Black Liberation Struggle: The Key to American Socialist Revolution
Part Two
http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1149/black_liberation.html
Date Written: 2019-02-22
Publisher: Workers Vanguard
Year Published: 2019
Resource Type: Article
Cx Number: CX23528
Everybody is familiar with Marx's famous saying, in Capital, Vol. 1 (1867), that "labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." This was more than a moral appeal against slavery. It was a statement of fact: Marx recognized that so long as half the country was dominated by slavery, workers would never be able to fight for even basic trade-union rights. The Civil War paved the way for the growth of American capitalism and the labor movement.
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
It is important to contrast how the race concept in the U.S. incorporated the "one-drop rule," which was not the case elsewhere in the Americas. In Puerto Rico, there is a famous poem by Fortunato Vizcarrondo, "¿Y tu agüela, aonde ejtá?" whose title translates as, "Where is your grandmother?" In it, a black Puerto Rican responds to racist taunts by a white Puerto Rican, pointing out that both of them have black grandmothers, but his is a proud part of the family while the other's is hidden. The poem is powerful because many "white" Puerto Ricans have black ancestors whom they deny. But such a poem wouldn't work in the United States. Anybody in the U.S. with a black grandparent -- or great-grandparent -- is black, no matter his or her physical appearance.
For the overwhelming majority of slaves in the U.S., slavery was a permanent condition. Manumission was much less common than in other countries, so there was a much smaller population of free black people. There was at the same time a much larger white population than in much of the Caribbean.
Here it is important to keep in mind that about 500,000 African slaves ended up in the U.S. -- out of 12.5 million enslaved Africans who were brought to the Americas between 1525 and 1866. More than a third of all these slaves ended up in Brazil -- about ten times the number who ended up in the U.S. In Brazil by the time of abolition in 1888, there was a significant non-slave black population. According to the 1872 census, at least three-quarters of all black and mixed-race Brazilians -- some 4.25 million people -- were free. They constituted 40 percent of the entire population in Brazil.
Thus, the neat equation of black skin and being a slave broke down in Brazil in a way that it did not in the American South. I would argue that unlike in the United States, black people in Brazil do not form a caste. In fact, the term "black Brazilian" means something different in Brazil than it would to an American, since the "one-drop rule" does not exist in Brazil. Racial mixing is much more common -- and accepted -- in Brazil. There is a saying in Brazil, "money whitens." This means that wealth and status can to some degree offset racial discrimination. In the U.S. it is usually the opposite: the caste nature of black oppression means that even the most distinguished black person is still subject to racist abuse.
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