Commentary/Analysis by Dan Tres

Posted to the web 12 May 2008

 

 

For the Europeans involved in the Transatlantic Slave trade to be successful, they had to do two things. The first was to convince their African captives of their inferiority. This was done through the lethal process of transporting the African captives across the Atlantic Ocean under horrific conditions.

 

By the time the captives arrived in the New World, most if not all aboard the ship were shell shocked to the point of numbness and just accepted their lot. S. E. Anderson in his The Black Holocaust for Beginners writes a vivid description of this process. The second thing the European enslavers had to do to remain successful was to convince their countrymen that the Africans were subhuman and thus deserved to be enslaved so that they could be “civilized” or in some cases “Christianized.”

It was Bartholome De Las Casas, the monk who traveled with Cristobal Columbus, who suggested using Africans as laborers in order to save the indigenous peoples of Latin America from extinction. The Catholic Church also convinced their flocks that Africans were the children of Ham as found in Genesis 9:25-27 who were cursed to serve their brothers. Several Christian congregations that came after the Great Reformation even claimed that Africans had no souls and could not be saved. These religious stances condoned the practice of chattel slavery in the Americas.

 

It was this Christian based ideology that allowed most Europeans to sleep at night without a second thought of what was going on. It was also these two reasons that allowed the passage of Black Codes throughout the Americas after the abolishment of slavery in several countries. Since many people considered Africans and their descendants as subhuman or inferior, passing laws that prohibited them from gaining political and economic power. In several cases, there were many former slaves who went from physical bondage to wage slavery and had no legal recourse.

Marcus Garvey was shocked when he left his native Jamaica and traveled throughout the Americas. He learned that in several countries being Black equated to being poor. Garvey wrote extensively about his travels through Panama, Costa Rica, and other parts of Central America. It was what he found through his travels through Latin America that galvanized him to create the UNIA. Not only was Garvey shocked at how Europeans treated Africans after slavery, he was also shocked at how those who were dark skinned believed in their own inferiority.

In places such as the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Brazil there were classifications of not just skin color but hair texture as well. Some of these go back as early as the 16th century. Some of these are still used today. As a child, I was referred to as a trigueno (light with a very slight dark touch) with pelo muerto (thin and oily hair). I often heard my sister's hair being referred to as pelo malo (bad hair). In Junot Diaz' latest book, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the author makes references to how people placed curses on others by wishing that their children were dark skinned as if to mark them for life.

It is a tragedy that many of us who hail from Latin America, like people from the United States, still carry racial baggage from several centuries ago. It is so bad that many of us apply these classifications and stereotypes to people within our own families. Yet many of us do not see the connections between the physical, political, and economic setbacks faced by people throughout the African Diaspora.

 

Why is it that people of African descent in non-Latin American countries do not see that the racial dynamics found in Latin America as similar to their situation, and vice versa?

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