Mixed Race Studies

Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America (First Edition)

Routledge
2018-09-04
358 pages
31 B/W Illus.
Paperback: 9781138485303
Hardback: 9781138727021
eBook (VitalSource): 9781315191065

Edited by:

Kwame Dixon, Associate Professor of Political Science
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Ollie A. Johnson III, Associate Professor of African American Studies
Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan

Latin America has a rich and complex social history marked by slavery, colonialism, dictatorships, rebellions, social movements and revolutions. Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America explores the dynamic interplay between racial politics and hegemonic power in the region. It investigates the fluid intersection of social power and racial politics and their impact on the region’s histories, politics, identities and cultures.

Organized thematically with in-depth country case studies and a historical overview of Afro-Latin politics, the volume provides a range of perspectives on Black politics and cutting-edge analyses of Afro-descendant peoples in the region. Regional coverage includes Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti and more. Topics discussed include Afro-Civil Society; antidiscrimination criminal law; legal sanctions; racial identity; racial inequality and labor markets; recent Black electoral participation; Black feminism thought and praxis; comparative Afro-women social movements; the intersection of gender, race and class, immigration and migration; and citizenship and the struggle for human rights. Recognized experts in different disciplinary fields address the depth and complexity of these issues.

Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America contributes to and builds on the study of Black politics in Latin America.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America – Black Politics Matter [Kwame Dixon and Ollie A. Johnson III]
• Part 1: History
  • 1. Beyond Representation: Rethinking Rights, Alliances and Migrations: Three Historical Themes in Afro-Latin American Political Engagement [Darién J. Davis]
  • 2. Recognition, Reparations, and Political Autonomy of Black and Native Communities in the Americas [Bernd Reiter]
  • 3. Pan-Africanism and Latin America [Elisa Larkin Nascimento]
• Part 2: The Caribbean
  • 4. Black Activism and the State in Cuba [Danielle Pilar Clealand]
  • 5. Correcting Intellectual Malpractice: Haiti and Latin America [Jean-Germain Gros]
  • 6. Black Feminist Formations in the Dominican Republic since La Sentencia [April J. Mayes]
• Part 3: South America
  • 7. Afro-Ecuadorian Politics [Carlos de la Torre and Jhon Antón Sánchez]
  • 8. In The Branch of Paradise: Geographies of Privilege and Black Social Suffering in Cali, Colombia [Jaime Amparo Alves and Aurora Vergara-Figueroa]
  • 9. The Impossible Black Argentine Political Subject [Judith M. Anderson]
  • 10. Current Representations of “Black” Citizens: Contentious Visibility within the Multicultural Nation [Laura de la Rosa Solano]
• Part 4: Comparative Perspectives
  • 11. The Contours and Contexts of Afro-Latin American Women’s Activism [Kia Lilly Caldwell]
  • 12. Race and the Law in Latin America [Tanya Katerí Hernández]
  • 13. The Labyrinth of Ethnic-Racial Inequality: a Picture of Latin America according to the recent Census Rounds [Marcelo Paixão and Irene Rossetto]
  • 14. The Millennium/Sustainable Development Goals and Afro-descendants in the Americas: An (Un)intended Trap [Paula Lezama]
• Conclusion [Kwame Dixon and Ollie A. Johnson III]

Slavery’s legacies

The Economist
2016-09-10

SÃO PAULO

American thinking about race is starting to influence Brazil, the country whose population was shaped more than any other’s by the Atlantic slave trade

ALEXANDRA LORAS has lived in eight countries and visited 50-odd more. In most, any racism she might have experienced because of her black skin was deflected by her status as a diplomat’s wife. Not in Brazil, where her white husband acted as French consul in São Paulo for four years. At consular events, Ms Loras would be handed coats by guests who mistook her for a maid. She was often taken for a nanny to her fair-haired son. “Brazil is the most racist country I know,” she says.

Many Brazilians would bristle at this characterisation—and not just whites. Plenty of preto (black) and pardo (mixed-race) Brazilians, who together make up just over half of the country’s 208m people, proudly contrast its cordial race relations with America’s interracial strife. They see Brazil as a “racial democracy”, following the ideas of Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian sociologist who argued in the 1930s that race did not divide Brazil as it did other post-slavery societies. Yet the gulf between white Brazilians and their black and mixed-race compatriots is huge…

…Of the 12.5m Africans trafficked across the Atlantic between 1501 and 1866, only 300,000-400,000 disembarked in what is now the United States. They were quickly outnumbered by European settlers. Most whites arrived in families, so interracial relationships were rare. Though white masters fathered many slave children, miscegenation was frowned upon, and later criminalised in most American states.

As black Americans entered the labour market after emancipation, they threatened white incomes, says Avidit Acharya of Stanford University. “One drop” of black blood came to be seen as polluting; laws were passed defining mixed-race children as black and cutting them out of inheritance (though the palest sometimes “passed” as white). Racial resentment, as measured by negative feelings towards blacks, is still greater in areas where slavery was more common. After abolition, violence and racist legislation, such as segregation laws and literacy tests for voters, kept black Americans down.

But these also fostered solidarity among blacks, and mobilisation during the civil-rights era. The black middle class is now quite large. Ms Loras would not seem anomalous in any American city, as she did in São Paulo…

…Both black and white Brazilians have long considered “whiteness” something that can be striven towards. In 1912 João Baptista de Lacerda, a medic and advocate of “whitening” Brazil by encouraging European immigration, predicted that by 2012 the country would be 80% white, 3% mixed and 17% Amerindian; there would be no blacks. As Luciana Alves, who has researched race at the University of São Paulo, explains, an individual could “whiten his soul” by working hard or getting rich. Tomás Santa Rosa, a successful mid-20th-century painter, consoled a dark-skinned peer griping about discrimination, saying that he too “used to be black”.

Though only a few black and mixed-race Brazilians ever succeeded in “becoming white”, their existence, and the non-binary conception of race, allowed politicians to hold up Brazil as an exemplar of post-colonial harmony. It also made it harder to rally black Brazilians round a hyphenated identity of the sort that unites African-Americans. Brazil’s Unified Black Movement, founded in 1978 and inspired by militant American outfits such as the Black Panthers, failed to gain traction. Racism was left not only unchallenged but largely unarticulated.

Now Brazil’s racial boundaries are shifting—and in the opposite direction to that predicted by Baptista de Lacerda. After falling from 20% to 5% between 1872 and 1990, the share of self-described pretos edged up in the past quarter-century, to 8%. The share of pardos jumped from 39% in 2000 to 43% in 2010. These increases are bigger than can be explained by births, deaths and immigration, suggesting that some Brazilians who used to see themselves as white or pardo are shifting to pardo or preto. This “chromatographic convergence”, as Marcelo Paixão of the University of Texas, in Austin, dubs it, owes a lot to policy choices…

Read the entire article here.

Room for Debate: Brazil’s Racial Identity Challenge

The New York Times
2012-03-30

Jerry Dávila, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor of Brazilian History
University of Illinois

Peter Fry, Anthropolgist

Melissa Nobles, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University

Yvonne Maggie, Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

João Jorge Santos Rodrigues, Lawyer and President
Olodum (cultural group that aims to combat racism in Brazil)

Marcelo Paixão, Professor of Economics and Sociology
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

As Rio de Janeiro prepares to host the 2016 Olympics and celebrate its newfound economic prowess as a player on the world stage, the connection between poverty and racial discrimination in Brazil is coming under scrutiny. Would Brazil benefit from U.S.-style affirmative action to counter its history of slavery? What are the challenges of implementing such programs?

Note from Steven F. Riley: See also: Stanley R. Bailey, “Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil,” American Journal of Sociology, Volume 114, Number 3 (November 2008): 577–614.

What Brazil Does Well (Dávila)

In the United States and Brazil, Jim Crow’s shadow has yielded divergent understandings of the nature of racial inequality and the role of race-conscious policies. In the U.S., placing “separate but equal” in the rearview mirror feeds legal challenges to affirmative action.

But in Brazil, the distance from Jim Crow shapes a growing recognition that racial discrimination and inequality are not legacies and are not just the fruit of segregation. To the contrary, they have a stubbornly viral ability to reproduce and renew themselves…

…These Brazilian policies are not meant to redress legacies of racism: instead, they recognize and counteract ongoing inequalities. Brazil, in turn, has drawn a lesson from the U.S. history with affirmative action: policies that promote inclusion are insufficient without policies that reduce exclusion.

Race Is Too Hard to Identify (Fry)

Racial quotas in universities are polemical. For a start, they can hardly be called “U.S. style” since they would be unconstitutional in the United States. Furthermore, unlike the U.S., the majority of Brazilians do not classify themselves neatly into blacks and whites. In Brazil, therefore, eligibility for racial quotas is always a problem…

Quotas Are Working in Brazil (Nobles)

In 2004, when state and federal universities began implementing affirmative action policies, Brazil closed one chapter of its history and began another.

Brazil’s once dominant “myth of racial democracy,” made the contemplation, let alone implementation, of such policies impossible for most of the 20th century. Unlike the United States, Brazil’s post-slavery experience had not included deeply entrenched legal and social barriers. Nor had it included rigid racial identifications. Affirmative action policies were not needed, or so the reasoning went…

…Today, debate turns on arguments about merit and racial identity. Some hold that the quota system violates meritocracy. But basing university admissions solely on high-stakes standardized tests, which significantly advantage test preparation, seems a dubious way of determining merit. Others argue that Brazil’s system of racial classification is too fluid and ambiguous: the problem of “who is black?”…

Brazil Sets an Example to Follow (Seigel)

Affirmative action programs in Brazil are widespread and growing. Based on state legal victories beginning in 2000 and directed to expand further by the far-reaching federal Racial Equality Statute passed in 2010, all but three of Brazil’s 26 states now have reparative quota systems. The widespread objection that Brazilian racial categories were too fluid to define “black” for policy purposes has not panned out. Candidates define their racial identity themselves; apparently the disincentives to proclaiming black identity in a society still shot through with racist presumptions are enough to stave off the flood of sneaky white candidates who opponents claimed would jam the system. Plus, Brazilian affirmative action is not solely racial; it is class-based as well, and implemented in intelligent ways. In most states, quota candidates’ families must meet a salary limit, and an equal number of slots are set aside for children who have attended Brazil’s challenged public school system as for black students. Since most families poor enough to meet the income ceiling will have sent their kids to public schools, this means most students who meet the income requirement can apply, regardless of color…

Looking to the U.S. Has Been a Mistake (Maggie)

The history of racial relations in Brazil, which is completely different from the American case, leads me to believe that no, Brazil would not benefit from U.S.-style affirmative action.

In Brazil, there was no legislation dividing the population into “races,” nor prohibiting marriage between people of different “races,” in the post-abolition period; we’ve had no “one drop of blood” rule. The result is a national society based on the idea of mixture. U.S. affirmative action seeks to unite and make equal what had been separated by law. To implement this in Brazil, we would have to create legal identities based on the opposition between whites and blacks or African descendents.

Step in the Right Direction (Guimarães)

Brazil has already implemented some important affirmative action programs in higher education, and the balance is overall positive. Some 71 universities — with free tuition, linked to the federal system of higher education — as well as different state universities now have some kind of preferential system of entrance benefiting disadvantaged students (those coming from public high schools, those self-declared “pretos,” or blacks; “pardos,” or browns; “indigenous”; or those with low incomes).

The best thing is that those policies were taken one by one by different university boards trying to adapt the principles of social or racial justice to their regional reality. Available data on the school performance of those students show that they are doing pretty well and are not putting any kind of stress on the system. The real stress comes more from the huge expansion of slots than from the admission system.

Symbolically those policies are important in showing that being black (preto or pardo) in Brazil today is no longer a source of shame but rather one of pride. Descent from Africa is openly assumed and socially recognized. The policies also demonstrate that publicly financed universities must care for the quality of the education they offer without degrading the fairness of their admission when it becomes biased by class, race or color…

Read the entire debate here.