UR COUNTRY.... AGREE WITH IT
I will post an article tomorrow (Tuesday) about racism in Latin America. I will not be surprised that many eyes here will be opened.
For edification, Hispanic is an ethnicity (cultural), not a race (physical). You can have a white, black, Japanese, and Jewish Hispanic; that is, they may all speak Spanish.
When the Census Bureau in the U.S. asks
Hispanics to identify themselves, it is recommended that a black Colombian put Hispanic, because he/she speaks Spanish. This makes it easier for the government to know how many Hispanics live in the U.S. If he/she is a black Jamaican, it is recommended that he/she put black (not Hispanic, African-American or African).
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MikeU
Member posted 01-11-2005 10:48 AM
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Myth of Racial Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Interpretation
"There's no racism in Brazil!" Manuel declared with a dismissive wave of his glass. "Here we're all equal! How could there be racism when people of all colors intermarry and have children?" We were leaning against the counter in a small bar in a working-class town on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Pointing to his brown skin and short frizzy hair, he said, "I have the blood of all races in me — white, black, Indian. How could we be racists?"
Litanies about 'racial democracy' can be heard throughout Latin America. The key, racial democrats argue, is that, in contrast to North America's pattern of categorizing people as either black or white, in much of Latin America people fall somewhere in between these extremes, along a broad color spectrum. Venezuelans, for example, often say theirs is a café con leche country: 70 percent of all Venezuelans are pardos, of mixed African and non-African origin, descended from the hundred thousand slaves forced to work on coastal cacao plantations before the 19th century. About 40 percent of all Brazilians are mulattoes, that is, people with some degree of descent from the more than 3.5 million slaves who once sweated in that country's sugar and coffee plantations and gold fields; and at least a quarter of all Colombians are partially descended from the 200,000 slaves brought to toil in the cane fields and pan for gold in New Granada, the former Spanish colony composed of present-day Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. Even in the Andean country of Ecuador, up to a tenth of the population is descended from the hundred thousand slaves sent there centuries ago. According to racial democrats, the presence of so many mixed-bloods promotes fraternal race relations.
The reality is less sanguine. People on the lighter end of the color-race continuum hold strong prejudices against those toward the darker end. Mulattoes, anxious to maximize their distance from people darker than themselves, can be as racist as whites. One Brazilian mulatta recalls her childhood in this way: "I didn't know my place, but I knew I wasn't black. Blacks were dirty, and I was clean; blacks were stupid, and I was intelligent; blacks lived in the slum and I did not; and above all, blacks had thick noses and lips, and I didn't. I was a mulatta; I still had hopes of being saved."
Such attitudes have direct consequences for blacks' life chances. In Colombia virtually no graduate from middle-class secondary or law schools is black, while two-thirds of the slum dwellers near Cartagena are. In Venezuela most dark-skinned people work in the lowest-paying jobs, such as domestic service, informal labor, stevedoring, and sharecropping. In Brazil blacks are concentrated in the low-paying service sector, working as janitors, porters, laundresses, day laborers, domestic servants, and at other, similar positions. Jobs asking for applicants of a "good appearance" (read, "of light complexion"), such as receptionist, secretary, bank teller, or low-level federal employee, are effectively closed to blacks.
So strong is antiblack sentiment in Latin America that for much of the region's history, those toward the lighter end of the color spectrum have sought to "bleach" blacks right out of existence. If, as Richard Jackson has put it, whites in the United States tried to get rid of blacks "through extermination," in Latin America they attempted to do so "through amalgamation." As early as 1835, Cuban historian José Antonio Saco was already proclaiming that "the only remedy for making us respectable is whitening." "Whitening" meant eliminating Africa's racial heritage by means of miscegenation. In practical terms, this required the importation of Europeans and restrictions on the immigration of blacks. Throughout the 20th century, the governments of Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, and Guatemala, among others, passed such racist, antiblack immigration legislation.
Costa Rica, for example, refused citizenship in the 1930s to the West Indians who came to work on its railroads and banana plantations, and denied them the right to live outside certain provinces. In Panama racism was intensified during the construction of the Panama Canal, because U.S. supervisors treated West Indian workers the same as lighter-skinned Panamanians. This enraged the latter, who proceeded between 1920 and 1940 to ban any further black immigration, refuse blacks citizenship, and threaten to expel them. In the early 20th century Brazilian newspapers were up in arms at the suggestion that North American blacks be encouraged to migrate to their country. Such immigration, the editor of the Getulino wrote, would "be the death blow to the mathematical process of the disappearance of the black race of Brazil."
If racial democracy has any meaning at all, it refers to the fact that Latin American societies make some provision for better treatment of people of visibly mixed ancestry. Mulattoes usually enjoy at least some advantages over blacks, but their status varies greatly throughout the hemisphere. Shunted aside from the most respectable professions, such as medicine, law, academia, upper-level government, and the officer and diplomatic corps, Brazilian mulattoes are still able to enter a secondary occupational tier as schoolteachers, journalists, artists, clerks, and low-level officials in municipal government and tax offices. Mulattoes get promoted more easily and earn more than their black counterparts. Marriages between whites and mulattoes are less stigmatized than those between whites and blacks.
In contrast, for much of the last 200 years in Cuba — at least until the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and, some say, even afterward — only the smallest minority of the lightest-skinned mulattoes have been able to attain positions of prestige; most have faced the same sort of discrimination as darker-skinned Cubans. In the 19th century, rural mulattoes and blacks were mainly agricultural laborers, while their urban counterparts were prevented from entering the navy, air force, and various food-handling occupations. The segregation introduced by U.S. occupation early this century, affecting mulattoes and blacks equally, dovetailed neatly with white attitudes; so that even after the United States no longer directly implemented segregationist rules, whites continued to keep many of them in force. Ten years before the 1959 revolution, mulatto workers were still primarily "hewers of wood and drawers of water." Whether such patterns have survived in revolutionary Cuba is open to furious debate. Official sources and some observers claim that racism has been eradicated, but contrary claims made by black nationalists Eldridge Cleaver, Robert Williams, and Carlos Moore have become virtually legendary. Most observers of revolutionary Cuba concur that there is essentially no difference in status between blacks and mulattoes.
Two societies, two patterns of mixed-blood status. Any explanation of the difference should take into account the experiences of free mulattoes in Brazil and Cuba during the long night of slavery. In Brazil, free mulattoes remained so economically vital throughout the slave era that the white ruling class had little choice but to concede some social mobility to them. This concession nurtured among Brazilian mulattoes a willingness after the abolition of slavery to play the role of buffer between whites and blacks.
In Cuba, by contrast, a small, economically marginal, politically vulnerable free mulatto population found itself the victim, in the 19th century, of harsh repression at the hands of a jittery slaveholding elite. This experience forged among many Cuban mulattoes a deep-seated resentment against whites and a willingness to fight on the side of the slaves for abolition. This, in turn, reinforced whites' hostility toward the mulattoes, and rendered unworkable a Brazilian-style white-mulatto alliance after slavery was ended.
Marvin Harris has argued that at the very inception of the Brazilian colony, planters needed free mulattoes as overseers, slave catchers, foot soldiers and gunmen, cattle hands and subsistence farmers. Slaves could not be used for these functions, and a labor shortage in Portugal meant that not enough whites were available either. (The rate of white immigration remained static throughout the entire colonial period.) Slaveholders manumitted mulattoes in such numbers that by the late 18th and early 19th centuries, free people of color represented, in virtually every province of the country, between half and two times the size of the white population.
Many of these mulattoes were employed in militias to protect the property of white slaveholders. By distinguishing themselves in this service, mulattoes found ample opportunity for promotion through the ranks. Mulatto farmers also had a stake in slave society. Many of them worked small parcels of land to supply nearby sugar plantations with food. A surprisingly large number of these poor farmers, up to 77 percent of them in one locality, owned one or two slaves. Add to this that most of them depended on large slaveholders for land rights, credit, and protection, and it is not hard to see why rural mulattoes identified with the slave system and were unwilling to fight against it.
By the 18th century, many mulattoes had migrated to the burgeoning cities of Salvador, São Luis, and Rio de Janeiro, where they found opportunities as self-employed artisans and petty merchants. On the eve of abolition, mulattoes outnumbered free blacks in urban artisanal occupations by more than four to one, and, not surprisingly, feared that the end of slavery would threaten their position in the labor market.
From such favored positions in urban areas, Brazilian mulattoes readily advanced into the arts, letters, and liberal professions, including medicine. While slavery was still in force, free mulattoes could become engineers, civil servants, and lawyers. And at the culmination of their careers, they could buy a certificate of whiteness.
A historical bargain had been struck: in exchange for at least some social recognition and advancement, mulattoes threw in their lot with the white elite against the blackest members of society. As early as the 17th century, mulattoes helped Portuguese slaveholders expel Dutch invaders. During the Pernambucan independence rebellion of 1817-1823, mulatto leaders proclaimed support for slavery. And during every major slave revolt of the 19th century, mulattoes sided with the whites. So reliable were mulattoes, in fact, that at the height of the sugar boom, the rate of manumission increased steadily and free mulattoes played an important role in local militias.
Support for slavery is most striking in the period leading up to abolition in 1888. Though a few prominent mulattoes, like André Rebouças and Luis Gama, were abolitionists, most of the mulatto political elite studiously refrained from taking a stand, while others, such as the Baron of Cotegipe, were strongly Antiabolitionist. Only the combination of international pressure, the growing expense of slaveholding in many regions of the country, and massive slave rebellion finally broke the back of Brazilian slavery.
That mulattoes "sat out" the abolition of slavery entered, it seems, into the popular consciousness of many working-class blacks. The elderly black men and women I spoke with in 1988 found no place for mulattoes in their recounting of the story of abolition, even those who believed that abolition was a gift from the white masters. As one told me, "The mulattoes were sitting pretty up on high. They never cared for the slave, even if they shared his blood. They wanted only to forget him."
The process of abolition thus strengthened ties between whites and mulattoes, and allowed whites to continue counting on mulatto support in efforts to exclude blacks from social power. As long as dark-skinned blacks were forced to remain in the lowest-paying jobs, mulattoes would gladly take up the slack in the skilled trades, petty commerce, and the professions. In exchange, mulattoes pledged allegiance to white values, modes of behavior, and physical aesthetics. "Let us not seek to perpetuate our race," wrote a Brazilian mulatto leader in the 1920s, "but, yes, to infiltrate ourselves into the bosom of the privileged race, the white race."
Cuba's was a different story. An economic backwater of the Spanish Empire until the late 18th century, its inhabitants occupied themselves primarily with cattle raising and producing food to provision the Spanish ships and troops passing through the port of Havana. Until the sugar boom of the 18th and 19th centuries, slavery was a fairly minor institution on the island.
Mulattoes never established themselves as key actors in the Cuban economy. The Cuban mulatto population grew not from the slaveholders' economic needs, but from the desire of the Spanish Crown to people the colony as thickly as possible in order to ward off the territorial pretensions of the French and British. Only a small though visible percentage of mulattoes migrated to Havana, where limited opportunities as artisans and small merchants awaited them.
The absolute number of Cuban mulattoes always remained relatively small. Unlike Portugal, which was hard-pressed to send migrants to Brazil, Spain provided a small but steady flow of settlers to Cuba before 1800. By the end of the 18th century, free nonwhites accounted for only about 20 percent of Cuba's population. Numbering far fewer than whites and lacking a sizable, skilled, literate urban contingent, Cuban mulattoes remained vulnerable both socially and politically.
Immediately after the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, Cuba's sugar industry began to prosper, requiring hundreds of thousands of slaves. By mid-century, free nonwhites, mainly mulattoes, numbered just over 200,000, only half the number of slaves on the island and a quarter of the whites. These ratios spelled political trouble for the mulattoes. The sudden influx of slaves at the very moment that slavery was being abolished in much of the hemisphere — as well as Cuba's geographic proximity to Haiti — made Cuban slaveholders more than a little nervous.
The planters were haunted by the specter not just of a slave revolution, but of a mulatto-led slave revolution. As far as the Cuban elite was concerned, the events in Haiti were the handiwork of mixed-bloods who had been coddled by the decadent French. In 1845 Vicente Queipo, attorney general of Cuba, declared in no uncertain terms that Cuba's leaders had learned "the severe lesson of the neighboring island of Santo Domingo, whose loss depended a great deal on the close intimacy in which the white inhabitants of the French part lived with their slaves, and the numerous colored population resulting from this foreboding association."
Regardless of the accuracy of this perception of Haitian history, it led to a full-scale attack on the rights of mulattoes. An 1809 decree banned freedpeople and mulattoes from teaching at or attending Cuban schools, followed soon after by laws prohibiting them from owning land, serving in the militia, and traveling without special passes. The most dramatic change, and undoubtedly the cruelest blow, was the government's reclassification of mulattoes after 1841 as belonging to the same category as blacks: gente de color. This act accelerated other laws restricting interracial marriage, so that by the 1860s all interracial marriages were prohibited.
Such antimulatto legislation and color classifications left an indelible mark on the consciousness of the mixed-blood population. In the Cespedes Rebellion of 1868, which called for the end of Spanish rule and freedom for the slaves, one observer estimated that two-thirds of the fighting men were "of color other than black, all shades of brown predominating". These were men of little means, who, in contrast to the mulattoes of Brazil, owned no slaves. Ten years later, in yet another revolt that included the call for abolition, the so-called Guerra Chiquita (Little War), mulattoes again figured prominently.
The end of slavery in 1886, however, did not bring about an improvement in the condition of mulattoes. Throughout the 1890s, in Havana and the sugar-producing areas, mulattoes continued to be victims of the same racism as blacks.
In Brazil throughout much of the 20th century, mulattoes identified their ultimate interest as incorporation into, rather than rejection of, the established system of race relations. This identification did not prevent many of them from keenly resenting their exclusion from the highest echelons of power, a resentment periodically translated into mulatto-based social and political organizations. Such groups, however, have characteristically avoided calling for a distinct black identity, aiming instead to improve chances for assimilation. The Brazilian Negro Front of the 1930s insisted in one of its publications that "the problem of the Brazilian Negro is that of definitive, total integration of the Negro in all aspects of Brazilian life."
Brazilian mulattoes often redirected their resentment away from dominant whites and toward other vulnerable groups, a tendency reinforced by job competition with foreign immigrants. In the 1930s mulatto newspapers adopted a virulently antiforeign, anti-immigrant stance, as when O Clarim the Alvorada denounced "the colonies of foreigners, who organize themselves and discriminate." Nearly all of the limited number of mulatto politicians active in the last generation adopted similar postures, doing their best to blend into mainstream party politics and avoid being pulled into the political orbit of the small but growing Black Consciousness Movement.
By contrast, a strong mulatto and black political movement emerged in Cuba at the beginning of the 20th century. The Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Party of Color; PIC) was founded in 1908. Unlike the Black Brazilian Front, the PIC demonstrated sensitivity to the concerns of rural dark-skinned blacks by calling for land distribution to poor tenants in the densely black province of Oriente. In 1912 PIC leaders led rural blacks in a revolt against the white oligarchy. In the hysterical repression that followed, more than 3000 blacks and mulattoes lost their lives. The slaughter seared the consciousness of Cuban mulattoes in ways entirely unknown to people of color in Brazil. The memory of the massacre was still alive in small villages in Oriente Province as recently as 1968.
In the aftermath of the bloodshed, urban blacks and mulattoes limited their demands to the urban area, yet they continued to work together toward achieving common objectives. The Organización Celular Asteria, formed in the 1930s, argued that "since half of all Cubans were Negroid, the same percentage of government jobs must be held by Afro-Cubans." Also in the 1930s, the Committee for the Rights of the Negro brought blacks and mulattoes together to fight racist employment policies and to demonstrate against segregation at public beaches and parks. Given such a strong nonassimilationist political tradition, it is not surprising that in the 1950s blacks and mulattoes joined the Communist Party in droves.
The jury is still out on the impact of the Cuban Revolution on race relations in that country. The revolution did eliminate the visible, legal pillars of racism, and it seems to have enjoyed the support of poor blacks and mulattoes. Declaring its own version of racial democracy, the government has made race and racism taboo subjects, and no race-based political movements (or any other for that matter) have been allowed to emerge.
Brazil, on the other hand, has witnessed the emergence of an entirely new kind of black movement over the past two decades. Though still largely middle-class, intellectual, and mulatto-based, the Black Consciousness Movement no longer calls for assimilation, but rather black pride and power. Buried in Brazilian whites' strategy of selective privilege — generally successful in dividing mulattoes from blacks, thereby conquering them both — lies the seed of its own destruction. Put simply, while white society holds out the promise of acceptance to mulattoes, it fails to fulfill it.
My barroom companion Manuel once told me, "There is a saying in Brazil: If you're not white, you're black. That's not really true, you know. Here you can be other things. Like me. I'm a moreno [brown]. But to a white man, I'm a moreno only if he likes me. If he doesn't like me, I'm a mulatto, or I'm even a preto [black]. They play a game, you know? I guess the real saying should be, If you're not white, you lose." Herein lies a glimmer of the consciousness that has led an entire generation of mulattoes to become activists in black consciousness movements, a process that has begun to undermine the hold of the myth of racial democracy.
From NACLA Report on the Americas 25, no. 4 (February 1992): 40-45. Copyright 1997 by the North American Congress on Latin America, 475 Riverside Dr., #454, New York, NY 10115-0122. Used with permission.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® Reference Library 2005.
A NICE READ FROM ANOTHER THREAD: DOES THIS GO ON STILL IN...
Re: A NICE READ FROM ANOTHER THREAD: DOES THIS GO ON STILL I
Very interesting read.
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elmatador447
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