Abstract
The ongoing marginalization and premature, preventable death of disproportionate numbers of black persons in the African diaspora create the very conditions for the revolutionary transformation of our societies. Antiblack genocide generates the imperatives of liberation and revolution. Either we begin to address, redress, and do away with what makes possible the multiple facets of antiblack genocide or we succumb to the dehumanizing values that produce and are reproduced by the systematic, persistent disregard for the lives of Afro-descended individuals and their communities. It is not only black people who are affected by antiblack genocide. Inasmuch as the core values we organize our lives by depend on and are energized by devaluing the lives of others, we are relegated to living a life of fear, terror, and imminent death. As long as there is oppression and senseless death, we will be oppressed and require the continued killing of those deemed unworthy. If there is truth to these propositions, then we fail to realize our full potential as ethical and just social beings. The urgency of antiblack genocide calls for the total remaking of our lives and our values.
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Notes
Whereas, according to the official 2000 Brazilian census, nonwhites (blacks and browns) comprise 47.3 percent of the population, they are 52 percent among the lowest earning 40 percent, that is, among those earning less than the equivalent of $200. Only 29 percent of whites are included in this group. The highest income bracket ($2,000 or more), on the other hand, is comprised of 7.5 percent of the white population but only 1.5 percent of nonwhites. See Edward E. Telles, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 110.
For an analysis of the Brazilian macroeconomy recent performance, see the volume organized by Ricardo Carneiro, A Supremacia dos Mercados e a Política Econômica do Governo Lula (Sáo Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2006).
See, for example, the data in Wendy Hunter and Timothy J. Power, “Rewarding Lula: Executive Power, Social Policy, and the Brazilian Elections of 2006,” Latin American Politics and Society 49, no. 1 (2007): 1–30.
For further description and analysis of that collaboration, see Joáo H. Costa Vargas, “The Inner City and the Favela: Transnational Black Politics,” Race & Class 44, no. 4 (2003): 19–40.
William I. Robinson, “Latin America and Global Capitalism,” Race & Class, 40, nos. 2–3 (1998–1999): 111–31. This is an insightful analysis of the impact of 1980s neoliberal globalization polices on Latin American countries. The author convincingly connects the new globalization model with the increase in inequality, polarization, impoverishment, and police brutality in Brazil.
For a collection of apt essays on the political economy, popular representations, and perspectives of the favelas and housing projects in Rio de Janeiro, see Alba Zaluar, Condomínio do Diabo (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 1994).
For an analysis of the political motivations behind Operação Rio, see Luis Eduardo Soares, Violência e Política no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto de Estudos da Religião ISER), 1996).
Gerald Horne, Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956 (Rutherford, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1988); Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
William Patterson and others, We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951), 7.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 16–19.
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Carol Anderson, in Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 189–209, documents Patterson’s difficulties in presenting the genocide petition to the UN, pressured by both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the State Department. Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, who planned to support the petition and Patterson’s efforts in Paris, ended up not being able to make the trip: the State Department, suspecting Robeson had written We Charge Genocide, denied him a passport; Du Bois, on the other hand, had just won a long and tiring legal battle against the Justice Department, and was energetically advised by his physician, attorney, and his wife not to travel. Patterson, alone in Paris and harassed by the State Department and the U.S. embassy, which attempted to confiscate his passport, found himself having to flee to Eastern Europe to avoid the confiscation. He later came to Paris when new incidents of racist violence in the United States made the claims in We Charge Genocide all the more urgent. More recently, in 1996 the National Black United Front (NBUF) launched a national petition drive charging the U.S. government with the same accusation. The NBUF’s main focus was the scale and scope of crack cocaine affecting black urban communities. NBUF based its charge on analyses of the “crack epidemic” that linked the import and sale of the drug to the complicity of the Central Intelligence Agency. On the latter, see Garry Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press 1999).
See, for example, the essays in The South End Press Collective, ed., What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007).
“The study of the relationship between globalization and racism must, I believe, start with the recognition of global trends in racism but must primarily focus on the ways in which the specific national histories of race and current racial structures intersect with the new dynamics of globalization.” Andrew Barlow, Between Fear and Hope: Globalization and Race in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 22. See also Faye V. Harrison, “Global Apartheid, Foreign Policy, and Human Rights,” Souls 4, no. 3 (2002): 48–68.
Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1983, repr., Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), 252–53.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Coming to Our Senses,” in The Anthropology of Genocide, ed. Alec Hinton (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 373.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1988).
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 46.
M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 192.
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992).
S. Donziger, ed. The Real War on Crime (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 107.
Donald Braman, “Families and Incarceration,” in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, ed. Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind (New York: New Press 2002), 117.
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).
N. Kurshan, “Behind the Walls: The History and Current Reality of Women’s Imprisonment,” in Criminal Injustice, ed. E. Rosenblatt (Boston: South End Press, 1996), 136–64.
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1997).
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Israel W. Charny, “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide,” in Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, ed. G. Andreopoulos (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). A debate about intentionality, drawing from the UN definition that appears earlier in this chapter, has dominated much of the debate on genocide. For example, Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage, 1993); and Leo Kuper, “Theoretical Issues Relating to Genocide: Uses and Abuses,” in Genocide, ed. Andreopoulos.
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See, for examples, Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’Mama’s Disfunktional! (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (Boston: Allyn & Unwin, 1988); Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?; Gilmore, “Globalisation and U.S. Prison Growth.”
Abdias do Nascimento, Brazil: Mixture or Massacre? (Dover, DE: Majority Press, 1989).
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Edmund Gordon, Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African-Nicaraguan Community (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998); Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy.
Kabengele Munanga, Rediscutindo a Mestiçagem no Brasil: Identidade Nacional Versus Identidade Negra (Petrópolis, Brazil: Editora Vozes, 1999), 103, quotes from Darcy Ribeiro’s O Povo Brasileiro (São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 1995), 225, who reported on a dialogue between two black persons, a well-known painter, Santa Rosa, and a young, aspiring diplomat. Commenting on the young man’s complaints about discrimination, Santa Rosa replied that he understood the issue well, since he “had also been black.”
Tulio Kahn, Velha e nova polícia: Polícia e políticas de segurança pública no Brasil atual (São Paulo: Editora Sicurezza, 2002); Human Rights Watch/Americas, Police Brutality in Urban Brazil (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1997); Michael Mitchell and Charles Wood, “Ironies of Citizenship: Skin Color, Police Brutality, and the Challenge to Democracy in Brazil,” Social Forces 77, no. 3 (1998): 1001–20; Edward Telles, “Ethnic Boundaries and Political Mobilization Among African Brazilians: Comparisons with the U.S. Case,” in Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil, ed. Michael Hanchard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 267–90.
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), Pesquias Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (Brazil: IBGE, 1996).
Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Paul Amar, “Reform in Rio: Reconsidering the Myths of Crime and Violence” NACLA Report on the Americas 37, no. 2 (2003): 37–42.
Nascimento, “Brazil: Mixture or Massacre.”; Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
See Vargas, “The Inner City and the Favela” and “When a Favela Dared to Become a Gated Condominium,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2006): 49–81, where I explain in detail the events that led to the formation and fall of the Zinzun Center.
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© 2009 Manning Marable and Leith Mullings
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Vargas, J.H.C. (2009). The Liberation Imperative of Black Genocide. In: Mullings, L. (eds) New Social Movements in the African Diaspora. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104570_5
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