While some forget that the United States does not have a monopoly over the title "America," the term, with some exceptions, encompasses most of the Western Hemisphere. As such, many of the communities of African descent that reside within this range possess equal claim to the name "African Americans." The event commemorated "Black Consciousness Day," an annual holiday that is celebrated in Brazil on November 20. The public holiday pays tribute to an African ancestor, Zumbi dos Palmares, revered by Blacks in the country for his fierce resistance to slavery in the 17th century. The day was consciously chosen to symbolize the ongoing struggles of Blacks to achieve social and economic equality in Brazil.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
196 p., Explores how Quilombo recognition has significantly affected the everyday lives of those who experience the often-complicated political process. Questions of identity, race, and entitlement play out against a community’s struggle to prove its historical authenticity—and to gain the land and rights they need to survive.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
280 p., Compares the experiences of persons of African origin and descent in the towns of Baltimore and Sabara, Black Townsmen reconsiders their relationship to eighteenth-century urban environments in the Americas. Following Africans and their descendants through their struggle with slavery, manumission, and life in freedom, Dantas explains how these men and women's efforts and choices helped to define the trajectory of these two towns.
Portuguese and Spanish slavers supplied the Americas with "los Negros," the Blacks. Only those young and strong, impervious to European disease and able to withstand months of torturous living packed in the cruel quarters of slave shipholds survived the middle passage. Those who arrived, stunned and malnourished, lost in a foreign land, were easy prey to the slavers. Removed from a world that had nourished them, left to the mercy of those whose own lack of humanity prevented the recognition of theirs, they were utterly dependent and at the mercy of their captors. Vestiges of racism threaten to dismantle further progress in South America, as they do here. The prophecies of Willie Lynch, a slave owner who created a divisive plan to keep Blacks separate by fostering dissent among them, are coming true. Lynch outlined the differences in physical characteristics among the slaves-skin shade, hair texture, height, etc. By playing up these differences, Lynch promised, "The Black slave, after receiving this indoctrination, shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands." Throughout North and South America, Lynch's plan lives on. Color lines rule, with the predominantly European strains remaining in power, and those of darker skin and crisper hair texture continue to be oppressed. It is a chilling reality that echoes down from the brutal suppression of the native peoples of Chiapas to the continued repression of Mexicans here and in their own country, to the harsh discrimination shown the Blacks of Brazil and America.
