Boaventura de Sousa Santos
May 21, 2021
Opinion, Society 1 Comment
Translated by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
The skin is our greatest natural protective barrier. Why does the color of the skin have an infinitely greater social significance than the color of the pupil of the eyes? Both in the Christian tradition (including the secularism in which it was prolonged) and in the Buddhist tradition, darkness and clarity were conceptual metaphors that tried to explain the perfection of the human person in his relationships with the powers that transcend him. They refer to movements of knowledge and inner life. The path from darkness to clarity is open to all human beings. And, in fact, the maximum clarity (for example, in the presence of divinity) can become the maximum darkness, an example of this being the divine horror of George Bataille, or the maximum silence of the universe, in the case of José. Saramago.
However, with modern European colonial expansion, especially from the 16th century on, darkness and light were progressively used to distinguish between human beings, to classify and rank them. It was then that darkness and light were mobilized as identity factors, to define the colors of the skin of human beings, transferring ancient meanings to this definition. If before such meanings were based on the idea of ​​the common condition of humans, from then on the color of the skin will constitute one of the fundamental vectors of the abyssal line that distinguishes humans from subhumans, the distinction that underlies racism. .
Once applied to human skin as a determining factor, color came to designate “natural” characteristics that define from the beginning the permitted and prohibited social transits. The “natural” became a social construction conceived as an extra-social factor of the legitimacy of the social hierarchy defined from the colonial metropolises. The “black” became “color”, a symbol of the negative, and the “white”, “the absence of color”, a symbol of the positive. Thus arose modern racism, one of the main and most destructive prejudices of Eurocentric modernity. As Francisco Bethencourt well analyzes, racism, despite not being an exclusive Western trait,Racisms: days of the Crusades ao seculo XX , 2015).
Despite having undergone many mutations, racial prejudice has maintained a remarkable stability. On the one hand, the immense diversity of physiological traits and skin color tones does not prevent prejudice from incessantly adapting and reconstituting itself according to the contexts, sometimes seeming a residue of the past, sometimes re-emerging with renewed virulence. On the other hand, its insidious nature stems from its “availability” to be internalized by those who are victims of it, in which case they go on to evaluate their existence and their role in society based on the canon of racial hierarchy. Finally, the racial logic of color runs so deeply into culture and language that it is present in contexts so naturalized that they seem to have nothing to do with prejudice.
The primacy accorded to vision in Eurocentric analysis of the world makes skin color one of the most visible variations among humans. It is related to responses to ultraviolet radiation. The darker skin, with more melanin, protects the native populations of regions near the equator. Therefore, in its origin it is a physical-biological response to the environment. How is it that, although the origin of humanity occurred in regions with higher ultraviolet radiation, the color of the skin ended up becoming a marker of dehumanization? It was a long historical process that, in some contexts, evolved to turn light skin and dark skin into connotations of a rigid social hierarchy, what we call racism and colorism.
The perception of color ceased to be a physical characteristic of the skin to become a marker of power and a cultural construction. The nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century were the epoch of the apogee of the scientific explanation of racial differences, from which the social hierarchy and the recommendation of no miscegenation, of eugenics, of apartheid and of the elimination of what were considered inferior races (eg, Nancy Stepan, The Idea of ​​Race in Science: Great Britain 1800-1960 , 1982). The concept of “under man” (subhuman) gained popularity with the book of the American Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man, published in 1922, which would become the handbook of the Nazis. After the Second World War and in the face of the genocidal catastrophe of Nazism and fascism, the paradigm of racist science was dismantled. Today, genetic studies show that since racial classifications do not translate into significant genetic differences, it makes no sense to speak of race as a biological category. In fact, the genetic variation between racial groups is small compared to the genetic differences within the same group. In other words, racist ideology survives the dismantling of the “scientific bases” of racism.
Despite the discrediting of the scientific basis of racism, racism as an ideology remains and has even been accentuated in recent times. The morphological characteristics of the face, hair or skin color continue to be used as markers of racial discrimination, and in many countries determine the variations in discrimination directed against different racialized social groups, be they black, Asian, indigenous, gypsy or Latin, not to mention, depending on the time and context, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Slavic. Skin color, in particular, has acquired a particularly insidious meaning in determining systematic differences in treatment within groups that share the same “racialized identity” or “community of color.”
In the Americas, this phenomenon led to the formulation of the concept of colorism to designate this differential treatment. There is no colorism without racism or colonialism. Colorism enhances the complexity and gravity of racist narratives and practices and reiterates the epistemic and ontological violence of the colonial project, an even more cruel violence when it occurs within racialized groups. The color code states that the more “white” the color of the skin, the greater the probability that someone is a candidate for the privileges of whiteness, but, as with racial identity, the definition of the color of the skin is a social, cultural, economic and political construction.
Social studies of skin color show that identification and classification of skin color varies from society to society and even within the same society. It is appropriate to remember that Bethencourt decided to study the history of racism to answer this question: how is it possible that the same person is considered black in the United States, colored in the Caribbean or in South Africa, and white in Brazil? I would add two other questions. Why does the classification vary within the same country? In the case of Brazilian society, who is considered white in Bahia can be considered black in São Paulo. And can the classification vary over time?
When speaking critically about racism, there is a great tendency to highlight the damage, violence and destruction it causes in racialized populations. However, in this way, the color of those who cause racism becomes invisible. The skin of those who exercise a racist attitude has no color, especially in contexts where the “color white” is associated with the maintenance of privileges inherited from slavery and colonialism. The same could be said of the skin of the Saudi Arabs in relation to Pakistanis, Filipinos or Bangladeshis, or of the Chinese in relation to Africans.
Thus, both the color of the skin and the privileges it justifies become invisible: Why does the critical analysis of racism mainly affect the discrimination suffered by racialized bodies and omit the privileges of non-racialized bodies? In the end, when you talk about “white supremacy” you are not talking about the quality of the color, but about the power and privileges it invokes. Far beyond the contexts of white supremacy (whiteness), the racist use of color and the absence of color is always linked to the instrumentalization of power and privilege. I mentioned earlier the racism of the Chinese in China against black Africans. The truth is that the Supreme Court of South Africa ruled in 2008 that, in order to access positive discrimination to promote the “
The urgent conclusion seems to be the following: only political reasons and power struggles can explain the social instrumentalization of skin color; And, likewise, only they explain that the probable increase in the multiplicity of skin color tones resulting from miscegenation or creolization does not translate into an end to racism and the violence and injustice it causes. Despite the diversity of contexts already mentioned, historically the problem has become especially acute in countries where there is a population considered white, no matter how small, but in positions of power, and it assumes different contours in different contexts. Research has focused primarily on how differences in skin color between people considered to be of the “same race” determine differences in treatment. The most widely discussed case is that of the countries that inherited the violence of slavery, especially in the American context. The analyzes consistently show that, despite very significant advances in the access to public and private positions of people classified as black (or of any race other than white), as a result of the struggles against racial discrimination, especially During the last fifty years, the truth is that the racialized people who accessed these places have, in general, a lighter skin color.
Despite the immense diversity of skin tones, skin color marked and marks not only racial differences, but also differences in treatment within the same racial identity. Colorism is perhaps the most insidious weapon of racism to divide racialized groups. For example, in the United States, lighter-colored black slaves were more expensive and sought out for domestic work in plantation houses, while darker-colored slaves were destined for hard work in the fields. In fact, slave traders used differences in skin color to cause division among slaves. Long after the abolition of slavery, racism and colorism not only remained, but spread to new categories of population, for example, European immigrants. In other words, the racism-based exclusion matrix of phenotypic differentiation has such a cruel and unfathomable dynamism that it spreads “by analogy.” In the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, the Irish, Italians and Portuguese were considered “dark whites” and only gradually (and completely?) Their skin color was being “bleached”, accompanying their social ascent. But after all, was it the upward mobility that bleached the skin or was it skin without a phenotypic matrix that facilitated the ascent? The answer is obvious. Italians and Portuguese were considered “dark white” and only gradually (and completely?) their skin color was being “bleached”, accompanying their social ascent. But after all, was it the upward mobility that bleached the skin or was it skin without a phenotypic matrix that facilitated the ascent? The answer is obvious. Italians and Portuguese were considered “dark white” and only gradually (and completely?) their skin color was being “bleached”, accompanying their social ascent. But after all, was it the upward mobility that bleached the skin or was it skin without a phenotypic matrix that facilitated the ascent? The answer is obvious.
The persistence of racism and colorism is evident in this photographic snapshot of Brazil. On March 22, 2018, the well-known American newspaper Wall Street Journal published a report entitled “The demand for American sperm increases exponentially in Brazil.” He reported that in the previous seven years the importation of American semen by white, wealthy, single, and lesbian Brazilian women had increased dramatically. The preferences were for donors with fair skin and blue eyes. According to Fairfax Cryobank, the largest sperm exporter to Brazil, this country was the fastest growing semen market. While only 11 tubes of semen had been imported in 2011, in 2017 the number rose to 500 tubes. According to the journalist, the preference for white donors reflects the concern for racism “in a country where social class and skin color are closely linked.” For consumers, “fair-skinned children will expect better wages and fairer treatment from the police.” In the United States, black women with lighter skin tones and European features tend, as in other circumstances, to be more successful in landing a job, in a professional career, in beauty pageants, or in music videos. In the case of Brazil, in an elite European college .
Colorism has also existed within the same racial group when, for example, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, black elite clubs in the United States denied access to people with the darkest color. The internalization of colorism has led and continues to lead to skin whitening practices and the demand for whitening products has grown enormously (Lynn Thomas, Beneath the Surface: a transnational history of skin lighteners, 2020). But, on the other hand, colorism can also operate in reverse, in contexts of highly racialized communities and as a reaction of resentment: discriminating against lighter-skinned people considered weak or inferior for being the product of a mixture of races.
The color, the contracolor and the rainbow
Skin color is an essentialist marker in our unequal and discriminatory societies and, as a political phenomenon, it can be used with different political orientations and even as a form of historical compensation. In 1903, the great black American intellectual WEB Du Bois prophetically wrote that the problem of the 20th century would be “the color line,” the “line of racial division by color.” This is how it was and seems to continue to be well into the 21st century. In the middle of the last century, Franz Fanon eloquently showed how racism acted through a dialectical fracture between the body and the world, between the “body scheme” and the “epidermal racial scheme”. The epidermal phenotype would be trivial if phenotypic racism did not exist.
Racial and colorist logic is used both to exclude the “others” and to unite the “us.” Therein lies one of the threads with which the extreme right of our time is woven. At the opposite pole, the black is beautiful movement of African Americans in the 1960s, which later spread to other countries (for example, apartheid South Africa ), consisted of reclaiming color and changing its connotation. Whenever color is politicized against racism to unite the anti-racial struggle and the anti-capitalist struggle, the color of the skin tends to lose essentialism and become relative.
Intensely politicized, the Black Panther Party’s struggle was notable, especially in the 1970-1980s, in an effort to abolish the relevance of skin color differences among the black community. And yesterday, as today, the question remains open of knowing to what extent groups of various races, ethnicities and skin colors can unite in the struggles against capitalism, colonialism, racism and sexism, thus increasing the chances of success. of the struggles for a more just society. Periods of greatest optimism have been followed by periods of greatest pessimism with disturbing circularity.
Two things seem certain. On the one hand, identity essentialisms tend to make it difficult to articulate social struggles against inequality and discrimination. On the other hand, the change in the color of power cannot be confused with the change in the nature of power. After all, the American black bourgeoisie has been concerned with achieving capitalist power and not with changing it (see Barack Obama). And it will be no different elsewhere.
Wittgenstein wrote ( Observations on Colors ) that a color-blind people would have other concepts about colors. Would this be a solution to racism based on skin color? If my proposal is correct that racism does not reside in color itself, but in the politics of color centered on the inequality of power and the exclusive concentration of privileges, the answer is no. If the power structure is maintained, the prejudice would not disappear, it would only be expressed in another way and with another justification.
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