No Longer Invisible

No Longer Invisible cont'd.

Comparative perspectives

There is no evidence to suggest that significant numbers of people of African ancestry anywhere in the Americas actively contemplate voting with their feet. However unsatisfactory existing conditions for those of their kind, they tend not to abandon their home countries to seek other national identities. How to explain this? Afros undoubtedly derive some benefit from the flexible system of racial designations. In postcolonial Latin America, blacks have not been the targets of physical lynchings and other racially motivated acts of violence. The de facto segregation of Panama's Canal Zone was never the norm in the rest of Latin America. Nor did exclusionary practices - in schools, in clubs, in residential area - enjoy the kind of legal sanction associated with racial segregation in the United States. Yet, as Abdias do Nascimento has consistently argued, 'lynching' has far deeper meaning than the actual physical act. There is a special case to be made for (re)conceptualizing the role of violence as a determinant of 'good' or 'bad' race relations. A recurrent refrain in his writings since the mid-1940s is that racial violence is multifaceted and extremely subtle. To deny access to structures of education, health and political participation, he observes, constitutes violent actions for those on the receiving end. Such a conceptualization of violence and its role in race relations has the potential of liberating our understanding of the Latin American situation.

The point speaks directly to comparisons between the United States and Latin America. Meaningful comparisons cannot be selectively applied to only the most conspicuous aspects of race relations, especially those regulated by the force of law. Nor can comparisons be magically terminated at some point in the 1950s when the world was left to wonder at images of National Guard troops escorting a little black girl to school in the US South to the taunts and jeers of whites. What happened after such shocking events is central to the comparison. Why, it needs to be asked, do institutions of higher learning in Latin America have so few black students, a paucity made even more astonishing when one compares their numbers with their counterparts in the United States? No amount of 'flexibility', 'smoothness' or 'lack of tension' in racial matters can adequately explain away what is clearly a problem.

In a widely discussed case the daughter of the governor of the state of Espirito Santo, an Afro-Brazilian, was denied entry to an elevator designated for use by residents of a high-rise apartment building and, presumably, their guests. The story, a characteristic example of what one observer has very aptly termed 'vertical apartheid', rings a familiar note to the many blacks who have themselves been assumed to be service personnel irrespective of their dress or demeanor. The governor's legal counsel chose not to argue the case on the basis of existing anti-racist legislation, as they well understood the difficulties of successful prosecution in a legal climate where precedents are few and, perhaps even more important, the plaintiff bears the burden of proof. Lack of precedent here is linked to the conspicuous absence of multiracial civil rights organizations. The struggle for racial justice presupposes some notion of racial injustice; and as Latin American self-conceptions do not include that crucial notion, prominent multiracial organizations dedicated to racial justice are seen to be fundamentally oxymoronic and crass in their attempt to apply inappropriate North American racial paradigms to their societies.

Future examinations of present-day Afro-Latin Americans need to seek actively to extend the framework of the process to one that permits global comparison. That framework will have no a priori victors or successes contrasted with worst-possible cases; it will, one hopes, open the way for Afro-Latin Americans themselves to establish links with other peoples of African ancestry in transnational encounters much like the recent gathering in Uruguay discussed in the Postscript to this volume. The salient feature of these meetings is not the search for ready-made, all-purpose solutions; rather, it is the airing of reflections and histories that transcend individual cases.

A possible future research area would be, for example, inter- and intra-Dominican relations in communities outside the national territory. Do Dominicans in the United States hold steadfastly to the single commonality of Dominicanness, irrespective of race or color? What happens when they come into contact with other Latin Americans whose socio-racial mix may not be so directly linked to a Haitian factor but whose societies nonetheless confer privilege, status and power on those who are of lighter hues? What happens when in the United States Dominicans and other Latin Americans confront the rigidly binary division of racial lines? But even this binarism is more complicated than it would appear.

Even more productive would be an exploration of both overt and covert differences, posing the question, Are there in fact certain constants in race relations throughout the Americas, constants implicit in oft-repeated phrases: 'money whitens'; 'in the other Americas an individual has a greater possibility to be whatever he or she chooses or desires'; 'there is certainly greater racial mixture in Latin America'; 'after all, we are all at least symbolically hybridized or mesticized'? What the literature lacks is an in-depth comparative inquiry, across cultures, that does not give disproportionate credence to colonial nomenclatures, idealized expressions of nationhood or peoplehood that extol race mixture while ignoring the clearly color-based rank order of preference.

No amount of verbal elegance - or money - can 'whiten' a Pele, a Benedita da Silva or a Pena Gomez and still qualify as an accurate description of reality outside specific national contexts. Emphasizing the particularity of national etiquettes matters precisely because national histories and cultural practices are never to be ignored. However, as soon as individuals or groups cross national boundaries, those etiquettes and practices, be they concrete or symbolic, cannot be maintained in their innocence or originality. Does the indio Dominican or the Brazilian moreno who insists on being so identified find that North Americans, say, or Europeans, or continental Africans accept these categorizations? Indeed, it would be highly instructive to record American responses to the application of these labels to large numbers of their own, not simply a minority of honorable exceptions.

In 1989 a popular women's program on Venezuelan television discussed the question 'Is it punishment to be a black woman in Venezuela?' The participants - a well-known politician, a physician, a model and sibling athletes - offered a range of perspectives. In its modest way the program sheds light on the discussion of race and gender in present-day Latin America. How interesting it would be to compare the program with advocacy initiatives undertaken by, say, Afro-Brazilian women's organizations, together with examples drawn from other national groups.

Visibility, or non-invisibility, is a multifaceted and variable phenomenon. In Peru, where the salient divide is between the indigenous and the mesticized components of the population, any disadvantages associated with blackness pale in comparison to the individual and collective weight of those disadvantages endured by the majority indigenous population. What Peru does share with other Latin American countries is the privileging of whiteness. In this particular race relations universe a study of indigenous-Afro relations in specific situations, over the centuries, could well contribute to our understanding of comparative race relations. Similar work could be done on Ecuador.

On matters of race and color the novice observer does well to tread lightly when approaching societies and systems such as those in Latin America. Non-whiteness and blackness, one quickly learns, are not interchangeable concepts; never assume blackness, and determine, with delicacy, the individual's personal identification, which may not be consistent with that assigned him or her by others. For the Latin American, a similar challenge awaits in North America, say, or even continental Africa, where what is perceived as 'white' may very well be, to the person concerned, 'black'.
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