>On Sun, 9 Jun 1996 Marquetta wrote:
>Peace and Welcome, Sister Rosangela!
>We always look forward to more energy being added to our "powerbase."
>I am sure that the words you will share will expand our scopes and
>push us forward in the struggle.
>Peace and blessings,
>Marquetta
>Sister Rosangela's introduction to the BlackPower forum:
>>Greetings! My name is Rosangela Maria Vieira. I was born on April 13,
>>1954 to an interracial couple in Minas Gerais, a state in the
>>Southeastern part of Brazil. My father, a Brazilian of African descent,
>>was born in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro; he died in 1972, at age 42, of
>>acute nephritis and heart failure. My mother is of Native Brazilian,
>>and Spanish, descent. It is my dream to one day research my African
>>heritage in detail. I work at Howard University teaching Brazilian
>>Portuguese language, culture, civilization, and literatures from an
>>Afrocentric perspective. I am currently on leave on a fellowship from
>>the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1991 I founded the
>>-Journal of Afro-Latin American Studies and Literatures, JALAS&L-, ISSN
>>1051-1865, an annual publication of research and creation concerning the
>>life, culture, arts, and the literatures of Afro-Latin peoples; its
>>first issue was published in 1993. I have attended many symposia and
>>published articles on Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Latin American studies and
>>literatures (in scholarly publications other than JALAS&L, of course).
>>In 1994 I, Dr. Michael Mitchell (Arizona State University) and Dr. Larry
>>Glasco (University of Pittsburg) founded the Internet forum AFROLAT,
>>housed at Arizona State University and dedicated to Afro-Latino issues.
>>I am very happy to join the select BlackPower forum and look forward to
>>participating in it. All good wishes, Rosangela.
About Brazilian racism...
Copyright @ Summer 1996 by the Journal of Afro-Latin American Studies and
Literatures, JALAS&L, ISSN 1051-1865. All rights reserved. No portions
of this post on Brazilian racism may be printed and distributed without
permission from JALAS&L. Electronic distribution of this message must
include this copyright statement as well as all the bibliographic
citations found herein.
Dear Sister Marquetta:
Thank you for your encouraging welcome message. The black struggle is a
universal one; the efforts employed to succeed in it, therefore, must
originate from a global and pragmatically united front. Africans,
African-Americans, and all humanitarians living in the US and elsewhere in
the world are in a privileged position to assist in the liberation of
Blacks in Latin America, and especially in Brazil where more than 100
million blacks, or an estimated 68 to 75% of the population (Oliveira, E.,
'Manifesto 'a nacao brasileira e 'a comunidade negra de Sao Paulo,'
-Cadernos Candido Mendes, Estudos Afro-Asiaticos, Rio de Janeiro,
Aug.-Sept. 1983, pp. 24-5) live wretched lives and where civil rights
provisions (and attainment) are at least 400 years behind those observed
here in the US.
I agree that African peoples from Portuguese, Spanish, and French America
must continue to devise liberation strategies and engage in their own
resistance mevements and struggle for freedom. Actually, they have been
doing so since the Atlantic crossing. At that tragic intersection of
life, Africans being taken to Brazil, for instance, would chose to commit
suicide rather than to become a slave. Many died by swallowing their
tongues or by starving themselves to death (which wasn't very difficult to
do, given the type of nourishment available to them on board of those
hellish caravels); others resisted oppression by jumping overboard, thus
escaping enslavement in the 'newly discovered' land of Portuguese colonial
rulers.
Perhaps it would be appropriate for me to state that the Portuguese were
the largest importers of black peoples to the Americas. An estimated
3,650,000 Africans were brought to Brazil alone (Vieira, R. M., 'Brazil'
in M. Litvinoff (ed), -No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans Today-,
London, Minority Rights Group, 1995, p. 23), a figure many times greater
than the 427,000 (Hellwig, D.J. (ed.), -African American Reflections on
Brazil's Racial Paradise-, Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press,
1992, p. 3) Africans sent to what would become the USA.
The Portuguese were also the first modern Europeans to enslave Africans,
beginning in 1441, under the auspices of the Catholic Church. Although
Africans had enslaved themselves prior to the arrival of Europeans on
their continent, their slavery, as we know it today, was the invention of
the Portuguese, who monopolized the slave traffic throughout the sixteenth
century. With the colonial conquest, the Portuguese promoted both the
ethnic and cultural dismembering of Africa, the cradle of human
civilization and knowledge, and they also promoted the slaughter of
millions of indigenous Brazilians, a majority which today has been reduced
to a mere 2% of the national total, and their numbers continue to decline.
The Portuguese were also among the first Europeans to take advantage of
political instability, wars, and general unrest in Africa, an involvement
that lasted from the fifteenth century until the mid-1970's (Vieira, R.M.,
'Brazil,' in M. Litvinoff (ed), -No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans
Today-, London, Minority Rights Group, 1995, p. 24).
Black resistance is still strong in Brazil today. Afro-Brazilians write,
demonstrate, speak against their oppression and confront the various forms
of institutionalized racism found in Brazil. Brazilian racism, like all
forms of racism, is a crime against humanity itself, it is an aggression
against the only race that exists in the world, the human race.
Furthermore, it is based solely on the perceived notions of superiority of
a group over another.
Many Brazilians of African descent are also systematically killed by
groups such as "Esquadrao da Morte" (death squads) whose members, in their
majority, are off-duty policemen. These individuals, like their
Portuguese forefathers, continue to implement mandates that promote the
suffering of the black populace in my country. The scenes of carnage
observed after their crimes can be found in streets and remote areas of
just about every state in Brazil. These killings start with homeless
black children (as young as 5 years of age) and continue on within the
inhumane Brazilian prison system where blacks are also overrepresented.
Despite many battles, Afro-Brazilians have yet to succeed in changing
their plight. Such a phenomenon does not minimize the caliber of the
black struggle in Portuguese America, rather, it underscores the iron fist
nature of Brazilian racism and the white elite's determination to
perpetuate their dominance. Again, only the well devised strategies of a
global black movement can succeed in undermining Brazilian racism; nothing
else could prove effective in my view. Afro-Brazilians must strongly
unite themselves and join forces with African-Americans, Afro-Hispanics,
and all humanitarians to demand and achieve better standards of living for
themselves and for their children's children.
Efforts to create continental networks for the advancement of Afro-Latin
peoples have existed in the past. Some of these organizations, however,
have continuously ignored the imperative needs of Afro-Latin Americans in
areas of educational, political, economic, and social empowerment.
Instead, these organizations have served to promote personal agendas
and/or the financial interestes of their founders. Ironically, these
networks command neither the respect nor the recognition from black
leaders in Brazil or any other country in Latin America.
Organizations such as TransAfrica, in Washington, D.C., however, have been
known for their legitimacy and reputation. Their efforts to appease the
oppression of black peoples in countries like South Africa, Haiti, and
Nigeria, have been quite noble and tangible. The only question I would
pose here is: why is it that a well endowed and structured body, like
TransAfrica, would not promote awareness of and, somehow, help minimize
the suffering of black peoples in Brazil, a country with the largest black
population outside of Africa (second only to Nigeria) and where a much
worse system of oppression (and apartheid) has prevailed for almost 500
years now? Yet, for such alliances to be effective, Transafrica, or any
other legitimate organization, would have to work directly with the
leadership of black communities and/or modern Quilombos in Brazil, and not
with Brazilian statutory bodies or foundations which represent the very
government that has historically oppressed them.
Best regards, Rosangela <rmvieira@cldc.howard.edu>.