Genesis and of factual-doctrinarian Quince Duncan Moodie

Afro-descendant activism in the field of human rights Carlos Minott Maitland

Genesis and evolution of factual-doctrinarian racism

Quince Duncan Moodie

Genesis and evolution of factual-doctrinarian racism

1. Background

When in 1492 , seeking the East, found himself among the Caribbean islands, a new era started for mankind. One of the most problematic aspects of that so-called “discovery" was the encounter with the . That “discovery” gave rise to an intense debate in Europe because the Europeans were unaware of the existence of those peoples. The , and ethnic communities of the Bible are those that bore a relation to the major of Egypt and Babylon and to the Jews who were subjected to different forms of bondage in those lands. The European experience was mostly with and the Middle East and to a lesser degree with Asia. To be found suddenly in the presence of peoples who until then were totally unknown created great confusion. It was asked whether the “Indians” were descendants of . They were not mentioned in the Bible’s map of nations.

This is how the doctrine of racism, as we understand it today, began to be developed for the first time in human history - what we have called factual racism, to distinguish it historically from ethnic discrimination and from pseudo-racist theories invented to attenuate the historical responsibility of this creation of Western .

Some scholars have claimed that the dispute between Homo Sapiens and the Neanderthals may be explained by racism. This is obviously a flimsy effort because there is no evidence that the struggle was justified on the basis of a racist doctrine. Others have seen a manifestation of racism in the confrontation with the Moors. That dispute, however, was never based on the idea that peoples of certain phenotypical traits are absolutely superior to others. For example, on the Islamic side Tarik, who invaded in 711 with an army of 12,000 soldiers, was a dark-skinned African and on the Spanish side it was impossible to develop a theory of white superiority if at that time the Spaniards lost the war and were dominated for 700 years. (Von Sertima. 1993:4).

It has also been argued that there was racism in the Crusades. It is true that in 1095 Pope Urban II called for combating the cruel “race” that had seized Jerusalem, but the definition of race did not have anything to do with the later concept. Rather the Crusades were rationalized in religious terms (Rebérioux in Comarmond and Duchet, 1972:163).

Other scholars have equated the caste system in with factual-doctrinarian racism. India was invaded by Aryans, who had white skin and who conquered and subjected the local brown-skinned . The Aryans installed the caste system as a mechanism of domination and justified it mystically with ideas of karma and reincarnation. The writings in India, however, promoted the mixing of races, except for the untouchables, and, in any case, in India there was no theory similar to the Western doctrinarian racism, which is to say that they did not generalize the concept nor did they classify all humanity according to phenotypical traits. There are even Afro-descendants in India who were brought by an Indian emperor to be the palace guard (Harris 1971). There is also in the theoretical concert, a symphony of African “racism.” For example, there are those who see a typical manifestation of racism in the conflict between the Tutsi and the Hutu, inhabitants of and Burundi in Central Africa. It is claimed that the Tutsi aristocracy, a minority, imposes its control over the Hutu and Twa majority on the basis of racial superiority (van den Berghe 1967:12). What is certain is that after the original invasion and conquest of the Tutsi, these peoples had lived pacifically for centuries, marrying among the races. They did not develop a doctrine of racial superiority until the appearance of Belgians and English who, by measuring skulls, established racial categories that the Africans did not have. The former thus created an elitist class for their own colonial purposes.

Factual racism is doctrinarian. It turns out to be a process of superiority, suppression and a putting down of groups of human beings, based on socially-selected phenotypical criteria.

Race and factual racism.

Blackburn (in, Lang, Berel, 2000) insists that the concept of race is not biological. The word “race” has certainly been subject to many definitions. It is, undoubtedly, a concept loaded with a bad history. The word comes from the Italian razza (Marquer, 1969) and means family or group, a term that in turn comes from the Arabic ras indicative of origin or descendants. The concept was constructed socially, but its markers are phenotypical and, accordingly, communicable from one generation to another.

The word “race” has meant many things throughout history. But the term, as it is used in this essay, refers to the physical differences that exist between groups of human beings, such as the form of eyes, skin color or type of hair. These traits do not arise spontaneously in the different human groups, but are a set of distinctive marks of a group that has a common territorial origin and all the evidence indicates that they are developed as by-products of the human being’s adaptation to a different environment. There is no question that those markers are transmitted genetically.

Thus, the fact that the concept does not have a biological basis does not mean that races do not exist. Socially-constructed concepts are real –the is a social construct and it is real.

It must, nevertheless, be made clear that the phenotypical features of a people do not have affect their moral, emotional or mental aspects, as racists have unsuccessfully attempted to prove. Nobody is more or less intelligent because of the phenotypical group to which he or she belongs.

National, religious, geographical, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups and it cannot be proved that the cultural features of these groups bear any genetic relation with racial traits.

“As it is common to make serious mistakes of this type in using in the current language the word race, it would be advisable not to use it when speaking about human races and to use the term ethnic groups.” (The UNESCO Courier, Vol. 3 Nos. 6-7: p.8).

The Declaration that UNESCO adopted at the beginning of the 1950s was a political declaration, aimed at attacking the racist connotations of the word “race.” However, the difficulty of replacing “race” with “” is that the factors that define an ethnic group and race are not the same. Ethnic group refers to the culture. The markers of the ethnic group are strictly cultural and are not transmitted genetically.

Subsequently in 1978, UNESCO issued a Declaration on race and racial prejudice, which clearly establishes that “All human beings belong to a single species and are descended from a common stock. They are born equal in dignity and rights and all form an integral part of humanity.” (Art.1)

The discrimination to which Afro-descendant groups in the Americas are subject is not because of their culture but because of phenotypical factors that have traditionally been used to that end. In most cases, important cultural differences do not exist between Afro- descendants and . In the majority of the cases, they belong to a single ethnic group, that is to say, cultural, but they still suffer specific discrimination.

If, however, we attempt to renounce the concept of race, it would be necessary to assume that the human species can be grouped into phenotypically differentiated families, all with the same potential level of intelligence and emotional factors and all with the same attributes. In truth it is culture that is, in the final analysis, the factor with the greatest weight.

The factual racism that developed during the period of European colonial expansion is unique in the history of humanity. It established, based on its concept of race, a universal doctrine of the hierarchy of human groups, attributing intellectual, emotional and moral value to such differences. In the end, the white race was defined as the superior race and the other races came to occupy places of subordination on the scale.

2. Factual-doctrinarian racism.

2.1 Genesis

Racism is not natural. This psychologistic interpretation does not withstand rigorous analysis, despite being widespread among some contemporary social scientists. It is not true that racism can be explained on an alleged “fear of the other” by the “unknown.”

The evidence is overwhelming that the natural feeling that prevails in human beings faced with the new tends to be curiosity. The accounts of European travelers to Africa during of exploration are abundant and affirm that theory; for example, those of “Mungo” Park, a Scottish explorer, who around 1795 lived in the region of the Niger River. When he entered a community, everyone abandoned what he or she was doing and surrounded him, amazed at his white skin and his straight nose. They thought that his nose was artificial. They even took off his clothes and hat, counted his toes and fingers to corroborate that he was actually human. A few days later, a delegation of women visited him in order to verify, by a direct inspection, if Christians were circumcised. (Northrup, 2002:13-14).

Furthermore, thousands of white children in the Southern and the Caribbean fed on the milk of wet-nurses. They were raised by slaves or freed black women, in some cases relatives. What fear could the white children have toward the mother substitute that fed them with milk from her breast and raised them? And yet, they were racists.

The first bases of doctrinarian racism come from Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455), who as a result of the Portuguese exploration of the African coast, issued a directive that gave the Europeans freedom to “search out, vanquish and reduce to perpetual the Saracens, pagans and enemies of Christ to the south of Cape Bojador including all the coast of Guinea.” (Hart 1984: 19). Of course, the coast of Guinea is African.

The second also comes from the clergy. This time the Spanish friar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda provided the doctrinarian justification for the conquest. He proposed what he called "fair titles," whereby the Spanish had the right of guardianship over the indigenous peoples, so that they were natural slaves.

Pope Paul III was concerned about the progress of the polygenetic thesis, whereby human beings had various origins. He issued in 1537 the Papal Bull Sublimis Deus, in which he declared that idea as heresy and assured that the Indians and other peoples should not be treated as brute animals with the argument that they are “incapable of converting to Catholicism.” Exercising his authority as representative “in the world (of the) power of Our Father,” Paul III stated the thesis that

“The Indians are truly men ... not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but ...they desire... to embrace it... We declare...that...the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their freedom... nor should they in any way be enslaved.” (Hart 1984: 22)

But the words of Pope Paul fell on barren ground.

The conquest and domination of native peoples advanced rapidly. Attacked militarily with superior arms, these peoples became first enslaved and then subjected to other forms of bondage, such as the Mita and the .

The former interrupted the dietary production cycle, since the Spanish seized a substantial part of that production. The result combined with forced labor and malnutrition prepared the road for the population catastrophe that would necessarily follow. Millions of indigenous peoples died as a consequence of the diseases brought by the invaders. Due to the tragic process to which the indigenous population was subjected, in 1501 the Catholic Kings authorized the introduction of enslaved blacks to the island of , but “not Moors, nor Jews, nor heretics nor the reconciled nor recent converts to Our Faith, unless they were black slaves or other slaves who were born in the hands of Christians.”

The first “blacks” who arrived in the Americas therefore were not African but of African descent who came from the Iberian Peninsula. Many of those to whom the word “ladino” was originally applied were Andalusians. In fact, an Afro-descendant had reached America with Columbus. Andrés Niño, a Portuguese , was the commander of La Niña, one of Columbus’ three ships. Later, slaves arrived from Spain.

But the tragedy was increasing. In 1510 Fray Antonio de Montesinos denounced the slavery and cruelty to which the indigenous population on Hispaniola was subjected: “You are in mortal sin and in it you will live and die for the cruelty and tyranny that you inflicted on these innocent people.”

In turn, Bartolomé de las Casas, named in 1510 “Protector of the Indians” by King Ferdinand, in his despair to protect the native people lost perspective and, appearing before the new Emperor Carlos V in 1517, supported the settlers’ request to import blacks to replace the indigenous labor. Shortly thereafter, the Emperor authorized transporting 4,000 Africans to the island. Thus began, in serious, the trans-.

An interesting fact is that de las Casas renounced his bishopric in 1550 and devoted himself to the struggle for the rights of slaves until his death in 1566. In his writings on the “” he confesses that his support for the importation of Africans to replace the indigenous population was a great error. “The captivity of the blacks was as unjust as that of the Indians” and “he was not sure that his ignorance of the matter and his good intentions would exonerate him before divine justice.” (Hart 1984: 22).

Thus begins the institution of trans-Atlantic slavery, together with the treatment or trade of slaves. It was a case of brutality unprecedented in human history and has justly been declared a crime against humanity for its extreme cruelty and duration.

2.2 Theoretical evolution

As has been stated, doctrinarian racism, which we have called “factual racism,” arose during the colonialist expansion of the Western European nations. A result of the Portuguese exploration of the African coasts was the aforementioned directive of Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455) that authorized perpetual slavery for the Africans (Hart 1984: 19).

In the European courts, the so-called discovery of America gave rise to two opposing theories. One was the traditional notion that all human beings came from a single common trunk (Adam and Eve) and the other arose with the humanities and the incipient social sciences. Thus, Paracelso (1520) explained the origin of the races on the basis of the theory of polygenetics, whereby the indigenous peoples had a different origin from that of the other races.

Friar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, historian and Spanish ecclesiastic, justified the conquest and Spanish colonization of the indigenous population with what he called “fair titles.” The peoples of America were natural slaves and therefore the Spaniards had a guardianship right, which implied the bondage or natural slavery of the indigenous population with the Spanish as absolute masters.

The Friar also claimed that it was best that the Indians subjected themselves to the Spanish for their own good, since they were incapable of governing themselves. Furthermore, the Spaniards, as Christians, had to stop them, even by force, from cannibalism and other anti-natural conduct that the indigenous peoples practiced. Finally, he alleged that Christian Europeans were obligated to save the future innocent victims who would be sacrificed to false Gods.

The construction of racism is not therefore the result of nonsensical spoutings of ignorant people. On the contrary, some of the most brilliant minds of Europe participated in its creation. For example:

Carl Linnaeus (1758), well-known naturalist and considered by some the founder of European , launched the rationalist logic of racism in his treatise Systema Naturae in which classifies humanity in four groups, attributing to each one its own features. According to him, homo americanus (those from America) is choleric, eager, lazy and bound by custom; homo asiaticus (Asian) is melancholic, avaricious, severe and governed by opinion; homo afer (black) is phlegmatic, negligent and governed by what is arbitrary and, of course, homo europaeus (white) is pale, swift, inventive and governed by laws. Naturally, this classification, disguised as scientific, is no more than an ideological writing by a European with a colonialist mentality.

Conde de Buffon (1774) agreed with the idea that the original color of the human being was white but who in contact with the tropics underwent a degeneration thanks to which he became increasingly black and lost some mental faculties. He is the first to apply to these human groups the word race. This theory would be developed by one of his followers, Cornelius de Pauw (1774), who specifically pointed out that human beings become black and stunted in the equatorial zone.

There were also followers of Linnaeus. P. Kamper (1781) went deeper into the former’s theory by contributing a description of the typical facial features of each country, arriving at the conclusion that the features of the black are monkey-like.

By 1810, the racist theory had achieved total respectability in Europe to the point that a scientific specialty was opened in the University of Göttingen, where the German professor Barthold Niebuhr stated categorically that “race” is one of the most important elements of history. G. W. Hegel postulated in 1830 that the black represents the natural man in its wild condition and there is nothing remotely human in his nature. As with Linnaeus, his thesis was not supported by research or by his own observations, but on reports of missionaries.

In the nefarious 1815 Congress of Vienna, the Europeans partitioned Africa by means of a treaty. Immediately, two theses were presented: that of Marx and Engels (1848, 1867) that explains human progress through the struggle of classes and that of Arthur, Conde de Gobineau who, in his “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races” (1853), raised the idea of the unavoidable struggle among races, which in passing advanced the theory of doctrinarian racism by establishing the idea of sub-races: for example, the races would be divided into the sub-races Aryan, Alpine () and Mediterranean (of African origin). For Gobineau, class and race are indistinguishable.

There were also idealistic positions like that of Hunt (1865), for whom the white man had the responsibility of civilizing the others, as a heavy load on his back.

However, beginning with Houston Chamberlain in his The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, all Aryans are said to be concentrated in Germany and are called Teutons. Now, race and are indistinguishable.

The German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II, welcomed the book with a great deal of enthusiasm and became its main promoter. At the same time, he added the idea of the Chinese as the “yellow peril,” whom he saw as a threat to European civilization.

The social Darwinism attributed to the English philosopher (1820–1903) who, incorrectly interpreting the theories of and resurrecting the idea of Gobineau, held that the struggle between the white race and the other races was unavoidable because the former is Christian, civilized and lives in a temperate climate. Nature provided it with large animals, tools for work and a superior mind. The other races practice human sacrifice, are barbaric, live in a tropical environment, without large animals, and suffer from a chronic and incurable infantilism.

That period saw the beginnings of efforts to substantiate scientifically the idea of the inferiority of the African. The studies of “facial angles,” suggested by the Dutch anatomy professor Pieter Camper (1722-1789), measured the facial angles of the Africans and compared them with those of the Europeans to demonstrate scientifically, through the size and form of the faces, the alleged differences with regard to intellectual capacity.

In that context, there is also the theory of , proposed by Sir (1822–1911), British explorer and scientist and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton wanted to use artificial selection in order to improve race. His idea was to promote the “desirable traits” and to eliminate the undesirable, resorting to genetics. His theory was widely welcomed in Europe and in the United States.

It ideologically fed the utopia of German and the later efforts of that have occurred in some European countries. The Nazis, for example, had a policy of sterilizing blacks, together with the handicapped, criminals, the poor and the mentally ill

These novel approaches, supposedly scientific, again had religious support. In fact, some theologians and Protestant missionaries found these ideas totally consistent with the Christian Gospel. Protestant theology willingly welcomed these concepts. In fact, missionaries became spokespersons of white superiority and had in the colonies, more than a proselytizing role, a “civilizing” role, that is, changing a culture and the role of spreaders of the racist myth in the cities.

For example, a missions’ inspector in 1859 commented that it was obvious that racial differences were the result of a divine decree and on that basis he wondered whether such disparities did not also imply differences regarding salvation. Was it not, he wondered, “in the New Alliance, despite the universality of the mercy which appears in Christ, at the present time in this world a number of peoples and nations are to be and indeed should be held back until a new period in the Kingdom of God.” Immediately, the pastor gave as an example the Bushmen of Papua. For the Christian missionary, the Bushman has “only the traits of a primitive man, distorted and materialized by sin” (Luepke, citing H. Loth 1978).

It is interesting that, despite the French Revolution with its emphasis on equality, the ideas that prevailed in on race were ultimately those of (1694-1778), who placed the peoples of the “black race” as a lower species of man and therefore backed the theory of polygenism. Consistent with the ideas in vogue, France institutionalized racism in France in 1881 in order to apply it to its Asian and African colonies. The Code of Indigenism, a body of laws loaded with racism, deprived of their French status millions of citizens, who came to occupy the category of sub-human in the words of Jean- Paul Sartre.

France took thus an enormous step back, like that of the Congress of Vienna. The Code instituted the condition of serf for colonial subjects.

Many of Code’s rules appeared in the Jim Crow system of the United States, such as the prohibition of meetings, physical punishment, lack of civil rights, disrespect by looks or in a way that annoys the whites.

In general, racist was transmitted directly to all the faithful of the European churches, including children in Protestant Sunday schools, which guaranteed its spread. In 1932 the “German Christians” assured that “in race, Nation and national characteristics we see points of order for our life.” That order was established by God himself and it is thus a duty to maintain them. “For this reason any mixture of the race” should be opposed. Maintaining racial purity was an imperative for the Germans because “(b)elief in Christ does not destroy race, but deepens and sanctifies it.” (Luepke, 1978:3)

That is how the church once again justified the ideology of a dominant race.

These ideas established a firm foundation for the development of the Nazi racist ideology and then of Apartheid. Indeed, Adolfo Hitler relaunched in the Germany of the 1930s the ideas of Chamberlain on the superiority of German culture and the German nation and poured all his hatred upon the Jews. In September 1935 Germany enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which prohibited any marital or out-of-wedlock relationship between Jews and Germans. Some municipalities went much further, extending the prohibition to animals and succeeded in prohibiting the pairing of a “Jewish cow” and a “German bull.”

The last bastion of scientific and militant racism was . That nation represented the apotheosis of the idea of racism in the system known as Apartheid. This doctrine postulated the separate development of each racial and ethnic group. The system segregated the nation’s inhabitants in terms of race and ethnic group, defining by law the spaces and the services that corresponded to each and the remuneration that might be received for the same work. The differences among the groups were considered to be of divine origin and thus immutable. The whites, as the superior race, were God’s chosen people, who by divine right maintained the blacks in reservations called bantustans.

3. The enslavement of the African

3.1 The Ibero-American system

Forced labor was the typical form of colonial domination in the Americas. In some countries, this system continued after independence. Millions of indigenous people were enslaved and, although indigenous slavery was abolished very early, the and mitas continued the domination and exploitation of indigenous peoples and blacks through slavery and related forms of domination.

The blacks’ most significant contribution to the construction of our continent and to that of Europe has been their labor. In mines and in plantations, blacks bore most of the weight of the accumulation of capital and the development of European society. The vast production of , livestock, , gold, silver, añil and sugar, which contributed so greatly to the wealth of European and Creole businessmen, had as its essential element black labor: for example, in the boom times of at the beginning of the 19th century, it is calculated that there were 155,000 slaves in 750 sugar refineries; 54,000 in 900 coffee fields; 36,000 on 13,700 livestock farms and working in tobacco and other crops, and 20,000 in domestic occupations (Benítez, p.91).

Slavery and all other forms of domination had the support of factual-doctrinarian racism, which justified all the savageries of that time. We quote the pertinent words of the Colombian historian Nina S. de Friedmann “In order to maintain the blacks enslaved within the system, the most severe rules were imposed and the cruelest punishments were applied." Friedmann documents the punishments listed in the 1570 of Cartagena. Lashing and other savage forms of physical punishment abounded; for example, the obligation to wear for two months an iron shoe, which weighed twelve pounds. Taking it off could result in two hundred lashings for the slave and the months to wear it were doubled. If a compassionate master decided to remove the shoe, he had to pay a fine of fifty pesos. (Laws of Phillip II, February 1571. Friedmann 1993: 61-62). A similar situation is documented in . In 1579 these punishments included the castration of any black who was with an Indian and “any black slave who is found to have fled of the service of his master (...) is taken prisoner and castrated. Furthermore, “those blacks who flee the service of their masters must be fined and, before returning them to their masters, they had an ear cut off. (Martínez Montiel 1988: 44- 45)

Neither Spain nor Portugal had wars of extermination as a consistent policy because their principal objective was the exploitation of labor. It is true that there were cruel practices as the stake, quartering and torture, but Indians died mostly during military confrontations, by the breaking of the productive cycle and by diseases related to the genetic or cultural difficulties.

Nations were founded on very contradictory bases. The ultimate objective of the Creoles was independence, but the priority of the Afro-descendant leaders and masses was freedom. Although there was a joint effort of both sectors for independence, the so-called Creoles had difficulties in overcoming their Europhile mentality and their great fear of the Afro-descendant, indigenous and mixed masses.

Independence initially made sense if it was possible to establish a united strong national State. The Liberator Simón Bolívar was clear about this in his Message to the Congress of Angostura. He said that the people to be formed were an inheritance of Africa and America, because the Spain that conquered America was no longer European as it had become Africanized due to centuries of domination of the Moors.

But that dream had its limitations, as was pointed out by José de San Martín, whose liberating army was made up of one-third Afro-descendants.

“The only drawback that has occurred in practice of the project (...) is the impossibility of bringing together in a single body the various castes of white and brown (...) It would be a chimera to believe that by an inconceivable occurrence the master was found to be on the same level as his slave” (Anglarill, 1994).

3.2 English-speaking America

3.2.1 United States

The African presence in North America begins with the arrival in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 of two dozen blacks, purchased by the captain of a Dutch vessel. The colony of Jamestown thus acquired its black roots twelve years after its founding.

These first Africans were considered indentured servants since they were subject to bondage for a term. Furthermore, Virginia was considered English territory by its inhabitants and, therefore, it applied British law under which slavery was not permitted in the territory of His Majesty.

Initially there was no massive importation for several reasons: the white servants were worth half of that of a black and the settlers doubted the assimilation of the Africans. But the settlers’ reservations and scruples did not last long because in 1661 the decided to apply the principle of perpetual slavery to the Africans.

In the United States, as well as in South America, millions of indigenous people were also enslaved. It is estimated that in 1730 almost 25% of the slaves of the two Carolinas were indigenous people: Cherokee, Creek and other nations. Between the 16th and 17th centuries, a small minority of whites was also enslaved for crimes and debts and indigents were abducted on city streets and transferred to the colonies.

It did not take long for the massive importation of Africans to begin. The laws were directed to maintaining the status quo at any price. There was not in that context a caste system as such or any other form of upward mobility.

The norms on the perpetual slavery of every black, Indian or mulatto1 was extended to the children of a slave mother. The education of blacks was strictly prohibited, in some cases capital punishment was even prescribed for those who violated the law, for example, by teaching the slave to read and write.2

There was an effective deprivation of all civil rights, including access to justice. In strict accord with racism, a United States court declared that “Our slaves cannot do anything by own right, cannot have landholdings, nor sell, nor purchase, nor take, nor have anything without authorization of the master or inspector.”3

The slaveholders had an absolute right on the life of the slaves, even to the point of killing them since it was presumed that such a killing would be in self-defense since nobody would kill his property. Furthermore, they had sexual rights on black women, who were employed in the reproduction of the system against their will.

As in the rest of the Hemisphere, with the exceptions of and , the different ethnic groups and nations mixed to avoid any with the blacks who could carry out a concerted rebellion and, therefore, native languages were rapidly lost. The use of the drum was even prohibited in the North.

Nevertheless, slaves came little by little to be indispensable in the colonial and post- colonial productive system. Already by the end of the 18th century it was not possible to think of the economy of the Southern United States or of the Caribbean without the contribution of Afro-descendants. This also was largely true in the Latin American

1 Massachussets, 1698; Connecticut and New Jersey, 1704; Pennsylvania and New York, 1706; Soouth Carolina, 1712; Delaware, 1721; Rhode Island, 1728; North Carolina, 1741. 2 Laws of Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina. 3 Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. United States Supreme Court. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856). colonies at different periods of history. The Afro-descendants contributed basic and specialized labor in mining, agriculture, livestock, handcrafts, trade and domestic work.

3.2.2 The Caribbean

About the daily lives of slaves in the Caribbean, we have the writings of James Ramsay, a Scottish Anglican clergyman, who lived in the Caribbean for twenty years and published his testimony in 1784. We summarize: The day of the slaves began in the plantation at 4 am. At 9 am, they were given half an hour for breakfast that they ate while working. Work continued until 11 am or noon, when they were dispersed to gather, along the fences, in the mountains and in the uncultivated fields, grass and vines for the horses and livestock. This lasted until one or two in the afternoon, when the slaves delivered what was collected and returned to the field. A half an hour before sunset, they again collected grass and at the end of the day, around seven o’clock or later if the field boss so decided, they returned to their huts. Along the road they collected their own supplies in order to prepare their food in their huts. They fell asleep around midnight and did this every day. This reality was quite universal, although in some cases, especially in the Spanish colonies, work was prohibited on Sundays and holidays.

3.3 Liberation of the slave

In 1787 the Abolitionist Society, headed by Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson and ten other persons, mostly Quakers, was founded. Eventually, prominent Afro-descendant writers, such as Olaudah Equiano, Africans and former slaves in the Caribbean and Ignatius Sancho, an Afro-Colombian, actively participated in these struggles.

Its objective was to fight against the slave trade. Its strategy was in the style of modern parliamentary lobbyists, directed to the political aristocracy. Some sectors argued for a gradual process of emancipation, others simply wanted to abolish the traffic. “Produce our slaves instead of buying them,” argued the British lawmaker William Wilberforce. The debate lasted until 1807 when the international slave trade was abolished by the British Parliament.

In turn, in 1814 the United States signed the Treaty of Ghent by which it promised to combat the international slave trade and committed its fleet to capturing slave-trading ships in international waters and to free all the slaves who were on board.

The Haitian revolution abolished the slavery in 1794. Miguel Hidalgo (1810) and José María Morelos (1813) in Mexico, in their uprising against the Spanish, declared the slaves free. However, both were defeated by royal forces. On September 15, 1829 President Vincent Guerrero, celebrating another year of independence, decreed the definitive abolition of slavery in Mexico.

In turn, the nations of the Isthmus abolished slavery in 1824 by act of the Congress of the Federal Republic of Central America.

In South America, abolition occurred on different occasions: by the Spanish in an alliance with the blacks in an attempt to recuperate their colonies and by Bolivar who, regardless of his convictions, had to promise it in order to win the support of Haiti and to counter- act Spanish strategy. It was not, however, until 1854 during the government of José Gregorio Monagas that decreed the definitive freeing of the slaves.

4. The caste system

4.1 Making the family white in six generations.

The Spanish and Portuguese colonial systems created castes or upward mobility by “bleaching,” whereby the “upward mobility” of Afro-descendants was permitted through the mixing of races over several generations. The institutionalization of the ideology of bleaching had direct consequences that still have an impact on our way of thinking. Chapter Three, Sixth Law of the first Negro Code establishes that the teaching of the alphabet and the rudiments of were being given alike to all classes and to and free blacks, leaving unfortunate impressions of equality and familiarity among them and, thus, should be restricted. Hereinafter all first-born blacks and mulattos should work in agriculture, while not mixing with whites, the third- and fourth-born and the others may be placed in separated classrooms, but led by serious and educated whites, who imprint in their heart at an early age the feelings of respect and inclination to the whites, with whom they should associate themselves some day.

The Code obviously did not apply equally under all circumstances. What matters here is not a literal application, but the ideology behind it. In all the Hispano-American colonies there were, in practice, excesses.

Specifically, the caste system developed by Spain and Portugal was not based on absolute exclusion but on the myth of the gradual rise of families through its descendants. Six generations were necessary in order to be bleached. The castes thus became categories of peoples who, although not white, aspired or took the path to achieve it. (Friedmann 1993: 64).

In Brazil, as well as in the rest of the sub-region, there were cases of mulattos who were declared legally white, either in recognition of some service to the State or because their economic condition and educational status permitted it.

This gave rise to the widespread idea in some Latin American communities of the desirability of “raising” or “elevating” the color. From the standpoint of self-esteem, it did a great deal of harm by promoting in some sectors scorn for their cultural heritage and for they themselves. Color became for many a covering. The “ideal beauty,” the model to emulate was the European and those who did not have the appropriate physical features did not have any alternative models with which to identify.

It must be admitted that such a system worked. Toward the end of the colonial period, many freed blacks in Latin America had reached important positions in the corporate and economic structure of the time.

5. Latin American Social Darwinism

5.1 Theoretical bases

After the euphoria of independence, towards the end of the 19th century the Latin American elite faced a reality difficult to accept: the growing loss of its comparative advantages in the international markets because of the open and buoyant development of its neighbors of the north. To oppose that reality, the Latin American elite had to have a satisfactory explanation, something that would not put the responsibility on its own shoulders due to a lack of ability. To that end, it resorted to social Darwinism.

In Latin America, social Darwinism takes on Eurocentric, ethno-phobic, and endo-phobic traits. Euro-centrism was expressed as a cult to Europe. The term Europhilia is applicable as a marker of a process of European identity assumed by the Creole mestizos and whites. The mixed population of Latin America fought for its political and economic independence and finally expelled the Spanish. However, once this objective was achieved it assumed the identity of the conqueror idealizing France and, although to a lesser degree, it would again refer to Spain or Portugal as the Mother Country, calling themselves white and European and including in that category the vast majority of the mestizos, including the Afro-mestizos with phenotypical features of the Europeans.

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento stated the following about France:

“The French man today is the boldest warrior, the most ardent poet, the most profound wise man, the most frivolous elegant man, the most jealous citizen, the young person most given to pleasure, the most delicate artist and the softest man in his dealings with others. France’s ideas and fashions, its men and their novels are today the model and the standard of all the other nations” (Cited by Schwartz, 1999: 13)

The writer Ventura García Calderón in turn praised Paris as follows: “To the example of your civilized parks that obey an occult geometry, I want to purify the barbaric soul every morning.” (Cantilenas 17, cited by Schwartz, 1999: 15) And the Central American poet Rubén Darío claimed that “Paris receives everything and everything embellishes it with the magic influence of a secret empire.” (Pilgrimages, cited by Schwartz, 1999: 11)

The second characteristic of Latin American social Darwinism is ethnophobia. The Latin American elite, in its desire to end every memory of castes and already in possession of the doctrine of social Darwinism, succeeded in considering ethnic diversity as a threat to the national unit, a fact that became a true phobia, a great fear of diversity.

In fact, social Darwinism, in its Creole version updated by Juan Domingo Sarmiento, posed the impossibility of the progress of the towns and communities of the various indigenous and black ethnic groups, which caused States to promote mass European immigration and for many of them to implement scorched earth policies.

Juan Bautista Alberdi, one of the principal theorists of the construction phase of the National State, stated that “(i)n America everything that is not European is barbarian.” He placed himself immediately in the civilized sector. He wrote that there is no greater division than this: the indigenous peoples that he considers savage and the European, that is, we, those who have been born in America and speak Spanish, those who believe in Jesus Christ. (Anglarill, 1994.)

The Uruguayan historian Graciela Sapriza has said that Juan Bautista Alberdi accurately coined the concept that “to govern is to populate,” but was clearly speaking of the civilizing agents as Europeans of the most developed countries.

"To populate is to civilize when you populate with civilized people, that is, with inhabitants of civilized Europe." (Alberdi, J. B. "Las bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República ." La cultura Argentina, Buenos Aires, 1928. Quoted by Graciela Sapriza)

We find in him his Europhílic calling and also an ethno-phobic vision with regard to the local population.

With respect specifically to Afro-descendants, the sociologist and jurist Carlos Bunge (1875-1918) stated that the African had a lesser capacity of thinking and of working than the European. “This is evident as he has not invented the telegraph or the railway, he is not a creative artist, he is not a perseverant businessman (...) as of today, in no climate and under no government has the black provided to humanity intellectual and directive services.” (Anglarill, 1994)4

A quote from the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio well summarizes the Latin American thinking of that time:

“There are indigenous Americans, and . It was the latter who civilized America. The Indians and the Africans always rejected it and by their barbaric instincts hindered the efforts of the white race to impose it. (El Mercurio, 7.8.1863. Quoted by Fernández Retamar, in Casa de las Amèrcas, No. 102, p. 44).

Ethno-phobia is sometimes so extreme that it presents before the world persons of questionable seriousness. For example, the Dominican intellectual and politician Joaquín Balaguer forcefully affirmed that “(t)he Ethiopian race (black) is by nature indolent and

4 Apart from the great ancient African civilizations and the University of Timbuctu that preceded European universities, it is interesting to cite several Afro-descendant contemporaries of Bunge who were making great contributions in the area of technology: Jan Matzeliger, (1882) inventor of a shoe-lasting machine; Elijah McCoy (1872) inventor of the apparatus that allowed the continuous lubrication of trains (before it was necessary to stop the train to perform that functon) and Garret Augustus Morgan (1923) inventor of the traffic light. does not apply its efforts to any useful object except when it is necessary to obtain in that way its own subsistence.” Balaguer, backing the opinion of Euclides Gutiérrez Félix, also tried to convince his readers that there is nothing African in the meringue, typical dance par excellence of the (Balaguer, Joaquín, 1998: 84-85, 212).

This rejection of diversity was not limited to intellectuals, but managed to spread to all society, occasionally very explicitly, and sometimes even affecting the legal order with a direct and sometimes extremely painful impact on the history of Afro-descendants.

In a contract that Costa Rica signed with Smith and Cooper for the construction and exploitation of the railway to the Pacific, it was expressly established that:

"It was understood that the concessionaire will not introduce people of the Asian race to work on the railway, nor Asians or blacks to work or to cultivate the lands that are granted." (Decree IV, Art. 18, 25.11.1891).

Historian Iván Molina cites the words of Clodomiro Picado, the most significant Costa Rican scientist of the last century, who published a letter in the Diario de Costa Rica in May 1939 in which he argued

“OUR BLOOD IS BLACKENED! and to continue thus the crucible will not produce a grain of gold but a piece of coal. Maybe there is still time to restore our European blood patrimony, which is what has possibly saved us until now from falling into systems of African gestures, either politically or already in interests that ape the art or the distinction, in sad ridiculous forms. ”(Picado, Clodomiro, “Nuestra sangre se ennegrece dice el Dr. don Clodomiro Picado.” Obras completas, t. VI (Cartago, Editorial Tecnológica de Costa Rica, 1988, p. 299).

We close with the position of the socialist and psychiatrist José Ingenieros, for whom "men of colored race must not be our equals politically and legally; they are inept for the exercise of civil functions and should not legally consider themselves persons” (Las razas inferiores, 1906).

The third element, endophobia, is a logical consequence of the other two. It is the Latin American culture’s rejection, in general, of its own inheritance. In some cases, that rejection even becomes self-hatred.

The sociologist and journalist Laureano Ballenilla Lanz (1870-1936) justified caudilism, believing it necessary and natural to control “the barbaric illiterate masses that see freedom as a license, a human herd in a natural state, plainsmen, blacks and mestizos.” (Cesarismo democratic, cited by Devés Valdez, 2000:69).

Carlos Bunge, referring to the psychic make-up of Latin Americans said “the Spanish give us arrogance, indolence, decorum; the Indians, fatalism, and savageness; the blacks, servility, malleability” but since the three races have mixed a “certain lack of psychological harmony, relative sterility and lack of moral sense is seen in the Spanish .” (Nuestra América, cited by Devés Valdez, 2000:71). In turn, Salvador Mendieta wrote at the beginning of the last century that Central Americans were characterized by their physical weakness, laziness, lack of initiative, lust, sadness, and other epithets. The Central American author considered his own people as moral cowards, as individuals who are ashamed of the country where they were born. (La Enfermedad de Centroamérica, 1906. Cited in Devés Valdés, 76-77)

The same José Ingenieros held that “(a) new race (Euro-Argentine) cultured, laborious and democratic, grew at the expense of the colonial race, gaucho, illiterate, anarchic and feudal.”5

6. United States Bio-Determinism

As in the early period of Latin American social Darwinism, North American social determinism was initially based on theology. Protestant theologians attempted to prove that the enslavement of Afro-descendants was a divine right.

To do so, for example, they took the famous Biblical account of Noah and Cam to justify first enslavement and then the nascent racist ideas of the West. In fact, according to the Biblical account (Genesis 9:18 et seq.) Noah, being drunk, was seen naked by his son Ham. The other brothers covered him. When he became sober, Noah worried about the attitude of Ham and in his anger placed a curse that Cam, son of Ham, and his descendants were to be the serfs of his brothers and their descendants.

The Bible does not say that Cam is the father of all the black nations. In fact, if we adhere to the table of nations in the Bible, Ham had four children, which supposedly led to four nations: Cush (Ethiopia), Mizraím (Egypt), Phut (supposedly the father of the other North Africans) and Canaan. If the curse was on Cam, then it fell on the Canaanites (historical enemies of Israel) and not on the other children of Ham. (Genesis 10:6 et seq.) As we have seen, Mizraim, Cush and Phut were also children of Ham, but Noah did not place a curse on Ham. Thus, the Africans did not even descend from the accursed child.

Furthermore, if the theologians had adhered to the philosophy of the Old Testament, curses endure unto the fourth generation and thousands of years would have passed between the moment in which this account allegedly occurred and the 17th century. If they had adhered to the theology of the New Testament, not even the Canaanites owed anything because it is presumed that Christ’s voluntary sacrifice settled all previous accounts of humanity, so that it could not be that 1,500 years later the Africans, who were not Canaanites, had to begin to pay suddenly for the alleged offense of Cam.

At the beginning of the 19th century, there was an intense debate in the Virginia Legislature. Thomas R. Dew, professor of political economy, published in 1832 a

5 There were also other ideas, such as the Brazilian theories of bleaching and racial democracy; the idea of mestizaje found in the theories of the cosmic race in Mexico and the cultural movement of “negritude” in the heart of the black community and the movement of , but those movements are beyond the limits of this study. summary of those debates in a pamphlet entitled Review of the Debate. In his writings, he insisted on his mythical-religious vision.

He said, in summary, that there is nothing in the Old Testament that would indicate that slavery should be abolished. In fact, the patriarchs of Israel had many slaves, precisely during a period in which they were under the rule of Jehovah. Jesus Christ, for his part, did condemn slavery. The author cites in his support the position of Paul (1 Corinthians VII:20-21) that everyone should remain in the condition in which he was when he was called to join the Christian faith. However, Dew does not cite the full text in his argument. For example, in the same passage the Apostle adds that “although if you have the opportunity to obtain your freedom you should take advantage of it. Then the one who was a slave when he was called to believe in the Lord, is now a free man in the service of the Lord.”

With regard to the passage of Peter (Peter ii. 18.20), he did call on servants to submit to their masters, whether the latter are good or bad. We may or may not differ from the Apostle, but it must be taken into account that slavery, as Peter knew it, was the typical Eastern slavery, which was bondage for a period and often voluntary in that the slaves never lost their human condition.

In any case, Mr. Dew concluded that, although slavery was morally inexcusable, the fact was that it already existed and was not instituted by his generation. Abolishing it, on the other hand, would bring confusion and suffering to both blacks and whites.

As has been seen, citing and interpreting them in a twisted fashion, Southern racists quoted Biblical texts to justify this system so absolutely against the Christian vision of human rights.

The second fundamental characteristic of Northern racism was its adhesion and theoretical contributions to the European theory of the absolute superiority of whites. Great efforts were made to sustain that myth with pseudo-scientific arguments. The theory was updated in America by (1799–1851), a physician and naturalist from Philadelphia.

A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Morton returned to the United States, imbued in the doctrine of white superiority that prevailed in Europe, to occupy the post of professor of anatomy of the University of Pennsylvania. He is considered the founder of the “American school” . He published his vision of the races in Crania Americana.

Although Morton was careful not to deny explicitly the unity of the human species, especially so as not to contradict the Bible, his followers, Josiah C. Nott, and , stated in their book Types of Mankind (1854) that Morton’s research proved conclusively the theory of polygenism.

This theory, as it was laid out, is the first milestone of the so-called that a large number of researchers in the field of the natural sciences fervently continued. This view claims that the differences among groups of human beings are not simple variations of the species, but every “race” actually constitutes a different species.

Consistent with the studies of cranology suggested by Pieter Camper (1722-1789), Morton held that it was possible to determine the intellectual level of a person by the size and form of his skull: the larger the cranial cavity, the greater the intelligence.

His point was that the “Caucasians” (White race) were more intelligent because they had larger skulls. Applying his studies to the ancient Egyptians, he concluded that they had been white.

While he considered the as superior, he labeled the Asians as a race “whose attention is always changing from one object to another.” He believed American natives to be subject to a chronically infantile mental state, incapable of a continued process of abstract reasoning. Blacks, according to this vision, are superstitious and cruel, but once domnated, they turn out to be surprisingly docile and adaptable to every change of circumstances. They are little inventive, Morton added, but had strong powers of imitation. (Crania Americana, 1839)

This racist vision was extended to Latin America. William Walker, the U.S. filibuster who invaded Central America in 1856, considered Central Americans as “a mixed race, degenerate, disguised as white.” Hence the justification of his clear manifest:

"Only idiots speak of maintaining stable relations between the American race, pure and white, and the mixed Indo-Spanish race, as it exists in Mexico and Central America. The history of the world there are no examples of a utopia in which a lower race yields pacifically and tamely to the influence of a superior people." (Quoted by Leopoldo Zea, Journal Universum, Año 12-1997).

The third interesting trait regarding bio-determinism is the thesis of the chronic and incurable infantilism of the blacks. John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) was a prominent Southern politician in the United States, who was, among others, Vice President, Secretary of War, Senator and political philosopher. What is interesting for this study was his position on slavery, which he notably defended in a celebrated speech pronounced in the Senate in February 1837 in which he argued against the abolition of slavery.

His basic thesis was that slavery, far from being a necessary evil, was a positive good. His speech, tinged with a paternalistic attitude, claimed that being slaves suited blacks, that they lived happy and resigned to their fate, knowing that whites would care for them. Never before, he argued, from the beginning of history to the present, had the “Central African race” achieved such a level of civilization as in the slave-holding South. It had improved, the Senator vigorously maintained, physically, morally and intellectually. He stated that it was obvious that blacks in the South were better off than the European proletariat. This chronic infantilism supposedly made the blacks grateful for the luck of having a tutor from the white . This idea was widely spread in the United States and was applied to both blacks and indigenous peoples.

The fourth characteristic of bio-determinism was the Myth of Jauja. The expression “to live in Jauja” comes from Peru and refers a region where the population allegedly lived very well. In the context of bio-determinism the same idea was applied with the expression “being in clover.” According to Thomas R. Dew, no one on the face of the Earth was happier than the black slave of the United States. Why then, if slavery was not prohibited by God and if the slave was happy, should the system be undone. If the system exists and works, what interest would be served infusing in the mind of the slaves the vain and undefined desire of freedom, being something that the black in any case cannot understand and that all that would occur would be to put an end to his happiness?

Dew, as was seen, combines very well three of the four characteristics: divine right, chronic and incurable infantilism and the idea of the happiness of the slave who is grateful for being a slave.

7. Racism in the Caribbean

Racism in the Anglo- and Francophone Caribbean followed slightly different formulas. The French opted in Haiti for a caste system that, although its structure had a certain symmetry with the Brazilian, was not capable of permitting the flexibility necessary for consolidating, in terms of classes, the different social levels. The mulatto population suffered from the same considerations as their Latin American counterparts.

As of 1666 there is a record of massive French involvement in the slave trade, sending slaves to the colonies in the Americas that were being acquired by conquest or by treaty.

The relationship between slaves and masters was governed by the Negro Code, promulgated by Louis XIV, by which the slave had only the rights to a minimum alimentation, which the King himself established, and to be baptized in the Catholic faith. They had no civil rights.

Article 30 even prohibited them from performing public functions and from being administrators of businesses, arbitrators or witnesses since their testimony would only be complementary, but could not be evidence.

Racism was written about crudely by Voltaire. For him, the black was a different species of being, hardly human. He compared blacks to monkeys, elephants and wrote that blacks “have a language that I do not understand.” If it were necessary to choose which was the reasonable animal among the three, he would choose the elephant. (Voltaire, Traité de Métaphysique, 1734)

He had an equally poor concept of mulattos. After characterizing blacks from a physical standpoint, he said that he was opposed to the naturalist theory whereby blacks were the product of the degeneration of human beings in the tropics.

Blacks, claimed the famous philosopher, transported to the coldest countries procreate animals of their own species, and mulattos are only a bastard race. (Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs, Tome 1, 1756).

In spite of the provisions of the Negro Code and the ideas of Voltaire, mixed classes were growing, but their civil rights were nevertheless denied.

It was under those conditions that the uprising of Haitian mulattos occurred, led by Vincente Ogé in 1790. The insurrection was crushed and Ogé was sentenced to be quartered, which was followed by an unprecedented massacre. This caused relationships between mulattos and whites to become irreconcilable.

The result of this and later confrontations was the radicalization of the struggle. Blacks and mulattos, influenced by the leaders of the French Revolution, began the final struggle: mulattos to acquire civil rights and blacks to gain their freedom. At the end, they coincided in the creation of a nation.

In the British colonies, the trend was similar with some variations. Colonial authorities enjoyed a certain autonomy in their decisions, so they created a series of rules to regulate relations between slaves, “persons of color” a term that was applied originally to the mulatto class and the owners of the plantations and estates.

One of the most famous ideologues was Edward Long, author of The History of , published in 1774. According to him, blacks “(i)n general lack intelligence, and seem to be incapable of making any progress in civility and the sciences. Among them there is no moral system. The barbarism toward their children exceeds that of animals. They lack moral feelings: their only pleasure is women; they eat and drink with excess; they do not desire anything but to loiter about … They are represented by all writers as the vilest of the human species, with which their only similarity is with their exterior façade. (Long, cited by Hart 1984: 89).

Long believed in bio-determinism, invoking divine right. “Nor do we doubt for a moment that each member of creation is duly placed and adapted for certain uses and confined within the limits laid out by the Divine Creator” and he repeats the theory that blacks belong not to a different class, but to a different species (Long, cited by Hart 1984: 90).

The colonial Assemblies were consistent with this vision. As in North America, blacks were declared perpetual slaves (Assembly of , 1702). Severe measures were adopted throughout the , including death sentences for slaves and for whoever helped him; denying the mulatto any possibility of inheriting landholdings of his white parents, or cutting off the ears of fugitives.6

6 Barbados 1917; Jamaica 1761. It may be said that racism in the British Caribbean was based on divine right, biological differentiation (different species) and stigmatization (savage, cannibal -defamatory generalizations that were even was refuted by some of the less dishonest Africanists).

Regarding slavery in the Caribbean, Charles Leslie reported that “(t)hey apply the most severe punishments. No country surpasses them in the barbaric treatment of slaves or in the methods of cruelty that are carried out” (Leslie, cited by Hart 1984: 84).

7.1 Jim Crow system No dogs, blacks or Mexicans permitted in this business.

That text is taken literally from one of the signs of the Jim Crow system. This system of took place from the end of the 19th century until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The name was taken from a comical character, a white in blackface who imitated blacks in an effort to mock them.

As a result of the American Revolution, in which nearly half a million blacks fought with the forces of the North, racist laws were abolished and the slaves were freed. Shortly thereafter, a large number of blacks was elected to State Legislatures and some even succeeded in holding Federal positions.

However, the end of the 19th century brought about a process known as Reconstruction, during which all the ideals related to equality were betrayed and blacks were left with nothing due either to legal means or the terrorist tactics of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

This racist practice was actually a class-caste system based on the concept of race, as it was socially constructed in the United States. Although this system in the South and in the States the bordered on Mexico was much more severe, no State escaped to some degree the application of the ideology of Jim Crow.

It was, above all, the consolidation of the idea of white superiority, applied in daily life, and it was aided and abetted by what has been called scientific racism. The pseudo- sciences known as the aforementioned cranology; eugenics, the doctrine of white superiority, some of whose defenders succeeded in proposing the elimination of the allegedly inferior races and individuals; phrenology, invented by the German physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) that linked brain size to an individual’s character and affirmed that the human mind consisted in a series of different faculties detectible by measuring the pertinent regions of the skull; social Darwinists, cited supra, and the very old theology of divine right, which proclaimed that whites were the chosen people and that blacks were accursed by God since times of Noah.

The Jim Crow system may be characterized as follows:

 Stigmatization of the Afro-descendant as “nigger” and other epithets that strengthened anti-black stereotypes. In this, newspapers and journals played a predominant role.

 Emphasis on the alleged intellectual, moral and social superiority of whitex over blacks.

 Absolute prohibition of racial mixing, since it was believed that this would destroy United States society.

 Rigid social standards that reminded whites of their domination and blacks of their inferiority and bondage. In this context, a black could not shake hands with a white because he was not his peer, nor could he offer any part of his body to a white woman since this would be considered an attempt of rape.

 Segregation of public spaces including hospitals, schools, churches, barber shops, libraries, prisons, restaurants, bathrooms, trains, buses.

 Residential areas for whites only were established in practice and districts and ghettos for blacks were created in the large cities.

 Whites should be served before blacks in all cases, regardless of who arrived first.

 Blacks could not show affection in public. For example, they could not kiss because it was considered offensive to whites.

 In introductions, in all cases it was necessary to present blacks to whites and never the reverse. Blacks should always address whites as Mister, Miss or Mrs. Whites did not use these titles with blacks.

 It was not tolerated that blacks demonstrate or try to demonstrate a superior intelligence or greater knowledge than whites, nor to refer to the latter as a lower class or group

 White pedestrians and drivers always had the right of way.

 Certain types of tasks were reserved exclusively for whites. When persons of both races performed the same task, the wages of whites would be very much higher.

 Black citizens were deprived of the right to vote that they had acquired after the Civil War and the abolition of the slavery through several mechanisms, including the famous oral examination in which those who wished to be registered had to name a long historical list of authorities.

 The city of Birmingham, Alabama in 1930 prohibited blacks and whites from sharing tables and Georgia in the 1930s established separate parks for blacks and whites.

7.2 Eugenics: strategy to improve the race

The ideas of Francis Galton on eugenics were broadly accepted in the United States. Connecticut enacted a law in 1896 that prohibited the demented to marry. In 1921 the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held in New York, declared that science should “illustrate the government in the prevention and the dissemination and proliferation of the useless members of society.”

According to the data at hand, these theories were taken into account in establishing the immigration policies of the United States during the 1930s. In 1974 the sterilization of 25% of the indigenous women was proved and curiously there was a decrease in the fertility of Afro-descendant and Hispanic women (CCHR, Psychiatry, an industry of death, 2006).

These ideas still prevail in North American psychiatry circles. In The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life published in 1994 by the psychiatrists Richard J. Herrnstein, who was a professor of Harvard until his death shortly after the book’s publication, and Charles Murray, it is argued that, from a genetic standpoint, both African-Americans and Hispanics are intellectually inferior due to their genetic heredity. Thus, they cannot improve their condition, either through education or through training. The authors, incidentally, to support their ideas cite writers consistently associated with the international Nazi movement.

8. The necessary Convention

The future Inter-American Convention against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination and Intolerance is justified for three principal reasons. First, it is a recognition of the validity of the struggles of Afro-descendants in the Hemisphere and, as such, is a definitive rupture of the historical silence on the unresolved inequity, and directly confronts the problem of the denial of the problem. Second, it concerns the creation of social equity, a concept that belongs to the advanced democratic societies and aims at eradicating residual racism from our countries. Third, it responds to a commitment to human rights made by our countries and it is hoped that when the final text is adopted what remains of racism has been overcome.

The historical position of the American States has been clear since the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (Ninth International Conference of American States, Bogotá, Colombia, 1948). Moreover, according to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination the States undertake to “adopt immediate and effective measures, particularly in the fields of teaching, education, culture, and information, with a view to combating prejudices which lead to racial discrimination and to promoting understanding, tolerance and friendship among nations and racial or ethnical groups….” These principles were ratified at the Regional Conference of the Americas (Santiago, Chile, 2000) and in the Final Declaration and Programme of Action of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, and Related Forms of Intolerance. (Durban, 2001).

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Stein, Stanley J. and Barbara H Stein. La Herencia Colonial de América Latina. Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1973.

Van den Berghe, Pierre L. Race and Racism. A comparative perspective. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 1967.

Van Dijk, Teun A. Racismo y discurso de las élites. Barcelona, Gedisa, 1993.

Velásquez, María Elisa and Ethel Correa (comps.). Poblaciones y culturas de origen africano en México. Mexico, INAH, 1993.

Velásquez, María Elisa. “Mujeres Afromexicanas en la Nueva España.” Paper. IV Encuentro de Afromexicanistas. Mexico, 1994.

Velázquez, María Elisa. Mujeres de Origen Africano en la Capital Novo Hispana, Siglos XVII and XVIII. México, INAH, 2006.

Williams, Eric. From Columbus to Castro. The . New York, Vintage, 1970.

Afro-descendant activism in the field of human rights

Carlos Minott Maitland Afro-descendant activism in the field of human rights

In the international human rights instruments that have been drafted since the birth of the United Nations, the States have accepted that every member of the human family has equal and inalienable rights, which the States have undertaken to guarantee and protect.

Racial discrimination, however, continues to obstruct the full realization of human rights. Distinctions, exclusions, restrictions and preferences based on race, color, ancestry and national or ethnic origin continue to create and aggravate conflicts in spite of the progress made in some spheres. Due to the inherent unjust nature of racial discrimination, as well as the dangers that it represents, its elimination has become a goal of the UN.

Due to the ever-increasing concern about racial discrimination, in 1963 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Shortly thereafter, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination was adopted. Since 1945 the international community has been provided with several legal instruments to combat the old and serious scourge of racism, racial discrimination and intolerance.

In spite of the important advances of the UN, the inter-American system, in the framework of the OAS, has not had a similar instrument, which shows the urgent need for the debate and adoption of such a document.

The Latin American Afro-descendant movement has played a very active role in promoting the topic of racism and racial discrimination and, to a lesser degree, of other forms of discrimination and intolerance (given their common goals), which demonstrates that, in complementing the efforts of the States, civil society agrees on the necessity of having a regional treaty on this subject. This article will point out some of the advances of the human rights movement that may be found in the Draft Inter-American Convention against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination and Intolerance. The Afro-descendant’s struggle for the right to the recognition of their existence and presence in the Americas was mainly consolidated beginning with the Regional Conference of the Americas (Prepcom) held in Santiago, Chile. This Conference enjoyed the broad participation of civil society and of Afro-descendant leaders and organizations, as a result of the Conference of Citizens against Racism, Xenophobia, Intolerance and Discrimination, held as a precursor to the Regional Conference. Edna Maria Santos Roland, in the paper that she presented at the Third Regional Conference of the Americas in Santiago,1 promoted the use of the term Afro-descendant, which would subsequently serve as the basis of the identity movement of ethnic vindication in Latin America. The term was initially proposed by the Brazilian Sueli Carneiro in a Workshop on Ethnic Group and Identity during the Fourth Luso–Afro-

1 Preparatory Conference to the World Conference against Racism, Discrimination, Xenophobia and Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, 2001. Brazilian Congress of the Social Sciences, held September 1-5, 1996 at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, The term refers to the descendants of Africans who were victims of the trans-Atlantic enslavement.2 During the First Regional Seminar on Afro-descendants in the Americas that took place in La Ceiba, Honduras in 2002,3 the participants called on the governments of the region to “[r]ecognize the existence of Afro-descendant peoples in the Constitutions of their countries and admit that the nations of the Americas have multicultural and multi-ethnic societies … ." With regard to collective rights and the right to territory, it is important to point out that the Charter of Afro-descendant Civil Society in the Americas establishes in one of its clauses that “... in the entire hemisphere the territories of Afro-descendant communities constitute a patrimony and a demonstration of its cultural construction, its memory, and its contributions to the preservation of the environment. The States should effectively guarantee access to and the preservation of the right to property in their territories, to the use of their natural resources, to the protection and conservation of traditional lore, to the prior free and informed consent such as found in international legislation.”4 In this same Charter, the participants agreed to “(p)romote actions that guarantee the ancestral territory of the Afro-descendant communities as a structure necessary to preserve Afro-descendant life, culture, freedom and identity.” Furthermore, they proposed “holding a seminar on the situation of the territorial and environmental rights of Afro-descendants of Latin America and the Caribbean, in which national and international policies are analyzed and recommendations are made to the States for the effective protection of these rights.” It is also proposed in the Charter to “(r)ecommend to the countries of the Ibero-American Summit where constitutional changes are developed, that the rights that the Afro- descendants have won in social conquests are preserved; and, especially, to recommend to the Constitutional Assembly of Ecuador that it preserve the status of individual and collective rights of these communities. Furthermore, to include the principle of non- discrimination, the recognition of racism as a systematic practice of denial of human rights and the incorporation of measures of affirmative action in order to combat racism and discrimination.”5 In the meantime, the General Assembly of the Central American Black Organization declared that it will continue “...with the steps and actions before the Central American governments and multilateral bodies in order to culminate the process of reclamation of

2 http://www.ecoportal.net/content/view/full/65202, Vanesa Verástegui Ollé, “Recuperando los ancestros africanos”. Nov. 30, 2006. 3 Declaration and recommendations of the Regional Seminar on the Afro-descendantsción in the Americas. La Ceiba (Honduras), March 21-24, 2002. 4 Charter of Afro-descendant Civil Society in the Americas and the Caribbean, held March 28-29, 2008 in Panama City,within the framework of the Seminar on “Afro-descendant peoples in Latin America,” convened by the Ibero- American General Secretariat (SEGIB). 5 Ibid., para. 10. lands and territories of the Afro-descendant communities, in its three axes: titration, expansion and sanitation.”6 With regard to the duties of the States and to special measures, the member organizations of the Central American Black Organization (ONECA),7 expressed with respect to the commitments that the States should adopt its “… total support for the implementation of policies of affirmative action that the Afro-descendants request as a result of the Third World Conference against Racism and in support of the seminars of La Ceiba, Honduras and Montevideo, Uruguay, both events sponsored by the Office of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights.” They also manifested their “concern over the little interest of the governments of the Central American region to make effective the Programme of Action of Durban, especially as regards the implementation of the policy of affirmative action policy for Afro-descendants,” giving their full support to the implementation of such policies. Advancing in their proposals, at the Third Meeting of Afro-descendant Legislators of the Americas,8 in which the Black Parliament of the Americas was created, it was pointed out that “(t)he way we redesign the democracy that we have, made it necessary to address national experiences on the progress of public policies and national laws for Afro- descendants, emphasizing the instrument of affirmative action as a step that makes it possible to deepen the democratic principle of equality through the principle of equity.9 It was recognized that the Conference of Durban ensured that our democracies are questioned, because they are racist democracies. The concepts that we employ, such as democracy, should not homogenize realities, nor deny them, much less make us invisible for purposes of national unity.” Various Afro-descendant organizations in Sub-regional Forums emphasized the need to eradicate structural and institutionalized racism and racial discrimination that finds its expression in the workplace by defining the mechanisms of classification in accordance with institutional technical capability.10 The organizations also proposed the adoption of “measures for the elimination of stereotypes and racial prejudices in the curricula and textbooks of the educational systems of the OAS Member States.”11 The aforementioned First Regional Seminar of Afro-descendants recommended that the mass media create “... a code of ethics for the communications media that encompasses

6 Declaration of the IX General Assembly of the Central American Black Organization, held December 4-7, 2003 in New York City.. 7 Ibid. 8 Third Meeting of Afro-descendant Legislators, held August 28-31, 2005 in San José and Limón, Costa Rica. 9 The panels that discussed these topics were Leyes y decretos en favor de los afrodescendientes with the participation of Deputy Rafael Erazo Reasco (Ecuador); Deputy Luis Alberto Do Santos (Brazil); Ms. Ann Mc Kinley, President of the Afro-Costa Rican Women’s Center; Deputy Olegario López (honduras) representing Celeo Álvarez of the Central American Organizaton of Blacks and moderated by Deputy Vicente Paulo Da Silva (Brazil) and Políticas públicas y leyes afirmativas with the participation of Deputy Joao Granado (Brazil), former Deputy Walter Robinson (Costa Rica) and Humberto Brown for the Global Afro-Latino and Caribbean Initiatives, moderated by Deputy Maria Isabel Urrutia (Colombia). 10 Meetings of Afro-descendant organizations in Managua, Nicaragua, February 1-2, 2007; in Bogotá, Colombia, March 15-16 and in Sao Paulo, Brasil, April 19-20 within the framework of the aforementioned Sub-Regional Forums on the participation and impact of Afro-descendants in the Summits of the Americas and the General Assemblies. 11 Meetings of the Afro-descendant organizations in the aforementioned cities. the Internet and that requires the ceasing of all discriminatory practices in order to guarantee equitable and balanced coverage of the issues that affect Afro-descendant communities; a guarantee that cultural diversity is reflected in the institutions of the communications media through the representation of people with varied origins and cultures; the eradication of the proliferation of ideas of racial superiority, of the justification of racial hatred and of all forms of discrimination through the Internet.” With regard to the visibilization of Afro-descendants in the censuses, the Third Meeting of Legislators12 established other challenges beginning with “The participation of Afro- descendants in the legislative bodies in the region is extremely limited, if it is taken into account that, in accordance with the systematized information, fewer than one hundred Afro-descendants (excluding the Caribbean) represent some 150 million people. This is an irrefutable indicator of weak representative democracies whose formal organs of representation do not reflect the composition of the population. The exclusion of Afro- descendants in democratic institutions is the result of structural racism and of the sequels of slavery and the trans-Atlantic traffic of Africans, which was recognized as a crime against humanity by the governments of the Americas in the Declaration and Programme of Action of the Regional Conference (Santiago, Chile, 2000).” Furthermore, Afro-descendant organizations at the Sub-regional Forums requested the inclusion “in all the official and State statistical procedures, methodologies that would ensure the correct recording of the data on the situation of Afro-descendant peoples and communities.”13 The participants in Regional Seminar on Afro-descendants14 called on the Governments “[to] address the issue of the ethno-racial origin in national censuses and other surveys of the population, concentrating on social indicators such as education, health, housing, income and employment in order to formulate adequate social policies to reduce the disparities between Afro-descendant communities and the population in general; that they support the conducting of studies of Afro-descendant communities with a view to giving them more visibility; and that they collect data and detailed information on the disadvantaged Afro-descendant communities for the purpose of preparing future policies of promotion and protection of the rights of Afro-descendants.” Among the conclusions and recommendations of the Report of the Regional Seminar of Experts of Latin America and the Caribbean on the compliance of the Programme of Action adopted in Durban (Exchange of ideas for future action) is found the following: “The Seminar urges the United Nations to initiate, under the coordination of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), a specific research program coordinated with centers for African-American studies of the universities throughout the hemisphere and some centers of extra-continental studies, targeted to the Afro-descendant population of Latin America and the Caribbean within the short-term priority agenda that serves as input to the governments, non-governmental organizations and academic centers in order to advance toward the analysis and formulation of proposals of public policies. Research and promotion should cover local and regional,

12 Third Meeting of Afro-descendant Legislators, supra note 8. 13 See, supra note 10. 14 See, supra note 3. national and international spheres, in the historical, sociological and cultural aspects, both past and contemporary, related to the presence of Africans and Afro-descendants in the Americas.”15 With respect to the administration of justice, the participants in the Inter-American Forum of Afro-descendants considered that the penal justice system for adolescents, particularly Afro-descendants, should be regulated.”16 The International Coalition of Cities against Racism, an initiative promoted by UNESCO in 2004, has the purpose of creating a network of cities interested in sharing experiences in order to improve their policies to combat racism, discrimination, and xenophobia. The participating cities undertook to use all available mechanisms to oppose racism and discrimination based on ethnic group, race, religion, , gender, condition of health, sexual orientation and any other type of marginalization and exclusion through compliance of the ten commitments. The signers held themselves responsible for the implementation, coordination and execution of municipal regulations against racism and discrimination. These measures will be decided, in each case, after consultation with those who suffer directly racism and discrimination and in close collaboration with representatives of civil society (NGOs, academics, associations, etc.). Under the leadership of Montevideo, a Latin American and Caribbean Committee of Experts discussed a similar plan, adapted to this region.17 Concerning the movement of Afro-descendant women, the Network of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latino-American Women encouraged governments “... to work in the preparation of an index of international racial equality that would permit the adaptation, standardization and regulation of the examination of the current forms of discrimination and racism, their quantification and the formulation of specific indicators, taking into account the private reality of the Afro-descendant women.”18 It was also decided to

15 Report of the Regional Seminar of Experts for Latin America and the Caribbean on compliance with the Program of Action adopted in Durban: “Exchange of ideas for a future action.” E/CN.4/2003/18/Add.1. October 18, 2002, p. 12, para. 41. 16 In a follow-up seminar to the World Conference, held July 1-3, 2002 in Mexico, organized by the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), the distinguished expert Héctor Faúndez indicated that justice is one of the principle instruments to combat racism and racial discrimination and should be complied with certain conditions such as its independence and commitment with human rights. However, the judicial systems in the region present a series of problems such as the high level of impunity and the lack of a commitment with human rights by the judges. The document that mentions the thematic areas of the Conference against Racism included topics such as the analysis of the situation; access to justice without discrimination and the adoption of measures to eradicate xenophobia and discrimination in the judicial systems; equal representation in the administration of justice; judicial procedures necessary to investigate acts of racism; adoption of measures to protect victims of acts of racism, including the right to request pecuniary reparations and training for public officials. The expert added that the document recommends consideration of the implementation of adequate mechanisms for the resolution of conflicts, the adminstartion of justice in remotes areas and the dangers of the excessive formalitzation of the juridical system. The judicial system should also be evaluated in the framework of “good government” and a necessary distinction on the different forms of law existing in the interior of the countries (international law, domestic law, indigenous law, etc.). In this sense, cusomary law should be made known and valued. 17 Latin American and Caribbean Coalition of Cities against Racism, Discrimination and Xenophobia. Plan of Action of 10 Points. (Adopted by the Group of Experts and Representatives of the Cities of Latin America and the Caribbean meeting June 21-23, 2006 in Montevideo). 18 Preparatory Meeting of the Third Meeting of the Network of Afro-Cariibbean, Afro-Latin American Women and of the Diaspora and of the Regional Conference of the Americas on Progress and Challenges in the Program of Action against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Forms of Intolerance, Managua, Nicaragua, July 14-17, 2006. incorporate “into its agenda issues of great concern such as the situation of the migrant women and/or displaced persons with emphasis on Colombia, Haiti and the United States (Katrina), promoting campaigns of massive denunciations, political in situ visits; the promotion of the rights of Afro-descendant women in the Inter-American Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, facilitating the creation of Observatories of Gender, Ethnic Groups and Poverty.”19 The Regional Seminar of Experts urged the United Nations to initiate, under the coordination of the Research Institute of the United Nations for Social Development (UNRISD), a specific program for research coordinated with centers of African- American studies of the universities throughout the hemisphere and some centers of extra-continental studies, focused on the Afro-descendant peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean within the short-term priority agenda that would serve as input to governments, non-governmental organizations and academic centers, in order to advance toward the diagnosis and formulation of proposals of public policies. The initiative of the follow-up and evaluation of the agreements reached at the Citizen Conference and the Regional Meeting of the Americas in Santiago, Chile (2000) was adopted upon the proposal of four networks and institutions of civil society of the region, which being based on item 188 of the Declaration of Durban and its Programme of Action, promoted carrying out this evaluation of the state of implementation of the Programme of Action of Santiago (Santiago+5). Also worthy of mention was the Regional Conference of the Americas against Racism “Progress and challenges in the Programme of Action against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance,” held in Brasilia in July 2006. Meanwhile, the IX General Assembly of the Central American Black Organization requested “that the Central American governments proceed with the creation of National Commissions to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination”20 and Afro-descendant organizations, meeting in Nicaragua, requested “the governments to facilitate the creation of a racial observatory and that they work to disseminate the international instruments on combating racial discrimination.”21 With respect to international cooperation, the Afro-descendant organizations requested the governments to facilitate the creation of a racial observatory and that they work to disseminate the international instruments on combating racial discrimination.22 In addition, through the Charter of Afro-descendant Civil Society, support is provided to bringing about the realization of the Inter-American Convention of Racial Discrimination and for the most effective action of the office of the OAS Special Rapporteur for Afro- descendants. Support was also given to promote in each country of the Ibero-American Summit an agenda for achieving the Objectives and Goals of the Millennium of Afro- descendants, which implies activities of research and consensus-building of agendas of local development as well as support for conditions in the countries of the Ibero-

19 Ibid., Item IV. 20 In the framework of the aforementioned IX General Assembly of ONECA. 21 See, supra note 8. 22 Ibid.. American Summit for the impact assessment of the ten years of the Programme of Action of Durban and to generate conditions for its compliance.23

There follows a compilation of the activities of civil society, particularly of Afro- descendant organizations, since the Conferences of Santiago and Durban.

 VIII Asamblea de la Organización Negra Centroamericana (ONECA) / VII Assembly of the Central American Black Organization, San Isidro de Coronado, San José, Costa Rica, December 5-7, 2002.

 Seminario regional sobre los afrodescendientes en las Américas / Regional seminar on Afro-descendants in the Americas, La Ceiba, Honduras, March 21- 24, 2002.

 Seminario Regional de Expertos para América Latina y el Caribe sobre el cumplimiento del Programa de Acción adoptado en Durban: Intercambio de ideas para una acción futura / Latin America-Caribbean Regional Seminar of Experts on Implementation of the Durban Programme of Action: Exchange of ideas on future action, Mexico City, July 1-3, 2002.

 Taller Regional para la Adopción e Implementación de Políticas Afirmativas para Afrodescendientes de América Latina y el Caribe / Regional Workshop for the Adoption and Implementation of Affirmative Action for Afro- descendants of Latin America and the Caribbean convened by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Montevideo, Uruguay, May 7-9, 2003.

 II Encuentro de Parlamentarios Afrodescendientes de las Américas y del Caribe / Second Meeting of Afro-descendant Legislators of the Americas and the Caribbean. House of Representatives of Colombia, Ministry of the Interior and of Justice, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Inter-American Dialogue.

 III Encuentro de Parlamentarios/as Afrodescendientes de la América y el Foro Interamericano Afrodescendiente / Third Meeting of Afro-descendant Legislators of the Americas and the Inter-American Afro-descendant Forum, San José, Costa Rica, August 28–September 2, 2005.

 Encuentro cultural de jóvenes afrodescendientes / Cultural encounter of young Afro-descendants, Arica, Chile, February 27-March 2, 2005.

 Acciones Afirmativas y los Objetivos del Milenio / Affirmative Action and the Objectives of the Millennium, Brasília, June 28-29, 2005.

23 Charter of Civil Society, supra note 4, para. 10.  Seminario Instrumentos y Mecanismos Jurídicas Internacionales en la Lucha contra la Discriminación / Seminar on International Legal Instruments and Mechanisms in the Struggle against Discrimination, Montevideo, Uruguay, October 2003.

 Tercer Foro Andino Permanente contra el Racismo, la Discriminación Racial, la Xenofobia,la Intolerancia y sus Formas Conexas / Third Permanent Andean Forum against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, Intolerance and its Related Forms, Atacames, Ecuador, September,14-16, 2004.

• II Conferencia Regional de las Americas (Santiago plus) 5) / Second Regional Conference of the Americas (Santiago + 5), Santiago, Chile, June 2005;

 II Conferencia Regional contra el Racismo, la Discriminación Racial, la Xenofobia, la Intolerancia y sus Formas Conexas / Second Regional Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, Intolerance and its Related Forms, Brazil, December 2005.

FOOTNOTES/ENDNOTES

1. Preparatory event to the World Conference against Racism, the Discrimination, the Xenophobia, and the Intolerance in Durban, Africa, 2001.

2. http:/www.ecoportal.net/content/view/full/65202, Vanesa Verástegui Ollé. “Retrieving the African ancestors.” Nov. 30. 2006.

3. Declaration and recommendations of the Regional Seminar on the African descent ones in the Americas. The Ceiba (Honduras), 21 to 24 March 2002.

4. Charter of African descent Civil Society of the Americas and the Caribbean, brought together in the city of Panama 28 and 29 March 2008, within the framework of the Seminar on “African descent in Latin America”, convened by the Ibero-American General Secretariat, SEGIB. 5. Charter of Civil Society. Idem. Paragraph 10.

6. Declaration of the IX General Assembly of the Central American Black Organization. Held in the City of New Cork, USA, 4-7 December 2003. 7. Idem.

8. The III Meeting of African descent Lawmakers of the Americas was held in Costa Rica, in the cities of San José and Limón from 28 to 31 August 2005.

9. The panels that addressed these subjects were Laws and decrees for the African descent in charge of the representative of Ecuador, Mr. Rafael Erazo Reasco; the representative of Brazil, Mr. Luis Alberto Do Santos; the president of the Center of Women Afrocostarricenses, Mrs. Ann Mc Kinley; the representative of Honduras, Mr. Olegario López in representation of Celeo Álvarez of the Central American Black Organization and moderated by the representative of Brazil, Mr. Vincent Paulo Da Silva. And the panel public Policies and positive laws where they participated the representative of Brazil Joao Granado, the former-representative of Costa Rica, Walter Robinson and by Global Afro Latin and Caribbean Iniciatives, Humberto Brown, moderated by the representative of Colombia, Maria Isabel Urrutia.

10. African descent organizations brought together in Managua, Nicaragua, 1 and 2 February 2007; in Bogotá, Colombia, 15 and 16 March and in São Paulo, Brazil, 19 and 20 April, in the framework of the cited Subregional Forums. 11. The African descent organizations brought together in the cities cited in the previous note.

12. III I already find of African descent Lawmakers cited.

13. African descent organizations brought together in Managua, Nicaragua, 1 and 2 February 2007; in Bogotá, Colombia, 15 and 16 March and in São Paulo, Brazil, 19 and 20 April, in the framework of the Subregional Forums on the involvement and incidence of the African descent in the process of the Summit of the Americas and the General Assemblies.

14. Declaration and recommendations of the Regional Seminar on the African descent ones in the Americas. The Ceiba (Honduras), 21 to 24 March 2002.

15. Report on the Regional Seminar of Experts for Latin America and the Caribbean on the compliance of the Program of Action adopted in Durban: “Exchange of ideas for a future share.” AND/CN.4/2003/18/Add.1. 18 October 2002. P. 12. Paragraph 41.

16. In a seminar of follow-up to the World Conference, carried out in Mexico from 1 to 3 July 2002, organized by the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), the prominent expert Héctor Faúndez indicated that the justice is one of the principal tools for combating the racism and the discrimination, for what should be fulfilled with certain conditions as its independence and involvement to // the human rights. However, the judicial systems in the region present a series of problems as the high level of impunity and the lack of involvement of the magistrates to the human rights. The document, which mentions the areas subjects of the Conference against the Racism, addressed subjects as the diagnosis of the situation; access to the justice without discrimination and the adoption of measures to exile the xenophobia and discrimination in the judicial systems; equitable representation in the administration of justice; judicial procedures necessary for investigating the racism acts; adoption of measures to protect the victims from racism acts, including the right

to request pecuniary repair; and training for the civil servants. The expert added that the document recommends considering the implementation of adequate mechanisms of resolution of conflicts, the administration of justice in remote areas and the dangers of the excessive formalization of the legal system. The judicial system should also be evaluated within the framework of the concept of “good government” and a necessary distinction on the different existing forms of de jure within those of the countries (international right, national right, indigenous right, etc.). In this regard common law should be known and appraised.

17. Latin American and Caribbean Coalition of Cities against the Racism, the Discrimination, and the Xenophobia. Action plan of 10 points. (Approved by the Group of Experts and Representatives of Latin American and Caribbean Cities brought together in Montevideo from 21 to 23 June 2006).

18. Preparatory Meeting of the III Encounter of the Network of Afro-caribbean Women, Afrolatinoamericanas and of the Diaspora and of the Regional Conference of the Americas on the Progress and Challenges in the Program of Action against the Racism, the Racial Discrimination, the Xenophobia and the Related Forms of Intolerance, Managua, Nicaragua, 14 to 17 July 2006. 19. Idem. Item IV. 20. Within the framework of the realization of the IX General Assembly of ONECA already cited.

21. Organizations of African descent brought together in Managua, Nicaragua, 1 and 2 February 2007; in Bogotá, Colombia, 15 and 16 March, and in São Paulo, Brazil, 19 and 20 April in the framework of the Subregional Forums. 22. Idem.

23. Charter of Civil Society. Op. Cit. Paragraph 10.

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