#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #BRAZIL #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) cab anarquista [Brazil]: #Racism and #Colonial Domination (ca, de, it, pt)[machine translation]

 Published in the journal Socialismo Libertário nº 4 , Sept. 2020. Photo: Rovena

Rosa/Agência Brasil ---- Globalized world capitalism as it develops today, and in
which we are located in its 'periphery', America, is a product of colonization.
Among the human sciences, criticism is based, via post-colonial and decolonial
studies, about the coloniality of power. One of the pillars of colonization was
to establish the social classification of people through racial logic.[Quijano,
"Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America"]Colonial domination
inaugurates racism and uses it to justify its domination, that is, the
exploitation and extinction of certain peoples to the detriment of others.
However, this axis has been perpetuated over the years and is still present in
the pattern of contemporary world domination. Therefore, the idea of race was
born out of a specific context (whites classifying "blacks" and "Indians" as
such),and from the historical developments it was configured as one of the
central axes of capitalism, a structural element of society.

Racism is a broad term that encompasses numerous forms of violence from different
occurrences that are combined in different contexts. Racial difference, as we
mentioned, became inequality in a long historical process. Racism when it
develops openly can only result in genocide. Genocide is a violent historical
process, so it is a term that carries enormous weight. When we talk about
genocide, we talk about the systematic process of extermination of a specific group.

Whitening as a genocide strategy takes place inside and out. The myth built
around the Brazilian "racial democracy" that praised miscegenation, masks the
real intentions of the policy instituted until the Vargas government: to make the
black population decrease as the percentage of mestizos increased, facilitating
European immigration with the aim of whitening the population.[Abdias, "The
Genocide of the Brazilian Negro"]

Everyday violence is the maximum expression of an instituted racism, but in
addition to its physical, funereal and bloody manifestation, it is also manifest
in culture. Abdias Nascimento also raises as one of the strategies of genocide
the cultural whitening of blacks, historically present from the forced
catechization to the prohibition of religious and cultural expressions that they
brought from their African regions, to the demonization of their worshiped entities.

Anthropology brings a term of distinction of these networks that make up racism,
the idea of ethnocide. While genocide seeks to eliminate differences,
ethnocentrism seeks to convert them. Therefore, if the term genocide refers to
the racial issue, and the desire to completely exterminate an ethnic-racial
group, the term ethnocide does not refer to the physical destruction of men, such
as genocide, but to the destruction of their culture. Ethnocide characterizes the
systematic destruction of ways of life and thinking of people other than those
who lead the enterprise of destruction. The construction of the Other starts to
represent a negative difference, a difference to be converted for its good. This
argument is present even today in speeches that seek to justify the removal of
indigenous lands, for example.Genocide kills people in their bodies and ethnocide
kills them in their spirit. However, what differentiates the ethnic-racial
domination promoted by Europe from other historical conflicts? It is because
these issues are combined with the economic model of production that has
strengthened and developed around the world.

What does Western civilization contain that makes it infinitely more ethnocidal
than any other form of society? It is its regime of economic production,
capitalism as a socio-economic system for which everything is a resource to be
used, everything is a commodity, whether liberal or private, as in Western
Europe, or dominated by the State, as in Eastern Europe. . Industrial society is
the most formidable machine of production, and it is also the most frightening
machine of destruction. Races, societies, spaces, individuals, nature, subsoil:
everything must be useful, everything must be used, everything must be
productive, with a productivity taken to the maximum intensity. What is not
productive must be exterminated, it has no value.[Clastres, "The Archeology of
Violence"]

Thus, Europe became the level to be reached, it raised its own morals to the
maximum and became the standard against which all societies are compared, it
called itself civilization. The entire academic contribution, from the social and
human sciences, to questioning Eurocentrism, which constitutes an important part
of the world social organization, is forged from the very reflections of this
structure and the respective processes of struggle against colonialism and
neocolonialism. And even the grandiose stories of people's resistance were
hidden. In which textbook can you read about the bravery of the Zulu nation
against the English? About the centuries-long resistance of the Mapuche or the
victory of Haiti over the French? Or even its central role in the Brazilian
revolts? Everything we read, even when it comes to rebelling, centers
Europe.Non-Western peoples experienced the erasure of their roots, were removed
from their history and reduced to savages, such is the philosophical violence
suffered by the peoples of America and Africa.

"A Brazilian Dinner" - Jean-Baptiste Debret
Thinking about Brazil today, when analyzing the statistics in relation to the
black people in the different areas of study, whether economic, social, health,
housing, etc., it is clear that the black portion of the population (considered
by the Census as the sum of people self-declared black and mixed race) suffers
from the ailments in numbers frighteningly disproportionate in relation to the
racial composition of the country. The genocide is even more wide open when one
analyzes the public policies that were and are implemented aimed at the black
population. They are those that do not exist or are mostly ineffective in
repairing the centuries of damage caused by enslavement. The post-abolition
period cast its own luck on the black population, who could not find work and
could not practice their culture.

Considering that the Brazilian population is made up of 55% of black people
according to 2016 figures, it is important to note that when we talk about
poverty or misery in Brazil, we are talking about black people, since 76% of
impoverished people, according to data from the IBGE of 2014, are black. If it is
not understood that the color of marginalized people is directly linked to the
fact that they are marginalized, the focus of analyzes and actions is lost and
their results may not be as expected. The genocide of black people was built on
public policies of exclusion, barring black people's access to land and the job
market, for example.

If Brazilian poverty and misery have color, when talking about projects such as
the Labor Reform and the Outsourcing Law, for example, despite affecting the
population as a whole, the main target is black people who occupy most of the
precarious jobs. This is also the case with pension reform. According to 2010
data, the average life expectancy in Brazil is 72 years, but if we make a racial
cut, the numbers are: white men 69 years old, white women 71 years old, black men
62 years old and black women 66 years old. If we consider the minimum age of 65
to retire from the reform project, black people will die working.

According to data from the 2017 Atlas of Violence by the Institute for Applied
Economic Research (Ipea), for every 100 people murdered in the country, 71 are
black. According to the report, black people are 23.5 times more likely to be
murdered than non-black people, already discounting effects such as age, housing,
education and sex. The Senate CPI on the Murder of Youth 2016 revealed that a
young black man is murdered every 23 minutes in Brazil.

The 2018 Atlas of Violence also shows that in the last ten years, murder numbers
have dropped by 8% among white women and increased by 15.4% among black women.
Black women face a series of difficulties in their participation in the feminist
movement because their specificities and demands end up historically invisible or
in the background. That is why it is necessary to align, not only class and
gender, but also race for responsible militancy on the part of all
revolutionaries. However, a distinction needs to be made here. While most of
those who claim intersectional feminism fall back on typical social democracy
discourses, we do not believe in the debate of oppressions while fighting against
"privileges", nor do we believe in individual "empowerment",but rather that these
axes are part of the way society is structured. The only possible empowerment is
to build real, collective black power within the social movement together with
the oppressed sectors: black men and women, forest peoples, peasants, women and
workers in general.

All the data cited is numerical evidence of the real pain of black people. Pain
institutionalized and enforced by the state. In Rio de Janeiro, where today the
war is declared after the military intervention, we find even more absurd data
that show the active role of the military police in the extermination of the
black population. It is related to the acts of resistance, which today are called
in police reports as "homicides resulting from opposition to police
intervention". Data from 2017 indicated that 9 out of 10 people killed by police
in the state were identified as black. In June 2018 alone, there were 155 deaths
resulting from police operations, an increase of 59.8% compared to June last
year. As if that weren't enough, a 2005 study indicated that 99,2% of the
resistance cases were filed or never reached the complaint stage.

The list of deaths involving police violence in favelas in Rio de Janeiro that
shocked the country is immense. Like the youths from Morro da Providência who
were handed over to drug trafficking by police in 2008, 19-year-old Jonathan from
Manguinhos in 2014, 26-year-old DG from Pavão-Pavãozinho in 2014, Amarildo da
Rocinha in 2013, 38-year-old Cláudia dragged by the streets of Madureira by a
police car in 2014, 10-year-old Eduardo from Alemão in 2015, 19-year-old Matheus
killed in Rocinha, the 5 young people from Costa Barros killed with 111 shots in
2015, Andreu do Cantagalo beaten to death in a unit from Degase in 2008,
13-year-old Eduarda killed inside a school in Acari in 2017, the list is endless...

We also see the endorsement of the State in relation to the deaths that occur
among the indigenous people, who until today are fighting for their territory
against those who today dominate the state machine, the landowners and their
murderous gang of the ruralist bench. Deaths at the hands of the militia do not
only happen in the urban context, they are also present in the countryside and in
the forest. The growing fear for the strengthening of the Brazilian extreme right
in the 2018 elections brought the illusion that reaffirming the candidacies of
those who finance militias outside the urban context, for example, could express
in a so-called "pragmatic" vision, a way to stop fascistic forces. . Illusions
sold that do not accumulate in anything for the real defeat of reactionaryism in
vogue.Thus, genocide continues its funeral march and tends to deepen in a
conjuncture in which hate speech gains ground. The same is the illusion of the
candidates, with a social base and many times even said to be revolutionary, that
they can mitigate the genocide by being part of the company that commands it.

As anarchists of the Brazilian Anarchist Coordination, we must ground a racial
critique of the State and capital. Anarchism has no other chance than to
decolonize itself in order to face the struggles and build a real alternative
together with the black people. The Nation-State and capitalism cannot be
dissociated, and true social transformation is not possible through them, we must
destroy them in all their axes of domination.

The conditions of the descendants of enslaved Africans and those who suffered
under the European colonial system is something that has been ignored by the
mostly white anarchist movements. This is a mistake, both strategic and
political, which doomed the anarchist movement to be, too often, a project of the
white middle classes. Fortunately, autonomous non-white peoples who are
sympathetic to anarchism have spoken out and demand to be heard. Africa, Asia and
Latin America have seen oppressed people of color step out of their "places" and
demand autonomy: black autonomy.[Kom'boa Ervin, "Note to the Brazilian edition of
'Anarchism and the Black Revolution'"]

In this sense, Marx's economistic and Eurocentric stage is not useful, since it
brings distorted notions to the reality of colonized countries and ends up
placing the racial issue as secondary to the class issue. Not the postmoderns,
fashionable in Europe, that reduce politics to the individual level and erase the
class struggle. Nor should we allow ourselves to be seduced by Latin theories
that fall back on social democracy. Sociocultural differences can no longer be
sidelined as the Zapatistas taught us. To build the world where many worlds fit,
it is necessary to commit to a theory and a practice, from the base, truly
anti-racist!

https://cabanarquista.org/2022/01/20/racismo-e-dominacao-colonial/
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