Resurfacing + More Brown & Black Brazilians + DR to Change Racial ID Categories + Rita Indiana's "Da Po La Do"

Surfacing finally and temporarily, from the bogs or thickets or trenches, or whatever is lined with pages and pages of prose! Today was the first day where I could actually take a long, deep breath and inhale the now chilly Chicago air. Over the next few days I'll try to finish the few stubs I began over the last few weeks, on many different topics, ranging from Christian Bök's visit to the university, to the most recent gathering of the Human Micropoem at Occupy Chicago.  And I'll try to finish my posts on some other thoughts as well.

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Brazilian actor Lázaro Ramos

I saw today, on Mediatakeout.com, of all places, a link to this BBC article announcing that in Brazil, based on 2010 census numbers, a majority of the population now defines itself as either Pardo (brown/mixed) or Preto (black), which is a remarkable milestone given that country's (like most of the hemisphere's) centuries-long history of racist-inflected racial formation.  Reggie H. sent me another link, from AtlanticCities, on the same news. Out of 190 million Brazilians, 91 million self-identified as white, 82 million as mixed race and 15 million as black. "Whites fell from 53.7% of the population in 2000 to 47.7% last year," while the number of people self-identifying as "black" rose from 6.2% to 7.6%, while the number self-identifying mixed-race people rose from 38.5% to 43.1%.  As the Atlantic's Nate Berg writes

Race campaigners welcomed the growing number of self-declared African-Brazilians, but the census also underlined how the vast social divide between Brazil's white and non-white populations persists.

The 2010 census – a massive operation which involved about 190,000 census takers visiting 58m homes – found that in major cities white inhabitants were earning about 2.4 times more than their black counterparts.

(I'm not sure what a "race campaigner" is, but consider the source.)

In Brazil, which has the largest numerical black population outside Africa, unlike the US, there was more open racial and ethnic mixing from the initial arrival of the Portuguese and other Europeans in 1500, and over subsequent decades wealth, social status and a wider array of racial classifications allowed people to escape the US's hypodescent (one-drop) rule.  Central to this system was a process of not just physiological but cultural embranqueamento (or whitening) long held sway, alongside a national ideology of Brazil as a "racial democracy," thus blunting attempts by black and brown Brazilians to counter racist and white supremacist discourse, or organize nationally around anti-racism in the ways that black people in the United States (or Haiti, during its colonial period), with its apartheid Jim Crow system, could.

Brazil has long had black and brown activists working to challenge the racism there, and as I noted this past May, one of its major 20th century figures, Abdias do Nascimento, passed away this year after a lifetime of battling the dominant overt and casual racism there.  As I wrote to some friends today, I wonder how much Brazil's national affirmative action policies, which have proved controversial but have gained acceptance, have played a role, but also how much the sustained civil rights and equality efforts by Afrobrazilians have affected self-identification. It also made me think about Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS series, Black in Latin America, which I also covered in May. He barely touched on the shifts in self-recognition, making me wonder whether when he was down there for his series, did no one apprise him of these changes, even in the absence of hard census figures?  Had he known of this shift, I wonder how different his Brazil episode might have looked. He did, however, explore the economic disparities which continue there, as they do here and elsewhere across the hemisphere.

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This news about Brazil, and Gates's reading of that country also reminded me of his treatment of race and blackness in the Dominican Republic.  While I won't gainsay his reading overall, I felt it could have been much more nuanced, based both on my readings of works on that country by Dominicans and Dominican Americans, but also on my experiences there. One thing I remember saying to myself after having gotten to know some Dominicans in the US was that I would never go down to DR and impose American views of anything on people there (I hold this view for every country), but also I would never expect people there to view themselves as "black" in the ways that black Americans do, especially given DR's agonistic and antagonistic history with Haiti. Yet having held to this view, more than once while in DR I have learned about the multiple and complex ways in which Dominicans there understand, address, perform, and inflect the concept of blackness. It is far more complex than Gates's or the standard readings and understandings of it, which tend to be static and often seem to overlook popular conceptions and formations concerning blackness.

One issue that Gates talked about--and fascinatingly to me, he seemed to act as if this were not an active discourse among black Americans--was the presence of the indio, or "Indian/Native American" racial-ethnic category.  According to the Dominican newspaper Listín Diario, however, the DR's Central Electoral Board (JCE) has sought "to classify Dominicans as mulattoes, blacks and whites, eliminating the traditional 'Indian' category." To achieve this shift, specialists from the Organization of American States and the JCE drew up a bill to reform Electoral Law 275-97, which will be presented for approval to the general assembly of the judges of the JCE prior to sending it to Congress. On their cédulas, or ID cards, Dominicans would have three categories--"white" (blanco), "mulatto/mixed race" (mulato), and "black" (negro)--to chose from.

I think it will be interesting to see the breakdowns if and when this policy goes into effect, since it involves racial/ethnic self-identification, but I told a friend who lives down there that no matter what, I think the last category will be the smallest. I am especially curious to see what the breakdown's are among younger Dominicans (and I see this with many of the younger Dominican baseball players in the Major Leagues, as with younger writers, musicians, etc. down there).

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Finally, speaking of DR, I was also reminded of Rita Indiana's video, for her new song "Da Pa Lo Do," that Anthony M. posted on his Monaga blog a month or so ago. Rita Indiana, a talented, out young poet, author, songwriter and musician, explores the idea of DR's border with Haiti, brotherhood and connection, and Hispaniola's insoluble roots. The video, which she made with her girlfriend and frequent collaborator Noelia Quintero, is quite beautiful, and do watch it if you can all the way to the end.



da pa lo do from Engel Leonardo on Vimeo.

Abdias do Nascimento RIP

Checking tweets before bed, I saw Tara Betts' note about and link to the New York Times obituary for Abdias do Nascimento (1914-2011, at left, photo by Bia Parreira), one of the extraordinary figures in Brazil's contemporary history. Nascimento advocate for the rights and cultural of Afro-Brazilians, and major contributor to that culture and the society.  A playwright, poet, scholar, teacher, artist, activist, and politician, Nascimento had never softened his voice in calling out Brazil's racism and countering its prevailing ideology, still dominant despite major intellectual and cultural shifts, of itself as a "racial democracy."

Among his many social, political, economic and cultural interventions were his founding of the Black Experimental Theater in Rio de Janeiro, in 1944, which became a site for the production and celebration of Afro-Brazilian dramaturgy and culture; his participation in the first Congress of Brazilian Blacks, in 1950, sponsored in part by the acting troupe, which staged one of Brazil's best known exports of the mid-century, Vinicius de Morães's Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus), which Marcel Camus adapted into the award-winning movie of the same name; and his role in the 1945 founding of the Afro-Brazilian Democratic Committee to free political prisoners held by the right-wing Vargas regime. Later he established the Ipeafro (Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Afro-brasileiros), the Institute for Afro-Brazilian Research and Study.

Nascimento spent nearly 20 years in exile after Brazil's 1964 military coup, living in the United States, where he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and in Nigeria, returning in the 1980s. Yet while in exile, he helped found the Democratic Labor Party of Brazil, and after the resumption of democracy he served as a federal deputy and senator, and as the Secretary for the Defense and Promotion of the Afro-Brazilian Populations in the State of Rio de Janeiro in during the 1991-94 term of Leonel Brizola.  As the New York Times writes, Nascimento gave one of his final interviews to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as part of Gates's Black in Latin America series on PBS, which I wrote about a few weeks back. You can watch the Brazil episode here.

A native of Franca, São Paulo, and a graduate of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies, and the Oceanography Institute, Nascimento authored many works, including Africans in Brazil: a Pan-African perspective (1997); Orixás: os deuses vivos da Africa (Orishas: the living gods of Africa in Brazil) (1995); Race and ethnicity in Latin America - African culture in Brazilian art (1994); Brazil, mixture or massacre? Essays in the genocide of a Black people (1989); Sortilege (1978); and Racial Democracy in Brazil, Myth or Reality?: A Dossier of Brazilian Racism (1977). He also founded the important journal Quilombo. If you read Portuguese, O Dia has posted an obituary here. Scholar Molefi Kete Asante wrote a tribute posted on Dialogues.

One of my great hopes was to meet Nascimento before he passed. I nevertheless have a small link to him; a few years back, I came into possession of several copies of K. Anthony Appiah's and Gates's magisterial Encyclopedia Africana, and it so turned out that a Brazilian correspondent mentioned that Nascimento might be interested in one, so I sent it to him and he brought it down to Nascimento. It was a small (but heavy) gift of tribute to an amazing figure, and I have always hoped that he had the opportunity even to flip through it once or twice, to see Aaron Myers's fine entry on him.

Henry Louis Gates's Black in Latin America

Gates talks with
Brazilian rapper,
MV Bill

Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s 4-part PBS series Black in Latin America, which ran for each of the last four Tuesdays, has concluded, and all of the episodes are available free online. I have deep respect for Gates as a scholar, intellectual leader and institution-builder, but I must admit that I was a bit wary about this series after I saw some of the pre-broadcast clips on The Root's website. Based on these trailers, my two main fears were that Gates might oversimplify things and that he would allow some of his presuppositions to overwhelm the discussion. For example, in the Brazil trailer, Gates, who has written extensively about race and racism, fails to disarticulate the differences between between Brazilian names for skin colors and racial categories and identities in Brazil, while also failing to historicize these categories or broach contemporary discussions of them. He even denies that the lighter-skinned man can be negro (black). Here we go...I thought. But this thankfully was only a snippet.

Musicians perform at the Toro de Patate

In fact, Gates's discussion of race, and in particular, of blackness and black people in 6 Latin American countries--Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru--turned out to be one of the best, concise introductions to the topic I've come across in a while. He not only did not oversimplify, but he repeatedly challenged some of his own assumptions. In the background for me always as these episodes unfolded were magisterial overviews like the late Leslie B. Rout Jr.'s The African Experience in Latin America (Cambridge, 1976; Wiener, 2003), John Thornton's Africa and Africans and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge, 1998), and George Reid Andrews' Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (Oxford, 2004), as well as numerous excellent historical, sociological, and other kinds of studies on the specific countries.  Given how little many Americans know about our own national history (histories)--given how much I myself am always learning about moments that I have previously studied, like the US Civil War, from the New York Times's Disunion Series--I did not expect even a handful of Gates' viewers to know much of what could be found in these or similar books, and it was clear that he didn't either. This lack of knowledge included, it was refreshingly clear at times, himself.

Gates in Cuba with the son music group, Septeto Típico de Sones

Each of the episodes ran for an hour, so Gates had to shoehorn quite a bit into a small slot, and given the long histories of each of these countries (Hispaniola's going back to 1492, let us not forget). In the cases of the DR and Haiti, and later Mexico and Peru, he split the episodes in half.  I still believe Haiti alone deserved an hour, and that this particular episode did not take into account more recent and popular racial self-representations among younger Dominicans. That said, Gates' overall presentation of the processes and dynamics of historical development, the role of economics and politics in racial and cultural formation (incluing discursively), and the effects of US hegemony, particularly in the Caribbean, illuminated a great deal about each of these countries and their societies.  He thoughtfully consulted scholars, archivists, and activists from each of the countries, sometimes bringing to light, through minor details, what 1000 words might not fully convey. To give one example, in visiting a museum that housed the late Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo's effects, he and the curator examined a large pot of white (rice?) powder that Trujillo used to whiten his skin. The pot was still nearly full, and its contents blindingly white--as I glimpsed it I thought of the well of racial self-loathing this man possessed, of his ghostly, murderous face looming before me, and a shiver ran up my spine as I considered what terror it must have struck in the eyes and backbones of the Dominicans, Haitians and others (like Venezuela's Rómulo Bettencourt, whom Trujillo attempted to assassinate).

Chebo Ballumbrosio and his family with Gates

The Cuban and Brazilian episodes were the best, in that Gates had the time to delve more deeply than most commentators do about each of these countries, debunking something I have seen up close, Cuba's myth of having abolished racism (officially, perhaps, yes, in reality, no) and Brazil's "racial democracy." In the case of Brazil, Gates started in Salvador da Bahia, the heart of black Brazil, but traveled to other cities--Rio de Janeiro and, quite surprisingly, Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, the huge, populous interior state built, from the 17th century onwards, on mining--to explore questions of blackness, race and racism.  Anyone watching would have grasped the complexities of Brazil's history, but also parallels with the US in terms of how economic activities, geography, and so on, affected the system and practice of slavery.  Most revelatory for me, perhaps because I was reminded of information I had forgotten, was his episode on Mexico, and its intrinsic but obscured black history. From the slave ports to its maroon societies to the role of black Mexicans in the country's liberation, I think it's fair to say that almost none of this history is known or even mentioned in the United States, and, as Gates suggested, remains obscure even to many (most?) Mexicans, save those direct or semi-direct descendants of the Africans in places like Veracruz and the Costa Chica. One of the many great flashes of insight during this episode occurred when an Afro-Mexican interlocutor suggested to Gates that it would be better for Jesse Jackson to forgo protesting about the racist Memín Penguín cartoon figure and to spend more time taking interesting and advocating for black Mexicans living in the United States! I think most Americans, including Mexican Americans, would be surprised to know that black Mexicans are living in the US, and thus facing the same issues as other Latino immigrants and other black Americans, let alone that there are (not just were) blacks in Mexico.  To moreover hear this uttered on television, to hear someone break the silence about a group over whom a veil of ignorance still lies, was startling in the best way.

Gates talk with Bernard Diederich at Haiti's Fort Dimanche

Seeing the parallels between all these countries is in itself quite illustrative; so too is to consider how far blacks in the United States have come, for a variety of reasons, long before the election of President Barack H. Obama, whose election is the result not only of the long black struggle for freedom but also of its effects on white Americans and, more broadly, everyone in this country.  What Gates' show suggested more than once, however, is that in some cases other countries, like Mexico, were ahead of us in terms of racial attitudes, far ahead of us, in some ways, and yet the struggles that black people are battling in these countries are perhaps now multiple generations behind where black Americans were a while ago. What his series suggested too was the ways in which the slave trade also impacted Africa, especially the western and southwestern regions of that continent, an aspect of our global and hemispheric histories that still does not merit enough attention or discussion.  Unfortunately, I doubt enough people will see these episodes to deepen knowledge either about the presence or experiences of black people in Latin America or change a great deal of public and private discussions about race, racism, blackness, immigration, or anything else. (I can hope, though.) Indeed, I don't think that a sizable enough number of black Americans, or Latinos who are not black, will watch these shows, let alone white people, though we all would benefit from knowing more about the histories of all of these societies, especially given how deeply implicated the US and its political, economic, social and cultural politics and policies have been in many of them (cf. DR, Haiti, Cuba, Mexico).  But I know that's unlikely to happen, and that particularly those in power will continue to speak and act from positions of gross, sometimes willful ignorance about such things, since they benefit from the ignorance and the divisions and diversions it sows. PBS, however, is doing us all a huge favor by making the videos freely available, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. has done us a tremendous favor by producing these informative gems at all.