Slavery has existed for thousands of years, in many forms, in all parts of the globe. The Enlightenment and Renascence, on one hand, and the discovery of the Americas, on the other, would set the stage for the great debate about the "parculiar institution" of slavery that has been in the forefront of society for last 200 years. The need for labor in the new World gave renewed energy to the slave trade that had existed for thousands of years in Africa. By the millions, black people were kidnapped, enslaved, and hunted down to be sold to traders and shipped to work in the fields of the New World. The moral and political debate about slavery throughout this time intense, leading to an antislavery movement that forced the British Parliament to outlaw (1807) the slave trade, authorize search and seizure of suspect ships and payment for the liberation of slaves. In 1833, Britain entirely outlawed slavery. As South American countries won their independence, they too made slavery illegal; debt peonage, however, often took its place. By 1840, Spain and Portugal had officially abolished traffic in slaves, but Portuguese ships continued their crossings, remaining a major source of smuggled slaves throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
The concept of race as representing separate subspecies of Homo sapiens has little if any biological significance, and today many scientists reject the use of the term in the human context. In common usage, race is a socially defined term, and the definition differs from society to society. For example, many people who are socially defined as blacks in the United States, because they have one or more black ancestors, would be called whites in Brazil. The social significance of race, then, is limited to what people make of it: a society is racist to the extent that its members draw unwarranted conclusions from the physical differences between peoples.
The causes of racism are complex and cannot be reduced to a single factor. Its rise and fall are often linked with real conflicts of interest and competition for scarce resources. Historically, racism has commonly accompanied slavery, colonialism, and other forms of exploitation and gross inequality. In other cases relatively powerless groups that have felt threatened by social and economic instability have blamed other powerless groups for their predicament.
This page is under construction!Brazil Debates Racial Quotas at Universities Fri Apr 15, 8:22 AM ET By Terry Wade SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) - Rayfran Pereira, who comes from Brazil's poorest state of Maranhao where half the people are illiterate, beat the odds. At 25, seven years after leaving home, working long hours at low-paying jobs and studying in his spare time, he has passed a demanding test to attend an elite university in South America's largest city and become an eye doctor. A product of bad public elementary and high schools, dark-skinned Pereira stands out from his medical school peers. Ninety percent of them went to fancy private high schools, never had to work and grew up with domestic servants. To narrow gaping social inequalities, Brazil's left-wing government is encouraging public universities, which are free and regarded as the best in the country, to adopt racial quotas. Yet a long tradition of miscegenation in Brazil may make implementing them difficult. "I have friends who are poor and white and, if you saw my sister, you wouldn't believe it; she is white with green eyes," Pereira said. Like many Brazilians, he has one white parent and one black parent, often with indigenous ancestors. Seventeen universities including Pereira's used quotas this year as Brazil, the country with the biggest black population outside of Africa, embarks on a plan to define social benefits by race for the first time since banning slavery in 1888. Like in South Africa and the United States, controversy surrounds racial quotas. Brazil's experiment, however, may prove more complex. Its system depends mainly on how students define their race. Thanks in part to Brazil's long-standing myth of racial democracy, many people have fluid concepts of racial identity. Some people consider themselves neither white, black nor mixed, but simply "Brazilian" -- a catch-all term that can also reflect Indian, Japanese or Arab heritage. Using the quotas would force many people to choose a racial identity. Pereira, who has misgivings about quotas, passed the entrance exam at the Federal University of Sao Paulo (Unifesp) in two categories. In one, he competed against all students for one of 20 spots. In the other he competed against blacks and Indians for one of two extra quota spots. The dean of students at the university, Dr. Edmund Chada Baracat, says the system at his school, implemented for the first time this year, isn't perfect because it doesn't address the needs of poor white students. "This is something we want to address with the next incoming class," Baracat said. "We'd also like to get more funding to make sure poorer kids get aid to pay their rent and food so they don't end up quitting or working outside school." The quota systems developed by each of the 17 universities vary widely. At the Unicamp university, students who graduated from public schools are given 30 extra points on their entry exams, while blacks or Indians are given 10, allowing someone to get up to 40 points out of a total of 800. LEGISLATING QUOTAS A law pending in Congress would force dozens of other public universities to adopt quotas and impose a single, nationwide system. First, it would reserve half of all university spots for graduates of public high schools. Then, it would proportionally allocate those seats according to each state's racial breakdown in the latest census. The government has tried to address the needs of poor whites who went to public high school by including them in the quotas that have been introduced in the last couple of years. So, in Bahia state, which has a large Afro-Brazilian population, 73 percent of the reserved seats would go to people with African ancestors, 25 percent to poor whites and the rest to Indians. Afro-Brazilians who went to private high schools wouldn't be eligible for quotas. Education officials say the system tries to avoid a common criticism made of the U.S. system that it sometimes benefits rich minorities, instead of poor ones. Brazilians tend to support setting aside spots for public high school graduates, though many are less sure about introducing racial quotas and worry they might undermine entry based on merit alone. Constitutional law scholars fear dozens of court cases in Brazil's fractured judiciary challenging individuals' subjective definition of race, especially because a student could identify himself as black even if his peers consider him white. Jairo Jorge, vice chief of staff at the education ministry, says the system would avoid this commonly feared pitfall. "There would be no incentive to change your race because regardless of which category you choose you would only be competing against other public high school graduates, be they just white or just black," he said. Lawyers also worry it could violate the constitution, which outlaws any kind of discrimination. Some 10 court cases have been filed to protest the quotas and it could take years before the Supreme Court rules on the issue like the top U.S. court did in 2003, when it narrowed the use of racial preferences several decades after their adoption. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx While many believe that Arab and Latin American societies have a better track record in regard to race than the United States, Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, contends that this impression is wrong. Moore, a black man raised in pre-Castro Cuba, believes that while these societies may look color blind on the surface, race actually dominates every aspect of social and political life. Moore is best known for his book Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (CAAS, 1989), and African Presence in the Americas, co-edited with Shawna Moore and Tanya R. Sanders (Africa World Press, 1996). This lecture took place in UCLA's Haynes Hall May 19 and was sponsored by the African Studies Center, the Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies, and the UCLA Department of Political Science. The Arab Model Moore in his youth set out to find what historical events led to the establishment of a racial hierarchy in Latin America, where race mixing is the norm, yet lightness and darkness of skin still matters. His findings led him to believe that the paradigms of race in Latin America are directly descended from the time when Arabs controlled the Iberian Peninsula, the homeland of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the Americas. Arabs successfully invaded the Iberian Peninsula (today Spain and Portugal) in 711 CE. The Moorish culture that was established was known as Andalusia. By the late 1200s Christian armies had expelled the majority of Muslims from Iberia. "I have had the privilege to have lived in Arab countries," Moore said, "and to be shocked by the extraordinary similarities to Latin America of structures of race in countries like Egypt. It was familiar ground. I was twenty-one, had just left Cuba. I lived in Egypt for a year. I was surprised to see how it was as though I had not left Cuba except for the fact that they spoke Arabic and adhered to the Muslim religion. From then on I began to study the structures of race relations in the Arab countries in a comparative way with relations in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. That became my focus." Arab Slavery on the Iberian Peninsula “Through the Sahara alone," Moore said, "four million blacks were brought over to the Arab Iberian Peninsula. The Arab world was a world in which slavery was essential." Some scholars are skeptical of the size of the numbers Moore cites. Moore sees the export of Arab-model slavery and race relations to the New World by the Spanish and Portuguese, who had absorbed it during the Muslim occupation of Iberia. "The conquest of America begins when the Arabs are expelled from this part of the world by Europeans." Moore added that the Reconquista was accomplished by south Europeans who had already had long experience of intermarriage or less formal sexual relations with Arab and African peoples and who "are perfectly accustomed to a situation of familiarity of race relations between black and white in a situation of superiority and inferiority." Moore sees two alternate models of racial rule. The one more familiar in the Northern Hemisphere is the Anglo-American one, where power relations and socio-political structures were based on two distinct groups: the Northern European and African prototypes. "We have a stable racial social order achieved and perpetuated through enforcement of an inflexible two-track system whereby extreme racial polarization is involved between two opposing somatic prototypes: The proto-Nordic types with blonde hair, pale white skin, and sharp facial features, and the proto-African type, with crispy hair, very black skin, voluptuous facial features." Interracial Sex and Commingling The Arab-Spanish-Latin American pattern was far more permissive of interracial sex and incorporating racial differences, but, Moore adds, not without its own light-skinned hierarchy. Moore asserts that racial mixing was a very normal occurrence in the Arab world; socially acceptable racial mixing, however, only goes in one direction. Moore postulates the existence in Latin America of a "racial philosophy of eugenics" that encourages a "unilateral … sexual commingling between white [or light skinned] males and the females of the physically conquered and socially inferior race." Like the classification of "colored" in the former Apartheid South Africa, which was ranked as a higher class than the pure African, Moore sees the mixed race "mulatto" in Arab and Latin American society as a higher class than the purebred African or Indian. "The mulatto has a particular rank in society. In Arab societies there are all sorts of ranks. There are infidels, those who are believers, and the mulatto category which is viewed as a ladder for ascension." The racial mixing that took place in Latin America that was socially acceptable, Moore said, was only between white males and the black or American Indian females. According to Moore, the possibility of a black or American Indian man having sex with a white woman would have been destabilizing to the state because the black or American Indian penetrating the female would have been viewed as flipping the established racial hierarchy on its head. Mixed race children from white fathers and dark mothers were totally accepted into society, according to Moore. In each generation males are expected or permitted to marry females of their own skin color or darker. "The production of a stable intermediary swarthy white type is very important to the Latin-Arab model of race relations. It is so important that the state encourages it." Moore views this as "the sexual enslavement of black women by the conquering white males." The First Slaves in the Americas Were Imported from Spain The system developed in Iberia under Arab rule was exported to the Americas as part of the Spanish and Portuguese conquest in the sixteenth century. Moore says that the Portuguese and Spanish added American Indians to their already-enslaved black populations brought from Iberia. “The first black slaves that came to the Americas were not slaves from Africa, but black slaves that came from the Iberian Peninsula, who spoke Portuguese and Spanish." Moore told the audience that the Northern Europeans, “inventors of Apartheid," have traditionally feared the black person, while Europeans from the Iberian Peninsula, as well as their descendants in Latin America, have no such fear. As he put it, "in the U.S. one drop of black blood makes someone black. In Latin America one drop of white blood makes you white." When Spain and Portugal conquered vast parts of Latin America, Moore said, they established a black slave trade, continued the mixing of the races with white Europeans at the top of the social ladder and American Indian and African descendants at the bottom. Whites lived in close physical proximity to black and American Indian populations, however those of a white European ancestry (Spanish and Portuguese) had the political and economic power. The lightness or darkness of one’s skin strongly affected one’s social rank. The Rules of the Subtle Race Game Moore recalled that Hollywood wanted to make a film about Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. They had cast an African American in the role, only to have to pull the plug on the project when Sadat objected to a black man portraying him. Sadat, being the leader of Egypt, considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore said there are black-looking Arabs and Latin Americans who consider themselves white because they have some distant white ancestry. “The only problem is when they go to New York." Moore expressed some concern about the implications for race relations in the United States posed by the increasing immigration from Mexico and Latin America. While he clearly regarded the often overt racism of the North as perhaps even more objectionable than the Arab-Spanish form in the South, he saw a particular problem in the general Latin American denial of race as an issue. This has made it socially disreputable to raise demands for reform in Latin America around race issues. Moore concluded by expressing the hope that these new Latin American immigrants will not import their Arab-Latin American model of race relations, as with it comes a false color blindness. To Moore, the U.S. model of dealing with race, while far from ideal, enables groups to make demands on society, and to be able to work for change.