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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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No Stupid Questions
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Racial divides are very much present in South America, but racial tension seems to be a little lighter than in the US. Culturally, Brazil might have gone particularly far down the path of considering everyone part of a shared Brazilian identity, independent of ethnicity. Then again, Brazil has incredible class differences, and how is race distributed between the gated communities and the favela?
One source observes that "[w]hite workers have 74% higher income on average compared to Black and Brown people", so just because the culture might be less racist than the US, the systematic issues are still very much there.
As for race tensions, America has a few original sins. One is slavery, another is genocide. The two meet and interact in an interesting way when one considers cultural genocide: Africans brought to the US as slaves were not only forced to work for free, but they were taken from their families, deprived of their language and culture, and forced to create something new out of their situation. That's the depressing backstory of how blues became so great.
You see this in today's America: What is there of African culture left in African Americans? African music survived and transformed into call and respond in cotton fields, which transformed into rhythm and blues, which eventually became R&B and hiphop. Other than that? I can't think of anything, but maybe I'm ignorant.
In South America, it's a different story. I went to Colombia last year and briefly got to meet some people from the Afrodescendant community working on remembrance. They too were processing not only centuries of slavery and bad treatment, but also more recent horrors of the armed conflict. They did so in ways that embraced their African roots: Their use of colour, their artwork, their whole cultural production still shows clear roots back to Africa. They also have their own food, fuelled as always by "ancestral knowledge". I also felt like their vibe was a mix between South American and African, but that's harder to measure. Importantly however, unlike their American counterparts, there was not a successful effort to cut off these roots made on the basis of pure cruelty. They are highly aware - and proud - of their ancestry.
It's a complex argument, but I think it is an important one to understand why racial divides in the US are so fucked. White Americans are so fucking obsessed about their great grandfather being Irish, yet they don't want to consider the fact that black Americans had their entire history forcefully erased as a potential issue. I think it is an issue, and I think it's part of the reason why tensions run so high in the US.
According to this guy, some parts of African language were preserved and adapted in certain groups.
That sounds super interesting! I can't watch the video right now, but look forward to checking it out. Thanks for sharing! :)
Those systematic issues aren't racist issues tho. It makes sense the descendants of literal slaves brought from tribes from Africa and the descendants of native tribes in the Americas who didn't even invent the wheel, not even the Aztecs, Mayans or Incas, would have ended up poorer today than the descendants of people from developed civilisations that built huge trans-oceanic vessels. Only literal Star Trek-ian communism could have changed that, even real life communism doesn't and didn't suddenly make janitors rich and college educated managers poor. Look at any Eurasian country with no history of migrations or colonies and the poor people there today are the descendents of poor people from a couple hundred years ago, and the rich people today are the descendents of rich people from a couple hundred years ago.
The real issue is the lack of social mobility. Some countries have more of it, some less. The way to achieve it is through stuff like real and strong safety nets and welfare and good universal free education and policies such as a progressive inheritance tax, not through racial measures.
Racial measures exist and have a purpose in divided societies where the racial groups are divided and don't see eye to eye and don't understand each other's issues and therefore each group needs proper democratic representation which also means some amount of economic strength.
In a society where people aren't actually racist, or racially divided, those kind of measures would only breed resentment because some poor people would be overlooked because they aren't of the "right" colour, in this case not dark enough. So these anti-racism measures would just create more racial drama.
You can't use a one-size fits all solution to two different countries with a different cultural situation. And considering neither of these two countries is at an extreme of a possible position, the real solutions are more nuanced gradient policies, skewing one way in one country, and the other way in the other.
a) OP is talking about racial divides, not only racism. b) Makes sense, sure. Whether it's acceptable is another question. You don't need full-on communism to erase historical inequality. Even capitalism holds a promise of meritocracy, even though it routinely fails to deliver. In the real world, wealth tax and free universal education can go a long way. But accepting that the descendants of slaves are still poorer than the descendants of their masters and considering it to be anything else than a huge problem is seriously fucked up.
Also, Scandinavian social democracies are pretty egalitarian.
I implied no such thing, thankfully. I just think it's really hard if not impossible to focus policies on those descendants of slaves and the descendants of the slave-owners without catching other people in the cross-fire if the policies are done on racial basis. Why not just make policies that help all poor people, regardless of race, especially in societies where the line between descendants of slaves and the descendants of the slave-owners has become highly blurred? It would take longer to equalize the wealth that way, but there'd be less drama along the way.
Sure, that's a different problem entirely. I'm a big proponent of universal income, universal education, and taxing billionaires out of existence.
I don't think it's possible to make up for historical (and soon to be historical, for that matter) injustice by paying for it. I am convinced we need to create a society where these injustices are not decisive for your possibilities in life. So I think we agree on this point.
(Within the academic debate on this, I find the idea of justice in acquisition to be pretty appealing. In particular the article Self-Ownership and Equality: A Lockean Reconciliation by Michael Otsuka from 2006. It's behind a paywall with its original publisher, but if you search for https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.1998.tb00061.x on sci-hub you'll find it. It's less than 30 pages and a pretty light read, as far as I remember)
That's an interesting point. I think the sheer fact that Americans with darker skin might be the descendents of slaves might do something psychologically to some people and shape their identity in a different way.
But I also think that probably many Americans including the ones from European ancestors are probably quite far detached from that culture anyways. And I wonder if Americans with unknown origin couldn't just do a DNA test if they wanted to know their ancestry and get in touch with the specific country be it from Africa or partly European if it was really that meaningful for them.
I for example don't really care about my ancestors. I might come from slaves but I don't really care as I mainly focus on the present. But every person is different in that regard.
I think we carry culture on even when we don't notice, so there's still a lot of Europe left in white Americans even when they don't think about it actively. In the latest episode of Last Week Tonight John Oliver talked about how American tipping culture originates in how the British during the Tudors period would tip servants when being invited to festivities, or something like that. Just as one random example.
DNA tests to try to re-establish heritage is pretty popular among African Americans who can afford it. Samuel Jackson got himself Gabonese citizenship after DNA tests linked him to the Benga people. But entering it that way through a DNA test in adulthood obviously leaves you with a whole lot of catching up to do.
On a more positive note, it seems African nations are often quite welcoming towards African Americans who search for their ancestry. I'm not sure Europeans will extend such goodwill towards our white American cousins for very much longer.