Against
Post-Race? A Review of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Book on ‘Black in Latin America’
“All race,
all racism, just like politics, is local ” – Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (p. 88)
Chambi Chachage
Henry
Louis Gates, Jr.’s 259-paged book on Black in Latin America, published in 2011 by the New York University Press, is an
intriguing travelogue on ‘race’. It has six main chapters, each bearing the
name of one of the countries that the author visited as its title. The author
began his journey sometime in February 2010 as an attempt at understanding “the
many ways in which race and racism are configured differently in Latin America
than they have been in the United States” (p. ix). Of particular interest to
the author, who chose each of the six countries – Brazil, Mexico, Peru, the Dominican
Republic, Haiti, and Cuba – “as representative of a larger phenomenon” (p. 2), is
their varied African-cum-Black presence and experience.
Like
its accompanying documentary series that is a third in a trilogy, the book is
methodologically informed by the “Tri-Continental Approach” that it attributes
to Robert Thompson Farris. This approach takes the “points of the Atlantic
triangular trade: Africa, the European colonies of the Caribbean and South
America, and black America” (pp. 2-3) as the “cardinal points of the Black
World” (p. 2). In this regard, of course, one can critique it as privileging,
or rather, emphasizing the history of the ‘Black Atlantic’ at the expense of that
of the ‘Indian Ocean World’ in making sense of the African presence in the
world in the context of slavery, colonialism and racism.
Chapter
one on “Brazil: ‘May Exú Give Me The
Power of Speech’” is a critique of “Gilberto Freyre’s theory of Brazil as a unique
racial democracy” (p. 14); celebration of “compelling cultural products of Pan-African
culture in the New World” (p. 16); and affirmation of “Affirmation action – by
which [he] mean taking into account ethnicity, class, religion, and gender as
criteria for college admission” (p. 56-57).
The Brazil that the author knew before – and no
doubt experienced in – his visit is “also a place of contradictions” (p. 16).
It “received more Africans” (p. 13) than any other places in the Northern
hemisphere yet it was the last country therein “to abolish slavery” and “the
first to claim it was free of anti-black racism” (p. 16). The country “remains
one of the most racially mixed countries on earth” yet it has “at least 134
categories of ‘blackness’ (Ibid.). Since in “ a sense, this book is a study of
the growth and demise of the sugar economy in many of these countries, along with
that of coffee and tobacco” (p. 10) and
sugar “is the leitmotif of the book” (p. 18), the author traces how it
impacted, in varying ways, the expansion of slavery and experience of slaves across
time and space thus coloring the construction of race and institutionalization
of racism. Even though the answers he got about the difference between slavery
in the US and Brazil “were complex” (p. 19) the author seems to acknowledge, on
the basis of his interviews and studies, that generally there are places in
Brazil that slavers were treated relatively humanely than in others. True as it
is this understanding is a fodder for critics who are so adamant that ‘slavery
is slavery’, that is, it is simply inhumane.
Chapter
two on “Mexico: ‘The Black Grandma in the Closest’” continues Gates, Jr.’s
interrogation on why, despite that Latin America received more slaves than the
United States of America, blackness generally tended to be buried. Ironically,
as the author later discovered, black is located by way of denigration in a
popular Mexican lottery card game. As one of his interviewees “explained the
history of racial classification within her own family”, Gates, Jr. “nodded in
recognition of a larger phenomenon, one that” he had thus “encountered
throughout” his “research in Latin America”: “Just as I had in Brazil, I was
encountering here in Mexico a society in which traces of black roots were
buried in brownness. Blackness was okay, if it was part of a blend, an
ingredient that doesn’t exactly disappear but that is only rendered present
through a trace, a hint, a telltale sign” (p. 66). The intersection between
class and race – and even gender – also features prominently in Mexico as this
analysis indicates:
In
mixed-race societies, color is used, in part, to mark class. You see it in
Africa, in India, in Asia, throughout the Americas. And this fact contains
another – something I’ve also seen over and over again: It is very tempting to
hide one’s blackness in a mixed-race culture…. From inside a culture that
actively works to whiten itself – as Brazil had done and as I learned Mexico
had done – claiming African heritage isn’t always easy, especially when your
skin color and physical characteristics don’t look African to others (p. 67).
The
author also uses the case of Mexico to strongly argue against erasing race as
an official category in census among other records since, for him, doing so
does not necessarily eradicate racism. In other words, he does not see
‘post-race’, or what may be termed ‘color blindness’, as a way out racism.
After getting a pleasant surprise of getting to know that the second president of
Mexico in 1829, Vicente Ramón Guerrero
Saldaña, descended from Africans the author was thus disappointed after also
being told that his well-meaning attempt to create a post-racial society
resulted in unintended consequences that continue to inform their ambivalence
on blackness:
I had encountered this logic in Brazil and would in
Peru as well. The idea about abolishing the recording of color differences, as
we might expect, was intended to facilitate the elimination of privileges tied
to these color differences…. I recognized the well-meaning spirit behind
Guerrero’s actions. He had yearned to create a society beyond race, to act as
if race didn’t matter. This same idea gave birth to the idea of racial
democracy in Brazil. But denying roots is different from respecting them
equally. Guerrero, with the best intentions, inadvertently took an action that
helped, over time, to bury his own African ancestry and that aspect of genetic
heritage of every Afro-Mexican who followed him (p. 77-78).
But
if race is a social construct that is used to institutionalize racism why cling
to it?
Chapter
three on “Peru: ‘The Blood of the Incas, the Blood of the Mandingas’” has some
of the most touching personal testimonies on how people of ‘darker hue’ tend to
discover and juggle their blackness. One will read a story of Susan Baca, the
“young, but demonstrably talented teenager, unfairly overlooked in a dance
competition” because of her blackness but who “had grown into a noble woman who
knew her own value – and, in the process, had become a national treasure” (p.
93-94). Therein one will also read the story of Ana and Juana, “proud, happy
women doing right by the next generation” (p. 107) that they don’t want to see
pick cotton like them. It is in this chapter that one encounters such a strong
case for writing as activism against racism:
Seeing
El Negro Mama [‘The Stupid Negro’] sent a shock through my bank of anti-black
stereotypes. It made Memín
Pinguín seem almost tame by comparison… I’d seen some racist things on TV as a
child: Buckwheat and Stymie from Our Gang
and, of course, Amos and Andy. But I’d never seen anything as racist as El
Negro Mama…. ‘Why did it come back?’ I blurted. This story is unbelievable.
‘They said we are attacking free speech.’ she replied. ‘So now, we’re trying to
organize an international campaign against El Negro Mama, including institution
from the US too, of course.’ I told her she could sign me right up” (p.
112-113).
Chapter
four on “The Dominican Republic: ‘Black behind the Ears’” is a sobering
analysis of how “over 90 percent of Dominicans possess some degrees of African
descent” yet few people “self-identify as black or negro; rather, wide majority of Dominicans – 82 percent most
recently in a federal census – designate their race as ‘Indio’” (p. 120). One
of the main reasons for this, the travelogue indicates, is the uneasy historical
relationship with its neighbor within the Island, Haiti. In line with his focus
on sugar the author, in collaboration with his interviewees, also locates these
varying racial dynamics and their respective slavery patterns in the historical
changes of the political economy that shifted to cattle ranching in the
Dominican Republic.
Since
Haiti ultimately replaced it as a booming sugar economy when the United States
of America occupied both countries after World War I, thousands of Haitians
were brought to the Dominican Republic to work on the plantations thus
exacerbating the racial animosity between the countries that also had to do
with the fact that they were colonized by two different European powers – Spain
and France. For the author, however, “the cultural relation and the relation of
identity between the Dominican Republic and Spain, at least symbolically,
seemed, at times, to have been almost incestuous” (p. 126). It was thus easy
for Dominicans to identify more with ‘white’.
Chapter
five on “Haiti: ‘From My Ashes I rise; God is My Cause and My Sword’” is a passionate,
almost conventional, defense of a nation that “had technically been independent
since 1804” but one that “foreign powers never gave it a chance to flourish,
free from their interference” and in “fact, all they did was punish, sabotage,
and abuse” (p. 175-176) it. Of course the author, in collaboration with one of
his interviewees, acknowledges that the reasons for Haiti’s problems are also internal.
But for him, as it is for some if not many of us now, the United States of
America is one of the main culprits. However, the author makes this curious
observation when he laments why Haiti abandoned, wholesale, its political
economy of sugar: “If they had just maintained the plantation system, Haiti
would have been rich – it would have become one of the world’s richest
economies” (p. 173). Interestingly, upon reminding himself of the “pain of
slavery”, he thus retracts: “ Only truly inhuman circumstances could have compelled
Haitian to abandon their country’s best chances for success, which would have
been to maintain their level of sugar production, soon to be assumed by Cuba”
(Ibid.). It was a painful, albeit
rational, choice that one author thus aptly captures and which explains why we
ought not demonize ‘subsistence farmers’:
Following
the Revolution, Haitian workers sought an end to the plantation system and the
assurance that they would never return to the backbreaking work of sugar
cultivation or to the indignities of cane field overseers. As a result, many
ex-slaves abandoned the estates, which were almost all in the hands of the
state by 1806, and turned to the practice of squatting on vacant lands…. They
cultivated subsistence crops and picked and marketed coffee beans from existing
bushes according to local needs…. Those ex-slaves who were able to secure title
to plots of land by virtue of their military service followed similar economic
patterns. In this way, squatters and landowning ex-slaves established
subsistence culture as their primary mode of existence while also making
possible limited export economy (Mary A.
Renda, 2001, on Taking Haiti: MilitaryOccupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 p. 48).
Chapter
six on “Cuba: The Next Cuban Revolution’” is both a critique of the failure of
the Cuban Revolution of 1959 to continue its then promising reversal of the
effects of institutional racism and the role of the U.S. occupation in blocking
a historic social movement for racial equality there. In the case of the latter
the author observed that even though “Cuba had successfully banned institutional
racism against people based on the color of their skin” (p. 220) he “found an
informal racism that is pervasive, internalized by some white people and even
by some black people” (p. 221). In the case of the latter Gates, Jr. notes that
he “was deeply troubled by how far US intervention reached into the history of
Cuba’s race relations” for the “country’s nascent black-equality movement was
suppressed before it even had a chance to take root in a nation made
independent to a considerable degree by the sacrifices and courage of black
men” (p. 187). For him a revolution driven by youth is underway.
Thus
the answers to “the most important question that” Gates, Jr.’s “book attempts
to explore” i.e. “what does it mean to be ‘black’ in these countries? Who is
considered ‘black’ and under what circumstances and by whom in these
societies?’ indeed “varied widely across Latin America in ways that will
surprise most people in the United States, just as they surprised” (p. 3) him. However,
one may be tempted to think that by emphasizing these variations as captured in
the epigraph above the author is understating the impact of race constructed as
a global category and racism as a worldwide system of oppression. Racism is
local. But it is also global. The localization is part of its globalization. And
as the author puts it in the case of Cuba after noting in all the countries he
visited that generally blacks are poorer: “ If you really think blacks are
equal to whites and as capable as they are, don’t you have to question what
keeps them in poverty?” (p. 218). Or as he put is slightly differently in
Mexico: “Why, in every mixed-race society, is black always on the bottom?” (p.
66)
