Anti-racism. Thinking and praxis from an Afro-Latin American perspective

About the Book

Anti-racism. Thinking and praxis from an Afro-Latin American perspective is an unprecedented collective work in the Argentine publishing scene, the first ever compilation to bring together Afro-descendant intellectuals, activists, and community leaders from across the region—Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Argentina—to think about racism not as an anomaly from the past but as a structural device still in force. 

The book articulates technical rigor with political urgency. Its essays debunk the creole myths of “racial democracy” and the “melting pot”, expose multiculturalism as a potential form of dispossession, reclaim the Black feminism of Leila González and Beatriz Nascimento, and document Afro-Latin American mobilization processes that range from dance to the conquest of constitutional rights. The chapter by Federico Pita on Argentine “creole racism”—organized around the three pillars of invisibilization, denial, and foreignization—proposes an analytical model with remarkable global applicability: any society that thinks of itself as “post-racial” can see its reflection in these pages.

In times when denialism disguises itself as freedom of speech, this book does not seek comfort but transformation. A new and necessary voice in the international marketplace of ideas. 

Excerpt

Creole racism 

Argentina presents itself to the world as the whitest society in Latin America. This is not just a chromatic issue—it puts forward an idea of superiority that is not only racial, but also cultural. Part of our national narrative is rooted in the notion that we are an elevated society, a country with public universities, for example. Yet people of my skin color remain a minority in higher education, even though everybody knows we are the largest group outside of it.

No law prevents dark-skinned people, Afro-descendants, Indigenous people, or poor people from the provinces from attending university; instead, what operates is a meritocratic notion: that those who go are the ones who had the opportunity or the best prepared. Consequently, those who don’t make it are seen as less prepared or not hardworking enough. If we dismiss this idea, we’ll notice that racial categories are at play in individual biographies, and that the greatest responsibility lies with the State, which designs universal policy with no regard for a situation that, over time, generation after generation, ends up normalizing meritocracy as a valid and fair principle in society. 

To understand how racism is applied in our country—a phenomenon I term “creole racism”—we need to examine three essential aspects: invisibilization, denial, and foreignization.

Invisibilization:

In Argentina, we often imagine racism doesn’t exist—a belief tied to the idea that there are no Black Argentines. According to this naïve discourse, if there are no Black people, then there is no racism. This is why the murder of a Black man in the United States (such as that of George Floyd in 2020) has such an impact: because we gather that Black people and White racists exist in the United States.

In our country, the prevailing idea is that there is only one way to be a Black man or woman, defined by a certain chromatic palette. The stereotype is quite basic: a Black person should be dark-skinned, have afro hair and thick lips. Consider the school assembly commemorating May 25th, a ritual within the public sphere and one of the few occasions in which Blackness is talked about: we represent it by painting a kid’s face with burnt cork and portraying him as a (self-employed) street vendor.

I earned a degree in Political Science, and not a single Afro-descendant author appeared in the bibliography of any of the thirty-six courses that made up the program. The School of Social Sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires is diverse in terms of ideological perspectives, but in this respect—by action or omission—it ends up constructing a brutally racist curricula that conveys one statement: that we, Black people, are clueless. Yet there exists an immense library of male and female Black thinkers who address and problematize this reality.

Practices of this kind tend to invisibilize a certain part of the population. With the end of slavery and the foundation of the Republic—marked by the National Constitution of 1853—racism becomes more subtle and harder to identify. It conceals itself. During his presidency, Sarmiento introduced the concept of modern statistics in Argentina. The first censuses omit the racial category. Under the pretext of avoiding the racialization of our records, the designation “Black” was erased, while other categories such as “olive-skinned” were created, rendering origin and ethnic-racial identity invisible.

Indigenous people and Afro-descendants are specific political subjects. Stripped of their political, social, cultural, and historical discourses, their specificity is reduced to a chromatic question, and it then appears as if by accident that structural poverty disproportionately affects those with darker complexions.

In 1869, Argentine thinker Horacio Mendizábal wrote his final work shortly before he died at 24, a victim of the yellow fever epidemic. President Sarmiento had left Buenos Aires, and a Council of Notable Residents was appointed to make decisions in his absence. Mendizábal was one of the Council’s Secretaries. He left a piece of writing whose introduction, addressed to the President, challenges racism from Blackness itself, from his identity as an Afro-Argentine: 

Would you be horrified to see a Black man sitting in the Republic’s highest seat? And why, if he were as learned as the best of you, upright as the best of you, wise and honorable as the best of you? Only because the blood in his veins has been browned by the African sun upon his grandparents’ foreheads?

Would you be horrified to find in a Parliamentary seat one of those men you disdainfully insult by calling mulatto, only because the color of his forehead differs from yours? If that is what you think, then I feel shame for my people and regret their ignorance. 

This is what Horacio Mendizábal thought in 1869. We should be ashamed that his words remain relevant to this day.

Denial

Another subtle strategy to conceal creole racism is denial. It consists precisely in denying the very existence of Black people—and their status as social subjects—while reducing the whole of native peoples to a minority. In 1913, Joaquín V. González—thinker, politician, diplomat, and founder of several universities—delivered a speech before the National Congress in which he highlighted the importance of the census that was about to be carried out in Argentina:

When I speak about inferior races, I do so in full awareness, for I am not among those who claim that all men are equal, but in a political sense [...] Inferior races have fortunately been excluded from our organic whole; for one reason or another, we do not have Indians in significant numbers [...] We do not have Blacks; those introduced, in abundance[...] have also disappeared; they do not conform to our social fabric.

According to this remarkable politician, we, Afro-Argentines—through incompetence or lack of merit—have been extinguished. The task is not just to denounce Sarmiento or Joaquín V. González as racists—problematizing these figures helps us understand racism as an essential part of the historical narrative constructed by institutions. We were erased from statistics and historiographic discourse. A study conducted prior to the 2010 census noted that over two million Argentines, men and women, identified as belonging to that category. We didn’t disappear; they simply wanted to make us disappear.

 

 

Translated by Martín Juan - Edited by Alejandra Rogante