Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Henry Louis Gates Jr., is the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois
Institute for African and African American Research and the Alphonse
Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University. (NYU Press)
http://www.wnyc.org/npr_articles/2011/jul/27/what-it-means-to-be-black-in-latin-america/
Between 1502 and 1866, 11.2 million Africans disembarked from slave
ships in the New World during the Middle Passage. Of those 11.2
million people, only 450,000 came to the United States. The rest of
the African slaves who survived the journey were taken to the
Caribbean, Latin America and South America.
"Brazil got 4.8 million slaves alone," says historian Henry Louis
Gates Jr. "When I was growing up, I thought to talk about the slave
trade was to talk about the experiences of our ancestors here in the
United States. But it turns out that the real 'African-American
experience' — judging by numbers alone — unfolded south of our
borders."
That world, says Gates, is the one he wanted to explore in Black in
Latin America, a book and four-part documentary series airing on PBS,
which traces the cultural history and the lasting impact of the
millions of slaves who arrived in Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican
Republic, Haiti, Mexico and Peru.
"The average American — and even the average academic and the average
journalist — has no idea of the huge number of black people who landed
south of the United States over the course of the slave trade," he
tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.
A Spectrum Of Race
The descendents of slaves brought to Latin and South America, says
Gates, don't identify as white or black the way many Americans do. In
Brazil, there are 134 categories of blackness to describe someone of
African descent.
"[They say], 'I'm not black. I'm murano [or] I'm kubuku,' he says.
"You could say that these societies have refused to be locked into
this ridiculous binary opposition between black and white the way we
are here in America, and they've socially constructed race or
ethnicity in a more subtle way than we could ever imagine."
In each of the countries Gates examined, there were also policies
enacted to "whiten" the complexion of the country soon after receiving
an influx of slaves. In Brazil for instance, 4 million white Europeans
and 185,000 Japanese immigrants were allowed into the country between
1884 and 1939. Cuba and Mexico also had similar policies in place.
"They were trying to do two things," says Gates. "They wanted to bring
in white families so that the white population would increase. But
they also assumed, because so many of these indentured immigrants
would be men, that interracial sexual liaisons would ensue — and
indeed they did. So whitening was to be achieved in two ways — through
white people marrying white people — and a browning movement, when a
series of racial gradations would be created through interracial
sexuality."
In many countries in Latin America, says Gates, race is no longer
recorded as part of the census.
"But there's a slight problem with that," he says. "If because of
historical reasons, the people who are disproportionately
discriminated against happen to be that group of people with dark
skin, kinky hair and thick lips, how do you count them if you don't
have a census category?"
In both Mexico and Peru, political activists are fighting for the
right to have race reintroduced in the federal census.
"Until that's done, political activists can't argue for affirmative
action or more equal opportunity because they have no statistics,"
says Gates. "A great academic told me that he went to the government
to complain about the lack of blacks in higher education, and he was
told, 'We don't have racism because we don't have races.' And if you
can't count the race, then you can't have racism. And that is the
pernicious argument that they're trying to fight with this movement to
expand the categories on the federal census."
Interview Highlights
On self-identification in Latin America
"My favorite country to explore this question was the Dominican
Republic. In the Dominican Republic, I spent two weeks asking people
who would definitely be called black in [the United States] how they
would describe themselves. And to a woman or a man, they each
described themselves as 'indio,' though overwhelmingly, the
mitochondrial DNA goes straight back to Africa. ... But when I asked
'Who's black? Who's negro?' they said, 'Oh, the Haitians. The Haitians
are the negroes. We don't have any of them here.'"
On traveling to Latin America as an African-American man
"I did an experiment in each of the countries. I would wander through
the marketplace with just one camera behind me and I would say, 'Tell
me what color I am.' And Terry, I was every color from the blackest
black to the lightest category of mulatto-ness that that society has
conceived.'"
On how his life would be different had he grown up in Brazil
"Judging from other people in my social class, which would have been
working class, we never would have been having this interview. I never
would have gotten into Yale because I was part of the affirmative
action generation. The class that graduated in 1966 had six black men.
The class that entered with me in September of 1969 had 96 black men
and women. Was there a genetic blip in the race that all of a sudden
there were 90 smart black people? Of course not. Barack Obama: Would
he have gotten into Columbia and Harvard Law School without
affirmative action? I doubt it, though he's a brilliant man. There
were just strict racial quotas in white colleges [concerning] the
number of us who could matriculate there, and generally you had to be
a rich kid or the child of a doctor, lawyer or politician, and that
would have excluded me. ...
"So if you consider that and then drop us into Brazil or Peru or
Haiti, I would not be a professor at Harvard, and I would not be
making films for PBS, and I wouldn't have written any of the books
that I've written. Race was a tremendous obstacle and is a tremendous
obstacle in each of these countries. I would say 'fleeing blackness'
was a consistent theme that I saw. It's like what my father used to
say: 'If you're white, you're all right; if you're black, get back; if
you're brown, stick around.' That simple little phrase [shows] through
each of these countries and now, because of scholars — white, black
and brown — retrieving the history of black culture in these
countries ... and because of conscious policies starting to trickle
down from various aspects of government in these societies, it's
beginning to change."
On tracing his DNA and genealogy
"For me, the most shocking and astonishing thing that's been revealed
was my admixture — your admixture is your percentage of African
ancestry, Native American ancestry and European ancestry. And ... [I
learned that] I, the director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for
African and African-American Research, was half a white man. That my
admixture was almost 50/50 African and European. It was quite an
astonishing moment for me. I had no idea. ... I thought it was cool.
"What I love about our use of DNA in the PBS series is that it
explodes the notions of racial purity. No black person that we have
tested is 100 percent African, no matter how dark they are. ... So
that means that no matter what the laws were in the daytime, when the
lights came down, everybody was sleeping with everybody else. I don't
mean to belie the horrendous tradition of brutality and rape and
coercion that that figure suggests, but also we found there were
willing relationships."
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