the interplay in various forms, through art and through culture and everything, it's allowed, and it's been in place in Brazil. So it makes the whole Brazilian society, in terms of race, a little more, you know, open and a little more-not too hard, you know, as it can be in other parts of the world. So we have this opportunity to build a new interracial society in Brazil. That will help Brazil itself, and it could help the rest of the world. AMY GOODMAN: The Brazilian Minister of Culture, legendary musician Gilberto