Indigenous people and African descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean have long been affected by a social hierarchy established by elites, through which some groups were racialized and others were normalized. Far from being “racial paradises” populated by an amalgamated “cosmic race” of mulattos and mestizos, Latin America and the Caribbean have long been sites of shifting exploitative strategies and ideologies, ranging from scientific racism and eugenics to the more sophisticated official denial of racism and ethnic difference. This book, among the first to focus on African descendants in the region, brings together diverse reflections from scholars, activists, and funding agency representatives working to end racism and promote human rights in the Americas. By focusing on the ways racism inhibits agency among African descendants and the ways African-descendant groups position themselves in order to overcome obstacles, this interdisciplinary book provides a multi-faceted analysis of one of the gravest contemporary problems in the Americas.
Indigenous people and African descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean have long been affected by a social hierarchy established by elites, through which some groups were racialized and others were normalized. Far from being “racial paradises” populated by an amalgamated “cosmic race” of mulattos and mestizos, Latin America and the Caribbean have long been sites of shifting exploitative strategies and ideologies, ranging from scientific racism and eugenics to the more sophisticated official denial of racism and ethnic difference. This book, among the first to focus on African descendants in the region, brings together diverse reflections from scholars, activists, and funding agency representatives working to end racism and promote human rights in the Americas. By focusing on the ways racism inhibits agency among African descendants and the ways African-descendant groups position themselves in order to overcome obstacles, this interdisciplinary book provides a multi-faceted analysis of one of the gravest contemporary problems in the Americas.
Afrodescendants, Identity, and the Struggle for Development in the Americas
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Overview
Indigenous people and African descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean have long been affected by a social hierarchy established by elites, through which some groups were racialized and others were normalized. Far from being “racial paradises” populated by an amalgamated “cosmic race” of mulattos and mestizos, Latin America and the Caribbean have long been sites of shifting exploitative strategies and ideologies, ranging from scientific racism and eugenics to the more sophisticated official denial of racism and ethnic difference. This book, among the first to focus on African descendants in the region, brings together diverse reflections from scholars, activists, and funding agency representatives working to end racism and promote human rights in the Americas. By focusing on the ways racism inhibits agency among African descendants and the ways African-descendant groups position themselves in order to overcome obstacles, this interdisciplinary book provides a multi-faceted analysis of one of the gravest contemporary problems in the Americas.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628951639 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2012 |
| Series: | Ruth Simms Hamilton African Diaspora |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Bernd Reiter is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of South Florida and has worked as a social worker and NGO consultant in Colombia and Brazil.
Kimberly Eison Simmons is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies, Director of the Latin American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina, and past president of the Association of Black Anthropologists.
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Afro-Descendants, Identity, and the Struggle for Development in the Americas
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2012 Michigan State UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-040-5
Chapter One
PART 1The Black Atlantic Reexamined
Building Black Diaspora Networks and Meshworks for Knowledge, Justice, Peace, and Human Rights
Faye V. Harrison
If intellectuals, especially those based within academic settings, attempt to align their scholarship with the dismantling of racism in its multiple modalities and entanglements with other inequalities, then it is imperative that they collaborate in building alliances. Grassroots activists, practitioners within nongovernmental organizations, philanthropists, and other parties with varying stakes in racial justice can potentially work together in coalitions of knowledge and mobilization promoting human rights and patterns of development based on principles of economic and environmental justice. Scholarship for transformations of this sort cannot be limited to conversations in which academics talk mainly to themselves, invoking the most recent theoretical trends in endogamous and, largely, elitist terms. Appropriating a language of power and change when largely disengaged from the high-stakes, life-and-death struggles around the world does nothing to bring about substantive change. The particular struggles with which this chapter as well as the others in this book are most immediately concerned are those among people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. The cultural and political-economic geography of this part of the Americas is a dynamic zone of historicity, pluriculturality, power, and intellectual engagement that informs our thinking about both the usefulness and the limitations of "Diaspora" and "Black Atlantic" (Gilroy 1993) as conceptual and intercommunity organizing tools.
Exemplars of Activist-Academic Partnerships
In spring 2010, the University of South Florida's Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean hosted the international conference "Reexamining the Black Atlantic: Afro Descendants Still at the Bottom?" That dynamic meeting was organized around the participation of activists, development practitioners, and philanthropists. It emphasized the importance of developing a sustainable academic–community partnership through which research would service the capacity-building needs and objectives of grassroots communities, organizations, and movements. This approach to concerted action speaking louder than words alone made the conference and its follow-up activities somewhat akin to participatory activist scholarship projects, such as the following exemplars:
• The Global Afro-Latino and Caribbean Initiative (GALCI), based at Hunter College and the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York and organized "to foster cross-border Afro-Latino initiatives ... and facilitate contact with multilateral agencies and progressive private foundations" (Turner 2002, 32).
• The Caribbean Central American Research Council (CCARC), an interdisciplinary consultancy nonprofit organization linked to the University of Texas, Austin's activist anthropology program, specifically the collaborative, activist research that Edmund T. Gordon, Charles R. Hale, and their interdisciplinary associates have undertaken along the Atlantic/circum-Caribbean coasts of Nicaragua and Honduras among indigenous, Afro-indigenous Garifuna, and (Afro-descendant) Creole organizations to document and gain "legal recognition of" their communal land claims (e.g., Gordon, Gurdián, and Hale 2003).
• The collaborative "decolonial" and "undisciplinary" framework-building work that has emerged from the approach to development and social movements in which University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill's Arturo Escobar (2008) is a pivotal figure—exemplary of a critical mode of knowledge production and application with significant epistemological as well as practical implications.
A leading proponent of "world anthropologies" (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006) that are not subjugated or marginalized by the North Atlantic metropolitan regime of social sciences, Escobar has partnered activist research with Pacific Coast ethnic groups, notably Afro-Colombians. This paradigm-shifting project has placed subaltern, Afro-diasporic ontologies and epistemologies in the foreground as legitimate and necessary sources of knowledge that can inform interventions against the assaults of state, corporate, and insurgent-sanctioned violence; and against unjustly conceived and implemented mega-development projects. Mismanagement and environmental degradation are not uncommonly integral to these profits-over-people enterprises. In those exploitative contexts, the rights to free enterprise and free markets by any means necessary are effectively elevated over the purportedly universal rights of human beings. When the people targeted are racialized as black, and, hence, have been subjected to a historically deep regime of radical alterity or "otherness," their lives, cultures, and knowledges are too often devalued in terms of a categorical infrahumanity (Bogues 2006; Wynter 2002, 2003). Moreover, their lives are subjected to the realpolitik of what João Costa Vargas, drawing on Nancy Scheper-Hughes's thinking on the everyday expressions of violence and genocide, has described as the genocidal continuum characterizing Black diasporic predicaments (Vargas 2008; Scheper-Hughes 2000, 2002; Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes 2004).
All three of these projects, exemplars of sorts, draw upon skills and resources within universities, but beyond these, they are organized around epistemological and political partnerships designed to further the objectives of Afro-descendant (and in some cases indigenous) social movements. Although projects such as these are not altogether new, within the past decade or so they have assumed greater salience and urgency. Race-conscious identities, social action, and political mobilization have proliferated and intensified throughout the Americas, and, in fact, all over the world (Harrison 1995, 2005; Mullings 2005). This is in large part an outcome of deepening human-rights crises around the globe—a trend, I have argued (Harrison 2002), that stems from the negative, disjunctive impact that global restructuring under its neoliberal guise has had in many parts of the world, both in the North and the South. I acknowledge, however, that globalization should not be seen monolithically, and that some of its dimensions have created important new opportunities for some Afro-descendant sectors (e.g., see Ulysse 2007 on Jamaican informal commercial importers [ICIs]). Nonetheless, substantive human rights, understood in the most robust, holistic terms, appear to be in increased jeopardy at this moment of deregulated marketization, privatization, and capital accumulation—a moment when disparities of wealth, health, life expectancy, and military power are growing both at the global level and within nations. Feminist activists and scholars often point out how women and girls suffer the brunt of this vulnerability to deepening poverty, and its implications for education, health, and political participation (Gunewardena and Kingsolver 2007). I have also made a version of this argument in some of my own writings (Harrison 2004, 2009). Intellectuals concerned with race and racism must demonstrate how—in gender-varied ways—racially subjugated peoples, the majority of whom face structural obstacles to accumulating net assets (i.e., wealth) and to securing the means of subsistence to meet basic needs, also bear the brunt of these forces, which subject them to multiple modalities and assaults of structural violence (Harrison 1997, 2008; Farmer 2003, 2004; Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes 2004). In view of these conditions, racially subordinated peoples have been compelled to take collective action in their defense and in affirmation of their dignity as human beings. They are claiming their rights as full citizens of nation-states and, beyond the limits of national location, as agents of change and public well-being who have risen to the challenge and imperative of operating on a global terrain.
Antiracism, Human Rights, and International Conferences
International and regional conferences have also contributed to Afro-descendants' recent trends in activism. The United Nations has especially played a catalytic role by providing transnational and global spaces for dialogue and concerted action. UN-facilitated discourse and action have fostered the development of networks, as well as inspired the more "self-organizing, decentralized, and nonhierarchical 'meshworks'" (Escobar 2008, 11) among activists, and the extra-academic partnerships in support of their struggles.
The activities within these arenas have given greater international visibility and legitimacy to local and regional grievances. Through these activities, strategies and plans of action for promoting justice, peace, and human rights are devised that give antiracist activists the moral leverage and organizational capacity to more effectively lobby states and multinational agencies, holding them accountable to the norms and standards set by international law and reinforced by the declarations and plans of action that come out of UN prepcoms (preparatory conferences), world conferences, and, in their wake, post-conference review sessions.
There are many UN conferences and parallel nongovernment organizational (NGO) forums that have been relevant to the lives and struggles of Afro-descendants, but the main ones to which I am referring are those related to the Third World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR) held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. The 2000 Santiago Declaration (officially titled the Draft Declaration and Plan of Action at the Regional Conference of the Americas), drafted in preparation for the WCAR Declaration and Plan of Action, was historic for recognizing the transatlantic slave trade and enslavement as a crime against humanity whose legacy persists in the "widespread poverty and marginalization" (Turner 2002, 32) that peoples of African descent suffer throughout the hemisphere today. The accord reached in Santiago also led to the acceptance of the umbrella terms "Afro-descendant" and "Afro-Latino" as political categories for denoting all people of African descent, no matter the degree of admixture or their position in the color continuum or complex "racial calculus" (Harris 1970). As Lovell and Wood's research (1998), among that of many others, has shown, statistical data on life expectancy, employment distribution, income, educational attainment, health, and criminal (in)justice status indicate that mulattos have more in common with blacks than with whites, who, on average, are more advantaged along these indices. The data show that even middle-class blacks and mulattos face discrimination, causing them to fall behind whites in many of these indices. This evidence belies the "mulatto escape hatch" (Degler 1971) accepted by earlier generations of scholars.
For purposes of political expediency and for the sake of building a united front for combating racism and related intolerances, an Afro-descendant consciousness and solidarity assumed a central position on the hemispheric and global stage for anti-racist human rights. At the June 2001 prepcom in Geneva right before the Durban WCAR, Afro-descendants joined forces with African delegates to form the African and African Descendants Caucus (Turner 2002, 32). The strength of the caucus led to the final NGO and conference documents characterizing slavery as a crime against humanity and recommending that reparations be seriously considered.
In its vision and praxis, African descendants' antiracism has both discursively and politically shifted the boundaries of human rights beyond the limits of mainstream liberal democratic notions of rights, which frequently upstage and sometimes even deny economic, social, and cultural rights as universal human rights, or as rights at all. This is so despite the fact that, along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Bill of Rights includes the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both of which are treaties of which many nation-states are signatories. But de jure agreements and legalities do not necessarily translate into substantive realities protected by compliance with and enforcement of the law, be it national or international. If we confuse or conflate the de jure with the de facto, we can easily buy into the argument that we have already achieved an Obama-era "postracial" society in the United States, and progressive multicultural orders in those Latin American countries in which the ethnic distinctiveness of indigenous and African-descended peoples have come to be recognized constitutionally and legislatively.
The 1993 passage of Law 70 in Colombia granted Afro-Colombian communities collective land titles and the right to manage the resources found within those biodiversity- rich territories, but unfortunately, it has not effectively protected Afro-Colombian communities in the Pacific region from the encroachment of mega-development projects, and from the violence of the military, paramilitary forces, insurgent guerrillas, and narco-traffickers, resulting in mass displacement of the population, declining subsistence security, and declining health, with women, children, and the elderly being especially vulnerable (Escobar 2008; Wade 1993, 357; Jordan 2008; TransAfrica Forum 2008).
Paradoxically, the desperate economic marginality of these communities has led many young adults to seek the resources that come from joining the army, the paramilitias, and drug traffickers. In opposition to this self-defeating dependence, peace communities that refuse to take sides with any of the armed encroachers have been mobilized (Angel-Ajani 2008). Women's activism has been central to this political project. Unfortunately, this heroic movement of nonviolence has not received as much exposure in global media circuits as the Civil Rights Movement did fifty years ago. However, a greater degree of visibility has started to emerge.
The 2000 Santiago prepcom, the 2001 WCAR, and most recently the Durban Review in April 2009, along with all the research and lobbying done by the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent and the Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, have helped to create more of a climate of support for African-descended people's initiatives at home and across transnational fields of engagement, solidarity, and visibility. As J. Michael Turner (2002) has pointed out, Afro-Latinos probably gained more from WCAR-related events and activities than any other African or Afro-descendant group.
From the vantage point of U.S. foreign policy, the relative effectiveness of their engagements is reflected in the increased visibility and higher priority that Afro-Latin Americans have achieved in the lobbying of the TransAfrica Forum African American lobby, the advocacy of the Black Congressional Caucus, and the reformulation of policy in the U.S. Congress. For example, the Congressional Research Service (CRS 2008) has produced a major report for members of Congress who provide input into foreign policy, determining USAID and Peace Corps objectives and defining the agenda of multilateral development banks (e.g., Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank). Although the United States has never officially participated in any of the three WCARs, the report contains a section on the impact of Durban and regional conferences, acknowledging their international sociopolitical significance. Despite its demonstrated ambivalence toward hemispheric and world antiracisms, the U.S. government has had to make adjustments in response to what has, in effect, become a "racial report card" for monitoring multilateral development agencies such as the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (Turner 2002, 33). This new trend came out of the lobbying efforts of solidarity networks facilitated by GALCI, which strongly recommended that development projects within Afro-descendant communities be closely evaluated, critiqued, and, when necessary, redesigned in ways that promote those communities' general well-being and seriously take into account gender equity and child/youth development. The 2008 Congressional Review Service (CRS) report, in anticipation of the UN Durban Review Conference, includes a brief description of the Inter-Agency Consultation on Race in Latin America, a donor consortium with representation from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, Inter-American Foundation, the British Department for International Development, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), OAS Commission on Human Rights, and Ford Foundation. The work of the Inter-Agency Consultancy, founded in 2000 and operative until 2009 (personal communication, Linda Borst Kolko, 29 April 2010), demonstrates that Afro-Latin Americans are no longer invisible, as Minority Rights Group International demonstrated quite a while ago (Minority Rights Group 1995). Afro-Latin Americans have made their way into the agenda of U.S. foreign policy, which has historically been driven by what international-relations scholar Robert Vitalis (2000) characterizes as a longstanding, unspoken "norm against noticing race" (Harrison 2002, 56). The insistence among Afro-Latin Americans that race seriously matters and that racism exists in their societies can no longer be ignored. However, there is still the need to be critically vigilant of what the new foreign and national policies actually mean, what the effects of neoliberal multicultural regimes are on the ground, and whether these legislative and developmental reforms are sufficient for Afro-descendant well-being and empowerment. My sense, based on critiques of the new multiculturalisms with their double-edged sword of expanding the space for citizenship while sustaining the overall nexus of power (Hale 2005, 2006), is that they are absolutely necessary but insufficient. This is especially true if the goal of restructured governance is to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice that is wedded to expanded, substantive forms and expressions of citizenship and human rights.
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