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    Against Racism: Organizing for Social Change in Latin America
    Against Racism: Organizing for Social Change in Latin America
    Against Racism: Organizing for Social Change in Latin America
    Ebook462 pages6 hours

    Against Racism: Organizing for Social Change in Latin America

    By Peter Wade

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    Powerful narratives often describe Latin American nations as fundamentally mestizo. These narratives have hampered the acknowledgment of racism in the region, but recent multiculturalist reforms have increased recognition of Black and Indigenous identities and cultures. Multiculturalism may focus on identity and visibility and address more casual and social forms of racism, but can also distract attention from structural racism and racialized inequality, and constrain larger antiracist initiatives. Additionally, multiple understandings of how racism and antiracism fit into projects of social transformation make racism a complex and multifaceted issue. The essays in Against Racism examine actors in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico that move beyond recognition politics to address structural inequalities and material conflicts and build common ground with other marginalized groups. The organizations in this study advocate an approach to deep social structural transformation that is inclusive, fosters alliances, and is inspired by a radical imagination.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Pittsburgh Press
    Release dateMar 22, 2022
    ISBN9780822988748
    Against Racism: Organizing for Social Change in Latin America

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      Book preview

      Against Racism - Monica Moreno Figueroa

      PITT LATIN AMERICAN SERIES

      CATHERINE M. CONAGHAN, EDITOR

      AGAINST RACISM

      ORGANIZING FOR SOCIAL CHANGE IN LATIN AMERICA

      EDITED BY

      MÓNICA G. MORENO FIGUEROA

      AND PETER WADE

      UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

      Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

      Copyright © 2022, University of Pittsburgh Press

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Printed on acid-free paper

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

      ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4710-3

      ISBN 10: 0-8229-4710-2

      Cover art: Cecilia Jacinto Z

      Cover design: Melissa Dias-Mandoly

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8874-8 (electronic)

      CONTENTS

      PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      Peter Wade and Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa

      1. THE FORMATION OF MESTIZO NATIONS

      Fernando García, Antonio Sérgio Guimarães, Emiko Saldívar, and Mara Viveros-Vigoya

      2. ANTI-RACISM, INTERSECTIONALITY, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DIGNITY

      Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa and Mara Viveros-Vigoya

      3. BODILY ANTI-RACISM: WHAT BODIES CAN DO TO CONTEST RACISM IN PUBLIC SPACES

      Krisna Ruette-Orihuela

      4. TERRITORY AND ANTI-RACISM

      Peter Wade

      5. UPWARD MOBILITY, PROFESSIONALIZATION, AND ANTI-RACISM

      Gisela Carlos-Fregoso

      6. GIVING MEANING TO RACIAL JUSTICE: SYMBOLIC USES OF LAW IN ANTI-RACIST STRUGGLES

      María Moreno

      7. ANTI-RACISM IN MESTIZO SOCIETIES

      Peter Wade

      CONCLUSION

      Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa and Peter Wade

      APPENDIX

      NOTES

      REFERENCES

      INDEX

      PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      In a quirky teahouse in the north of England after a research seminar, many years ago, Mónica Moreno Figueroa suggested to Peter Wade that a project looking ethnographically at the diversity of anti-racist organizations and activities in Latin America would be a good idea. That suggestion planted the seed that eventually grew to become LAPORA—Latin American Anti-Racism in a Post-Racial Age (note well the scare quotes around post-racial, on which more below)—a project funded by the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council (grant ES/N012747/1), which ran from January 2017 to November 2019, directed by Mónica from the University of Cambridge, with Peter acting as codirector at the University of Manchester.

      At the design stage, the project involved four Latin American academics as coinvestigators: Antonio Sérgio Guimarães (Universidade de São Paulo/CEBRAP), Mara Viveros-Vigoya (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), Fernando García (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales–FLACSO, Ecuador), and Juan Carlos Martínez (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social—CIESAS, Pacífico Sur, Mexico). As it turned out, Juan Carlos participated for the first twelve months of the project, but for personal reasons he then withdrew. He was not replaced, as such, but Mónica, alongside our project’s international advisor, Emiko Saldívar (University of California, Santa Barbara), being experts on Mexico, took over some of this role (not least when it came to Emiko’s role in co-authoring the first chapter of this book). We would like to thank the Latin American coinvestigators from the bottom of our hearts for their dedicated work, intellectual inspiration, and support, and we owe a particular debt of gratitude to Emiko for going beyond her original role and for her consistent commitment to the project and her wise guidance.

      At the design stage, we also recruited advisory groups in each country, which underwent some changes as the project progressed. These groups were formed with the aim of bridging academia and activism, while also paying attention to racial diversity. We would like to extend our warm thanks to all these individuals for their support and interest. The groups ended up as follows:

      In Brazil: Suelaine Carneiro (a Black Brazilian organizer and member of Geledés), João Pacheco (Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro), Flavia Rios (Universidade Federal Fluminense), and Valter Silvério (Universidade Federal de São Carlos).

      In Colombia: Janneth Lozano Bustos (an organizer who works with Indigenous communities in Colombia to empower women), Claudia Mosquera (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), Maura Nasly Mosquera (a Black Colombian activist organizer), and Fernando Urrea Giraldo (Universidad del Valle).

      In Ecuador: Rocío Cachimuel (Federación Indígena y Campesina Imbabura), Pablo Minda (Universidad Técnica Luis Vargas Torres de Esmeraldas), Mercedes Prieto (FLACSO, Ecuador), and John Antón Sánchez (Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales).

      In Mexico: Eduardo Añorve Zapata (Black journalist, writer, trade union organizer, and cultural promoter), Alicia Castellanos Guerrero (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana), Rosalva Aída Hernández (CIESAS, Mexico City), and Pablo Yankelevich (El Colegio de México).

      At the start of the project, we recruited four postdoctoral researchers, two based in Cambridge with Mónica (Gisela Carlos-Fregoso, who worked in Mexico, and María Moreno, who worked in Ecuador) and two based in Manchester with Peter (Krisna Ruette-Orihuela, who worked in Colombia, and Luciane Rocha, who worked in Brazil). The four of them worked closely with the coinvestigators in the Latin American countries. We cannot say enough to convey how brilliant all four researchers have been throughout. They were the heart and soul of the project, and its success is mainly due to their efforts and unwavering commitment.

      In addition, after the project got under way and fieldwork was about to start, we recruited four local research assistants, who formed part of the team in each country. These people were Judith Bautista Pérez (Mexico), Renata Braga (Brazil), Luis Alfredo Briceño (Ecuador), and Danny María Ramírez Torres (Colombia). Warm thanks are due to them for their invaluable contributions to the research process, despite the fact that, in the end, circumstances did not allow them to participate as coauthors in this book.

      The four postdoctoral researchers spent three months in the United Kingdom before beginning nine months of fieldwork in Latin America. During that time, the project held three workshops in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, when the whole project team came together with the national advisory group to discuss findings, review progress, and plan for the future. After fieldwork ended and the four postdoctoral researchers returned to the United Kingdom to analyze the data, we held a fourth workshop in Ecuador, presenting preliminary writings. These workshops were fundamental to the development of the project and acted as a forum for transnational exchanges of ideas and information and as an inspiration for further research.

      As part of each workshop, we also held an event that was open to the general public in which we disseminated findings relevant to the country in question. The audience was composed mainly of academics, students, and activists (including some of the people we were working with), although interested members of the general public also attended. This was a valuable opportunity to test out some of our ideas in the arena of public opinion, and we found ourselves frequently having to defend the post-racial in our project’s title, pointing out that the scare quotes indicated we did not believe we were actually in a post-racial age (far from it), but the discourse of post-raciality was one of the obstacles that anti-racism had to confront and also that mestizaje, the main racial project in Latin America, could be understood as post-racial avant la lettre.

      The project culminated in a final, larger symposium in Manchester in November 2018, to which we invited guests from the United Kingdom, the United States, Latin America, and mainland Europe to comment on our findings and analysis. Some guests were asked to provide extended feedback on pre-circulated papers, and we are very grateful to them, as this has helped shape the present book. Our thanks go to Ginetta Candelario, Andrew Canessa, Elisabeth Cunin, Tanya Kateri Hernández, Graziella Morães, Flavia Rios, Silvia Rodríguez Maeso, Gladys Tzul, and Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj. Various members of the project team participated in dedicated panels and roundtables in the annual congress of the Latin American Studies Association in 2018 (Barcelona), 2019 (Boston), and 2020 (virtual), and our thanks go to people from outside the project who kindly acted as discussants in 2018—Charlie Hale and Pamela Calla.

      The project did not formally end until November 2019 (because of two no-cost extensions granted by the ESRC), but the postdoctoral researchers’ contracts ended in January 2019 and they moved on to other jobs. Luciane Rocha returned to Brazil and later started as an assistant professor in Kennesaw State University; Krisna Ruette-Orihuela began another postdoctoral researcher post on a project in the United Kingdom and now works as an assistant professor at University College Dublin; María Moreno began teaching and doing research in FLACSO, Ecuador; and Gisela Carlos-Fregoso started a teaching and research position at the Universidad de Guadalajara in Mexico. We believe it is a testament to the project’s intellectual vitality and inclusive ethos that the four postdoctoral researchers have quickly been able to develop their careers in fruitful directions.

      The four local research assistants have also continued to develop their careers in very significant ways. Judith Bautista Pérez is now the coordinator of the Colectivo para Eliminar el Racismo en México (COPERA). She collaborates with one of the organizations we worked with in Mexico, the Indigenous Professional Center of Advice, Defense, and Translation (CEPIADET), as coordinator of an anti-racist project to improve Indigenous people’s access to the justice system. Renata Braga completed her MA in the Universidade Federal de ABC with a thesis entitled ‘Eu sou Atlântica’: articulação transnacional afro-latino-americana (1988–2018) and in 2020 held a visiting research fellowship in the Africana Studies Department at Brown University. She is project coordinator for AFRO (Group for Research and Training in Gender, Race, and Social Justice) at CEBRAP, a Brazilian research institute. Luis Alfredo Briceño is currently in the doctoral program in anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile. Danny Ramírez completed her MA on Black femicides in Buenaventura at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and is now a teacher, a consultant researcher, and an activist defending the human rights of women and Afro-Colombians. She is currently working with the Colombian Truth Commission.

      In each country the postdoctoral researchers, supported by the coinvestigator and the research assistant, formed close working relationships with a wide variety of Black and Indigenous activists and others involved in what we can broadly understand as anti-racist actions. Many of them ended up participating in this project, and details about those organizations and cases that appear in more than one chapter of this book can be found in the appendix. Our deepest thanks go out to all the people who took the time to participate in the project and who with their energy and struggle have taught us not to overlook any of their efforts.

      We hope and believe that the project will support the struggle of the people we worked with, and we took particular care to make this hope concrete. We worked with local people to produce short videos that publicize important struggles against racism. La Vocera deals with the presidential campaign of María de Jesús Patricio Martínez (Marichuy) and institutional racism in Mexico. Nunca habrá un negro en mi ejército is about the legal case of Michael Arce, which was the first ruling on hate crime in Ecuador. Wimbí: una comuidad negra is about the Wimbí community and its struggle for land. Saraguro: criminalización de la protesta social y racismo de estado en Ecuador deals with the criminalization of Saraguro Indigenous protesters. Luchas contra el racismo en Colombia is about anti-racism in Colombia. All the videos can be found on LAPORA’s YouTube channel (search YouTube for Latin American Anti-racism in a ‘Post-Racial’ Age). A sixth video on Brazil is still in the pipeline. We also produced a policy briefing (in three languages) that provides an overview of the key findings of the LAPORA project, and four country key fact sheets, which give a quick and accessible guide to racism and anti-racism in each country. These documents are available on LAPORA’s trilingual website (https://www.lapora.sociology.cam.ac.uk).

      We finally want to thank all of our partners, families, and friends who supported us throughout this project, who were patient with our stress, the many meetings, and traveling. It is obvious for us we wouldn’t have made it without them in our lives.

      Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa and Peter Wade

      INTRODUCTION

      Peter Wade and Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa

      This book results from a sense of dissatisfaction with current thinking about how to address issues of racism and racial inequality. Our sense is that academia and activism are a bit stuck, running hard just to keep still, or treading water. We have spent much of our academic lives puzzling the question of how best to address this problem, but a simple (or indeed any) solution seems to be permanently deferred. Or rather, there are many possible measures and strategies, but how are we to judge which are effective and which should be avoided—let alone which is best? Meanwhile, the problem of racism is itself mercurial and shape-shifting, as one might expect given its historically enduring and deeply embedded interweaving with changing political, economic, and symbolic structures. In the last seventy years or so, racism has become more complex as it has loosened but by no means shed its previous moorings in a discourse of biology, while retaining the language of culture and morality that was always part of its repertoire. This language facilitates the denial and minimization of racism, even as racism simultaneously takes on ever more divisive, judgmental, and exclusionary dimensions, buttressing racialized hierarchies of privilege and disadvantage.

      In this landscape, what is an effective challenge to racism? What are good ways to organize for progressive social change toward greater racial equality? Should we support reformist policies and institutional initiatives, even though they are open to accusations of tokenism and co-optation? Should we adopt a radical viewpoint that insists on the need to challenge the historically accumulated, structural, and racialized inequalities of society as a whole, rather than simply integrating marginalized populations into an existing democratic and capitalist order that is in principle, or could become, equitable and just? If we take this radical stance, do we run the risk of setting the bar too high, of judging every initiative as falling short in the end, of always saying "Yes, but . . ."? As researchers, how do we deal with the ethical dilemmas of critiquing initiatives organized by people whose basic aims we support?

      These questions prompted us to begin—or, rather, continue in a different way—an inquiry into a range of organizations that work against racism in Latin America and into their strategies for carrying forward such work. We were also interested in how these organizations deal with the fact that the societies in which they operate are often seen as mestizo (roughly speaking, mixed-race). This is important, because the history of Latin American societies gives good reason to think that the denial and minimization of racism—and the characterization of those who highlight racism as themselves morally deficient and counterproductive—are particularly well developed in the region by virtue of nation-building discourses that refer to mestizo origins and mestizo futures, discourses that may acknowledge racism in one breath while minimizing it in the next. This suggests that anti-racism in the region might be shaped by the absent presence of racism itself (Wade 2010a).

      In the LAPORA project (Latin American Anti-Racism in a Post-Racial Age), our inquiry involved working with organizations in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico that operated in diverse ways. Some were predominantly Black or Indigenous grassroots social movements; others were NGOs run by Black, Indigenous, mestizo, and/or white people; others were instances of the state. Sometimes our inquiry focused on individual people, whose battles against racialized injustice were often supported by NGOs or state agencies. We encountered great variety in two respects. First, when the organization or the individual identified a problem and labeled it plainly as racism or quite often as racial discrimination, there were many different strategies for challenging the problem. Second, there were many organizations that did not identify the key issue as racism and instead centered their attention on achieving something else—justice, land rights, safety (or simply the right to life), autonomy—while the organizations were driven primarily by Indigenous or Black activists. These were people who were cautious about putting racism front and center of their stage, sometimes because of Marxist leanings toward class solidarity but also because such a stance can be difficult and even painful in a mestizo society, in which questions of racism have traditionally been downplayed both by perpetrators and by victims (who may in some cases be the same person). But they were also people who recognized at some level that racism was undeniably part of the problem, or at least that their being seen as Black or Indigenous people (or even just proximate to these social positions) was related to the lack of justice, land rights, safety, good life, and so on that affected them and others who shared their downtrodden condition.

      At one point we focused on whether the organizations were explicit in naming racism as the problem, why they did or did not name it, what they understood by the term, and what difference it made to name it or not. For example, we found that some Indigenous organizations could be cautious in using the language of racism—they said race was an outmoded concept, or that racism was a skin-color issue more relevant to Black people, particularly as some Indigenous people were physically not that dissimilar from the mestizo or white people confronting them. The focus on naming initially made sense, because it seemed intuitively correct that a truly progressive anti-racism should at least explicitly name racism and place it center stage. This intuition was reinforced in the Latin American case because the minimization of racism—which we are familiar with worldwide today as a discourse of post-raciality (Da Costa 2016; Lentin 2014)—has very deep historical roots in the region. So calling it by its name seemed an important and progressive move. These hunches are not altogether out of place: naming racism has something to be said for it.

      In the end, however, we found this analytic focus too narrow. The underlying assumption that explicitly naming racism was per se a positive strategy turned out to be weak because, of course, certain actors (e.g., state policy makers) might name racism explicitly but then only propose superficial or even mere token measures to address it. We are also aware of the trap of thinking that naming was equivalent to doing—how naming racism can also become the anti-racist action in itself, which requires nothing else (Ahmed 2012). On the other hand, we were missing the intuitively less obvious but progressive anti-racist effects of movements that did not place racism at the center of their concerns. In particular, we had been insistent from the start that we wanted to embrace Black and Indigenous actions and organizations, even if racism could be found more easily or more explicitly at the center of Black agendas. So we moved toward a wider focus that looked at the diversity of strategies for progressive social change and their anti-racist effects, whether or not racism was central to the organization’s agenda and named as such. In this sense, the division between the two kinds of diversity noted above (a variety of ways of combatting explicitly named racism and a variety of struggles of other kinds) dissolves into a single kind of diversity—various strategies for pursuing progressive social change that have anti-racist effects.

      The research team therefore arrived at the concept of alternative grammars of anti-racism so as to capture the actions and discourses in which racial inequality and racism were not explicit or central, although not entirely absent, but which nevertheless had what we considered to be anti-racist effects in that they challenged the racialized distribution of power and value, material and symbolic. The word grammar already carries the implication of something that organizes practices, which is unspoken and underlying, yet partly subject to verbalization (e.g., in terms of what sounds right or in terms of well-known rules of thumb). An alternative grammar of anti-racism is, then, an organizational matrix referring to elements that, when verbalized or excavated, do not seem to talk about anti-racism or even perhaps racism. Our contention is not that racism is necessarily absent as a referent but, rather, that it does not form the key organizing frame or grammar for the discourse and practice of the movement, organization, struggle, or action in question, the element against which the whole enterprise is defined. For example, we were struck by the presence of a racially aware class consciousness, in which people’s sense of suffering injustice and inequality was basically shaped by perceptions of the distribution of wealth, power, and privilege but was also infused with an underlying sense that their racialized condition had something to do with it.

      This is a function of the way in which racial and class inequalities intersect in Latin America: the frequent congruence of these two dimensions means that references to class—e.g., an idiom such as los de abajo (those from below)—would more or less automatically invoke the figure of racial difference, as a presence sometimes ghostly, sometimes visceral. Another, more familiar, example of intersectionality involves racism and gender, in the sense that racism and anti-racism necessarily operate in a gendered fashion, whether this is made explicit by the people involved or not. This means that, in a racially unequal society, struggles that mobilize idioms of gender, such as manhood or motherhood (e.g., campaigns by mothers of victims of police brutality), will very often be complicated by a racialized dimension, either explicit or not. Opening ourselves to alternative grammars of anti-racism obviously implicates explicit grammars of anti-racism. The cases we studied cover both possibilities, and their diverse affordances and limitations enrich and complicate what can be understood and mobilized as anti-racist or not.

      The difference between radical and reformist approaches in judging anti-racism is complicated by the Latin American material, which shows us that radical anti-racism can also be present in actions that are not directly about racism in the first place. The counterpart to this—that actions that explicitly name racism can still be highly reformist, tokenistic, and co-optative—is well known and an axe that has been frequently ground by academics and activists alike. Less obvious are the radically anti-racist effects of the actions that do not place racism center stage. The diversity of Latin American anti-racism, which includes many movements for progressive social change that have significant racialized dimensions, develops in new and important ways the existing acknowledgments of the heterogeneity of anti-racism (Bonnett 2000; Lentin 2004).

      That the idea of race and racism can come both into and out of focus, constituting an absent presence (Wade 2010a), has been noted for other contexts, such as Europe (M’charek, Schramm, and Skinner 2014a), usually in the context of remarking on the submerging (especially after the Second World War) of biological discourses of race and dominance of a language of culture and ethnicity. In France, for example, race-conscious policies and even the use of the word race in legislation and policy are forbidden. Yet racism as a problem to be addressed often has some public legitimacy, even if there is also a powerful discourse of post-raciality undermining that legitimacy by arguing that to highlight racism is counterproductive and antipatriotic.

      In Latin America, the absent presence of race and racism is more deeply constitutive of racial orders (Wade et al. 2014), because of their mestizo character—understood not just as an elite ideology but as one that pervades society, albeit sometimes in a contested and refracted fashion (Moreno Figueroa 2011; Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar 2016; Wade 2005). The fact that racism is constantly present and deeply embedded, while very often being veiled, unacknowledged, misrecognized, minimized, or with its significance delegitimated, means that anti-racism in the region can take profoundly heterogeneous forms. We need a broad, open-minded, and inclusive approach to grasp the full diversity of how anti-racism can operate—and, if this is true for Latin America, it is also true for other regions where the language of race is submerged and the importance of racism is minimized and where alternative grammars of anti-racism also exist.

      Being inclusive and open-minded, and complicating the radical-reformist opposition, is not the same as throwing critical judgment to the winds and abandoning a radical stance. We argue that a radical structural and racialized frame should act as a kind of political horizon against which anti-racist actions can be seen and evaluated. This frame is informed by a range of theoretical approaches (discussed below in more detail), including those developed by decolonial theorists, radical Black thinkers, and critical race theorists. This is an eclectic array of theories, but a common thread running through is the idea that racial difference and racism—and gender difference and sexism—are constitutive of modernity (meaning capitalism, from its earliest forms, and liberal forms of governance) and of the West as a spatiotemporal construct. That is, racism and racialized inequality are not simply historical contingencies that can be corrected by perfecting the operations of capitalism and liberalism. Racism and racial hierarchy have been necessary to the historical development of these systems and are thus so deeply embedded that radical structural change is needed to address the problems.

      In this sense, not all anti-racist actions, including ones using alternative grammars of anti-racism, have the same potential. Some actions might name racism explicitly but propose measures that do not tackle structural inequality and may fall into the realm of tokenism. These actions could be strengthened by a greater engagement with the deeply structural character of the racism they are seeking to address. This, however, does not mean they should necessarily be dismissed, as simply calling the problem by its name can be a useful contribution, especially in some Latin American contexts. Other actions might address structural inequality but name racism only in passing, instead of placing it center stage, even if such actions may produce anti-racist effects and, indeed, may involve a background awareness that racism is somehow part of the problem. These actions could be strengthened by greater engagement with the deeply racialized character of the structural inequalities they are seeking to address. Again, this does not mean these actions should be dismissed as inadequate, because pointing out the deeply rooted structural dimensions of inequality can be a useful contribution.

      Our approach is to err on the side of inclusiveness, to see the positive in each of the diverse anti-racist strategies to which people dedicate much of their time and energy. We look at many strategies and assess their strengths and weaknesses, always with a willingness to appreciate the diverse ways in which helpful contributions can be made—for example, toward making visible the presence and significance of Black and Indigenous minorities, calling out racism (perhaps via the judicial system), encouraging the transformation of individual and collective self-esteem, challenging or changing racialized inequalities, or campaigning for land rights, better services, or safer lives. But we also use a radical, structural, and racialized frame as a horizon, which should function as a way to help strengthen actions rather than simply critique or even dismiss them.

      RACISM AND ANTI-RACISM

      Racism

      In our view, the concept of racism should combine a recognition of two elements (Wade 2015, ch 1). First, its historical origins in European processes of reconquest and re-Christianizing within Europe (expelling Muslims and Jews from the Iberian peninsula, or forcing their conversion, and discriminating against people with Muslim and Jewish raza or ancestry), followed by processes of European conquest and colonization of other regions. This not only underpinned the development of Western modernity in the broadest sense, it also prompted the emergence of a relational matrix of specific categories of persons, in particular color coded as white, black, brown, yellow but also geographically coded as European, African, Indian, and Asian, from which emerged a proliferating set of derivative labels. These categories corresponded to the consolidation and hierarchization of a relational complex of existing spatial categories (Europe, Africa, America, Asia), revealing the deeply rooted spatial dimensions of racialized thinking.

      The second element in our definition of racism is its characteristic natural-cultural discourse that links bodies, behavior, and biocultural heredity in a self-explanatory circle (Wade 2002). In this circular thinking, certain behaviors, qualities, or dispositions are seen as linked to certain bodily features associated with the categories of persons noted above. These aspects are typically skin color, hair type, and facial features, but they may also include hair styles, body odors, beards, body movements, adornments, and even clothing, which blurs the boundary between body and behavior (M’charek, Schramm, and Skinner 2014b; Wade 2002; Weismantel 2001). The link is thought of as transgenerational and therefore as durable—but not rigidly fixed—because it is inherited via blood, biology, genes, and cultural tradition, all of which may be understood as adaptations to an original environment and climate. This circular argument may also propose that it is human nature to prefer people whose bodies, biology, and traditions are like one’s own (Stolcke 1995).

      The first component of this definition reveals that racism’s raison d’être is to distribute power, resources, and privilege unequally, and often with violence and violation, between the social groups originally defined in this history of colonialism, privileging some lives and bodies as more worthy and valuable than others. The second component reveals the grammar of naturalization with which it creates and maintains this unequal distribution. This is a grammar that uses a syntax as much affective as logical and, crucially, as much cultural as biological.

      The usefulness of this definition lies (1) in its historical specificity (not all naturalizing thinking that links bodies, behavior, and heredity is linked to racism; racism is tied to the particular history of European colonialism) and (2) in its biocultural inclusiveness within that historical trajectory. Racism does not necessarily have to invoke the existence of races or refer to biology in order to work; it may, for example, refer to indio as a category defined more in terms of culture than biology (without biology therefore being irrelevant). But the fact that this definition refers to the colonial category indio and locates it implicitly in relation to other categories such as mestizo or blanco (all seen as durable assemblages of bodies and behaviors) marks it as an element in a discourse of racism. Theorists have remarked on the emergence in the last few decades of cultural racism (Taguieff 1990), racism without racists (Bonilla-Silva 2003), or raceless racism (Goldberg 2008), in which the language of biology becomes taboo, at least in public discourse. But in these formulations it is sometimes hard to see why this qualifies as racism at all. The answer—implied in the argument that indio is indeed a racialized category—is that this kind of cultural racism targets the same categories as previous forms of racism, the categories that are linked to a long colonial and postcolonial history of domination by Europeans and their descendants.

      A further corollary to our definition is that concepts of race derive from racism, not vice versa. It does not make sense to posit a neutral mode of classification, called racial, which may or may not be deployed in a racist way (contra, for example, Goldberg 2008, 4). Racism emerged as an ideology for the domination and exclusion of certain categories of people and, at certain times and in certain places, the word race (or raza, race, razza, raça, etc.) has been applied to these categories, whether to refer to a line of ancestry or blood, a supposed underlying biological type, a statistically defined gene pool, or a collective group attributed with shared biocultural features. The meanings of the term have changed over time and have been, and still are, different according to region (Banton 1987; Hartigan 2013b; Wade 2015, chs. 3 and 4). At other times, the word race has not been used in relation to these categories, or not consistently. For example, in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglophone world, the word was not common in literate circles. After the Second World War, it has also become awkward or even taboo in some places (e.g., much of northwestern Europe). Thus race, when used as an analytic shorthand, is an umbrella category referring to a heterogeneous complex of shifting processes and relationships, in which the word race may or may not appear. In this book, we use the term and its derivatives—racial, racialized—to refer to processes linked to racism, as defined above.

      Direct and Structural Racism

      The next point of conceptual clarification relates to how we understand the operation of racism. Which acts, mechanisms, and processes count as racist in the sense of operating to distribute power, resources, and privilege unequally among the social groups originally defined in the history of European colonialism, using ideas that link bodies, behavior, and biocultural heredity in a self-explanatory circle? It is useful here to adopt a conventional distinction between direct and structural racism. The term direct racism refers to acts of stigmatization, in which people demean and violate the worth of others (with insults, jokes, assaults, threats, negative stereotyping, negligence, etc.) and acts of discrimination in which people deny others access to valued resources (employment, land, services, housing, etc.). This may require a certain level of conscious intention, but it may not. Many acts of stigmatization and discrimination, for example, can be driven by taken-for-granted, barely conscious assumptions about people in the social groups concerned, assumptions that fit into a whole worldview and value system. Racism awareness training seeks to make some of these assumptions visible and demonstrate their negative consequences. Most anti-racist legislation is aimed at direct racism and focuses on specific acts carried out by identifiable actors, whether the focus is

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