Luiza Trajano grows up by taking a bold stance on racism

It was a casual conversation that led Luiza Trajano, one of the richest women in Brazil, to meditate on racism in her country, recognize her part in it, and do something about it.

Trajano said that a few years ago he heard a young, accomplished black businesswoman say that she never went to happy hours with her colleagues unless her boss explicitly invited her. Years of feeling rejected that many black Brazilians experience in predominantly white environments had taught her to wait for express invitations, the woman explained.

Trajano, who is white, felt a pang of sadness. Then an uncomfortable thought crossed her mind: “There are no black women at my birthday parties,” she remembers thinking. “That’s structural racism, which, in my case, is not caused by rejection, but by not seeking them out.”

This moment of introspection by Trajano, who had transformed a small family business into a retail giant, helped to sow a bold corporate affirmative action, which attracted praise, anger and much reflection in Brazil.

For the past two years, the publicly traded company, called Magazine Luiza, or Magalu, has limited its executive training program for recent college grads — a conduit for high-paying senior positions — to black applicants.

The announcement, in September 2020, provoked a deluge of press coverage and commentary. Most of them were critical.

The hashtag #MagaluRacista has been trending on Twitter for days. A deputy close to Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s conservative president, asked the Public Ministry to open an investigation into the company, claiming the program violated constitutional protections.

But Magazine Luiza said it was a necessary and overdue measure to diversify its executive teams and to mitigate the brutal legacy of racism in Brazil, where slavery was not abolished until 1888.
Trajano was the most visible and vehement supporter of her company’s policy.

“In addition to the social and economic aspects, slavery left a very strong emotional mark, which is a society of colonizers and colonized,” said Trajano, 70. “Many people never felt that this country is theirs.”

Trajano caused a stir far beyond the corporate spheres, speaking frankly about issues such as race, inequality, domestic violence and the failings of the political system. Parties from across the political spectrum invited her to contest elections, seeing in her a rare mixture of pragmatism, charisma and intelligence.

“In a world where billionaires burn their fortunes in space adventures and yachts, Luiza is dedicated to a different kind of odyssey,” former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wrote last September in Time magazine, which chose Trajano as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. “She took on the challenge of creating a commercial giant while building a better Brazil.”

Trajano was the only child of a family from Franca, a medium-sized town in the interior of São Paulo, where an aunt, also named Luiza, opened a small gift shop in 1957.

As the business expanded into a small group of stores, teenager Trajano took a position as a salesperson in one of them. The experience made her fall in love with customer service and workplace culture.

“When I was 17 or 18, I invented a little revolution to value investment in employees,” she said. “I started taking a psychologist to the store.”
Since then, she said she has been fascinated by the factors that make employees motivated and dedicated — and those that do the opposite.

She took the helm of the company in 1991 and oversaw a massive national expansion driven by the corporate mantra “Making accessible to the many what was the privilege of the few.”

As Magazine Luiza — which sells a little bit of everything, including appliances, electronics, clothing and beauty products — grew into a giant, with 1,400 stores, Trajano said he strove to build a culture where workers were committed to success. of brand.

When retail sales began to migrate to the internet, Trajano invested heavily to create a digital marketplace and distribution system while preparing his son, Frederico Trajano, to take over the day-to-day management of the company in 2016, as chief executive. She remains chairman of the board and its most visible figure.

Frederico Trajano, 45, said he learned from his mother to take risks and trust his intuition.
“She likes to say, ‘Play the band, don’t just watch it go by,'” he said. “That means learning to be the protagonist of my own story.”

Luiza Trajano credits her son with the idea of ​​​​the training program only for blacks, in 2020, but commented that this came after she pointed out for years that the intern classes were mostly white. The program has not been subject to legal proceedings or government action.

The company redoubled its bet on the initiative by releasing a 23-minute documentary about the selection process, which looks more like a reality show than a corporate promotion. It features candidates talking about the hurdles they’ve faced in getting their careers off the ground and shows some crying when they learn they’ve been accepted into the program.

Raíssa Aryadne de Andrade Lima, 31, a sustainability analyst from the state of Alagoas who was admitted to first class for black interns, said the role has transformed her, personally and professionally.

“The best thing about the show was that it opened my eyes to the number of opportunities that were within my reach,” she explained.

Trajano has said emphatically that he does not intend to run for public office. But she has become increasingly active in bringing political debate to a group of women leaders she founded in 2013, with the aim of advancing gender parity in all spheres of power. Today the group has over 101,000 members.

The group’s leaders are preparing long-term policy plans to address chronic problems in health, education, housing and the labor market. They also defend gender parity in electoral politics, which, according to Trajano, would transform Brazil’s dysfunctional and polarized system.

In early 2021, as the Brazilian government struggled to acquire vaccines against Covid-19 and President Bolsonaro sowed doubts about its effectiveness, Trajano became a tireless advocate for vaccination, mobilizing her network of women to pressure the government to act quickly and Eliminate misinformation about vaccines.

There has been heated speculation on social media that Trajano could be a wild card in this year’s presidential elections, perhaps as a running mate of Lula, the favorite in the polls. She has categorically ruled out that role, but it is clear that Bolsonaro has come to see her as a threat to his re-election prospects.

In November, he appeared to appreciate that Magalu’s share price had fallen in previous months, amid speculation of a political partnership between Lula and Trajano, whom Bolsonaro called “socialist”.

Later that day, when Trajano was asked about the president’s comment, she said she didn’t find the label offensive.

“I think social inequality has to be tackled,” he said. “If that’s being a socialist, then I’m a socialist.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves