The Liberation Imperative of Black Genocide: Blueprints from the African Diaspora in the Americas

The ongoing marginalization and premature, preventable death of disproportionate numbers of Black persons in the African Diaspora create the very conditions for the revolutionary transformation of our societies. Anti-Black genocide generates the imperatives of liberation and revolution. We either begin to address, redress, and do away with what makes possible the multiple facets of anti-Black genocide, or we succumb to the dehumanizing values that produce and are reproduced by the systematic, persistent disregard for the lives of Afro-descended individuals and their communities. It is not only Black people who are affected by anti-Black genocide. Inasmuch as the core values we organize our lives by depend on and are energized by devaluing the lives of others, we are relegated to living a life of fear, terror, and imminent death. As long as there is oppression and senseless death, we will be oppressed and require the continued killing of those deemed unworthy. If there is truth to these propositions, then we fail to realize our full potential as ethical and just social beings. The urgency of anti-Black genocide calls for the total remaking of our lives and our values.

The modern coinage of the term ‘‘genocide’’ is attributed to Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who fled Poland in 1939 for the United States. At a time when the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, as well as the mass atrocities committed by powerful states since the turn of the 20 century, lacked a concept by which they could be described and prosecuted, Lemkin’s 1944 definition of genocide, appearing in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe encompassed a multifaceted perspective. It included attacks on political, cultural, and economic institutions. To Lemkin, the definition of genocide did not require killing. Actions that infringed on the liberty, dignity, and safety of members of a group were enough to qualify them as genocide. The United Nation’s initial definition of genocide that appeared in its 1946 General Assembly reflected Lemkin’s broad conceptual reach.

The more restricted concept of genocide that stands today, however, is the result of a series of political battles waged at the U.N. by powerful nation-states who wanted to avoid a definition of genocide that could criminalize their own actions. Representatives of Great Britain, the U.S.S.R., the United States, and France, for example, were concerned about the implications of the U.N.’s resolution with respect to their own internal and international colonial endeavors. Such were the stakes that the United States, for example, only ratified the already watered-down 1948 definition forty years later, and even then with two ‘‘reservations’’ and five ‘‘understandings.’’ [1]

The definition of genocide that serves as reference in this essay is from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, approved by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 260 A (III) of December, 9 1948, which became effective January 12, 1951. According to Article II of the Convention, genocide is any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group such as:

a) Killing members of the group;

b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

By focusing on diasporic Black communities that have no choice but to resist and overcome genocide by engaging with theories and strategies developed for survival and liberation, this essay suggests blueprints for analysis, resistance, and transformation. The obstacles to formulating analysis and bringing about radical social change are daunting. Repressive and swift state intervention notwithstanding, we have become desensitized to the inherently dehumanizing values that govern our self-understanding and the ways in which our societies are structured. Desensitization to everyday forms of terror is a key condition for the existence of systemic state violence, dehumanization, marginalization, neglect, and for anti-Black genocide.

‘‘Six Year Old Street Resident, Rio De Janiero’’ 2006 © Juca Filho (Jose Fagundes)

The insights above have emerged from collective, radical political efforts in the United States and Brazil. Activists have pointed to both the features of anti-Black genocide and the ways in which they are connected to, express, and perpetuate the corrupt moral values and cognitive frameworks that shape our social worlds and imaginations. This essay draws on those wisdoms—wisdoms forged in activist practice: fighting police brutality, challenging the role of the state in the maintenance of residential segregation, and searching for alternatives to everyday forms of terror perpetrated against (and sometimes by) Black peoples.

To present and analyze the perspectives Black diaspora activists have developed in times of genocide, this essay is organized as follows: first I describe the context for a 1993 encounter between Black Brazilian and U.S. activists. In spite of the fact that I am a Brazilian national, I came into contact with Rio de Janeiro activists through former Los Angeles Black Panthers and their comrades. I have collaborated with the Coalition Against Police Abuse, located in South Central Los Angeles, since 1996. In 2000, their members called my attention to activists in Brazil’s Jacarezinho community and urged me to find institutional ways to support their projects. To meet those needs, I have been doing solidarity work with Rio-based organizations since 2001, the details of which I will explain below. [2] Next, based on these activist and solidarity work experiences, I draw on concepts of genocide developed by the Civil Rights Congress in the early 1950s, and by contemporary activist-intellectuals in the U.S. and Brazil. I then explore the applicability, theoretical, and practical importance of the concept of genocide for ongoing Black struggles. Finally, I reflect on possibilities for liberation and explain why, given the ubiquity and persistence of anti-Black genocide, liberation is a necessity we cannot afford not to fight for. Genocide creates the imperative for radical transformation and leaves us with no choice but to destroy the social conditions that generate it.

This Political Moment in Brazil: Social Programs and Persistent Anti-Black Discrimination

June 2006: Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro.
The intersection of Rua Vinícius de Morais and Av. Visconde de Pirajá. Early afternoon.

This elite, mostly white-inhabited (thus highly segregated) neighborhood, like most of the other neighborhoods in Rio (Black and white), is transformed by the World Cup, which this year takes place in Germany. The Brazilian team, replete with superstars, is not playing well, though it won its first games of the competition. The football mediocrity does not dampen people’s enthusiasm. Yellow and green, Brazilian national colors, are everywhere: painted on the asphalt, flying in flags, on strips of paper tied across the streets, on cars, on buildings. Few are those on the streets without a yellow or green dress detail. For those persons, mostly Black, living in segregated favelas, so near yet so far from neighborhoods such as Ipanema, this time of collective frenzy is a unique opportunity to supplement the family income. Street vendors are much more numerous than in other times. Sérgio, a neatly locked Black man in his mid-twenties, is one of them. He is selling Brazilian team jerseys in yellow, blue, green, or black, and has an improvised display set on the curb just in front of a couple of high-end boutiques. The risks are measured: the promise of a relatively quick profit offsets the danger of being harassed and beaten by the municipal police who patrol the area and are well known for their brutality against camelôs [street vendors]. I speak with him occasionally to or from my way to downtown. The people who work in the elite stores, mostly white-looking young women, have become used to his presence and seem to enjoy talking to him.

One day, coming back from the beach, I see a crowd forming at the intersection I described. As I get closer, I hear ‘‘covarde!’’ [‘‘coward’’], ‘‘lincha!’’ [‘‘lynch!’’], ‘‘direitos humanos!’’ [‘‘human rights!’’]. I was momentarily confused. I could see a Black man being savagely beaten by a group of five municipal police officers holding batons (while six other officers formed a ring between the beating and the crowd). It was Sérgio. Why would the crowd—a mixture of middle-aged retired white men and women, store clerks, messengers, and passersby—be against a vendor who was well-known and liked? My confusion dissipated when I realized that the crowd was shouting against the police officers— they were demanding that the beating be stopped; they were expressing their frustration about the police force; and some of them were openly challenging the officers, gesticulating and shouting their discontent. A few stones started to fly toward the cops. The officers reacted by charging against specific individuals in the crowd: those men who seemed the most vocal. The tactic did not intimidate the protestors. Upon arrival of police reinforcement and extra vehicles, the cops left in a hurry, their trucks showered by stones. They took Sérgio, handcuffed, with them, and we all feared for his life. Fortunately—and prob- ably due to the attention that the event generated among newspaper and television reporters—Sérgio was back the next morning. His face was badly swollen; he had bruises all over his legs and arms. We planned on calling activists and NGOs that could give him legal advice on how to make a complaint and sue the police.

One day, coming back from the beach, I see a crowd forming at the intersection I described. As I get closer, I hear ‘‘covarde!’’ [‘‘coward’’], ‘‘lincha!’’ [‘‘lynch!’’], ‘‘direitos humanos!’’ [‘‘human rights!’’]. I was momentarily confused. I could see a Black man being savagely beaten by a group of five municipal police officers holding batons (while six other officers formed a ring between the beating and the crowd). It was Sérgio. Why would the crowd—a mixture of middle-aged retired white men and women, store clerks, messengers, and passersby—be against a vendor who was well-known and liked? My confusion dissipated when I realized that the crowd was shouting against the police officers— they were demanding that the beating be stopped; they were expressing their frustration about the police force; and some of them were openly challenging the officers, gesticulat- ing and shouting their discontent. A few stones started to fly toward the cops. The officers reacted by charging against specific individuals in the crowd:those men who seemed the most vocal. The tactic did not intimidate the protestors. Upon arrival of police reinforce- ment and extra vehicles, the cops left in a hurry, their trucks showered by stones. They took Se ́rgio, handcuffed, with them, and we all feared for his life. Fortunately—and prob- ably due to the attention that the event generated among newspaper and television repor- ters—Se ́rgio was back the next morning. His face was badly swollen; he had bruises all over his legs and arms. We planned on calling activists and NGOs that could give him legal advice on how to make a complaint and sue the police.

I share these ethnographic details to illustrate this political moment, in which the theoretical and practical fruits of the collaborations between Black U.S. and Brazilian activists emerge. It is a moment of contradictions: as the Brazilian Black movements become relatively successful in pressing for and sometimes implementing affirmative action public policies, long-standing institutional and ideological practices further the marginalization of Black communities. Militarized police abuse, residential segregation, unemployment, and early death, as I will specify later in this essay, continue to disproportionately affect Afro-descended people. At the same time, two interrelated, mutually constitutive and contradictory processes materialize: [3] one is a relatively new public recognition of the corrupt and discriminating nature of Brazilian police and of the criminal justice system in general. [4] This recognition was voiced in the protest against Rio’s municipal police I described above. The other is a multifaceted anti–affirmative action campaign that draws its momentum from television programs, newspaper and magazine articles, and newly published books. The view that race does not exist and should not serve as a basis for public policies is the logic informing the campaign that recycles the racial democracy ideology [5] and makes a misleadingly appealing case for the resistance, refusal, and renegotiation of the few, but important, affirmative action gains Brazil has witnessed in the last few years. [6]

The economic policies adopted by the Lula government provide further context to the moment in which this contradiction unfolds. Among the very poor majority in Brazil (which is disproportionately Black) [7] Lula’s 2006 reelection marked the plebiscitary support of such policies. An improved macroeconomic context has generated, especially to the poorest parcel of the Brazilian population, unprecedented access to consumer credit and, more important, basic necessities such as food, clothing, and personal hygiene products.

Although by international standards Brazil’s annual growth rate during Lula’s final three years of his first mandate between 2004 and 2006, was unimpressive (estimated at 3.4 percent), it more than doubled the 1.3 percent growth rate of the previous three-year period (a combination of Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration’s last three years and Lula’s first). Combined with the decline of inflation a record 4 percent in 2006 and an appreciation of the currency by more than 25 percent relative to the U.S. dollar since 2004, these macroeconomic features drove the expansion of consumer credit, especially to low-income and first-time borrowers. [8]

Further contributing to the incorporation of the poor population into the consumer market, Lula’s administration increased the minimum wage so that purchasing power was augmented by a substantial 23 percent between 2003–2006. Combined with income transfer programs and social safety initiatives aimed at reducing poverty—for example, the Bolsa Família, or the ‘‘Family Stipend,’’ providing 15 Reals monthly (roughly 7 U.S. dollars) per child attending school (to a maximum of three children)—these social policies have effectively reduced poverty. Brazilians living under the poverty line have declined from 28 percent in 2003 to 23 percent in 2005. By some estimates, absolute poverty declined in the first three years of Lula’s presidency by approximately 15 percent. [9] As a result of these policies between 2005 and 2006, the poorer 50 percent’s share of the national total income increased from 14.3 to 15.1 percent. Taken together, these data suggest a significant increase in income redistribution, benefiting those most affected by poverty.

In spite of these macroeconomic programs, the Lula government fell short of achieving structural change. Even with the marked improvement in earnings for those in lower income brackets, per capita social spending decreased. Cuts in the social budget amount to R$19.3 billion in the period 2001–2003, [10] with the highest cuts being in housing and urban infrastructure. Expanding favelas in Brazil’s urban landscapes are a symptom of the collapse of the home loan system. It is estimated that only 20 percent of families in need of home loans have access to them. The relationship between the increase in the number and size of favelas and the unavailability of credit is direct: in the city of Rio de Janeiro, each 10 percent increase in favelas corresponds to a 2.3 percent decrease in home loan access. [11]

Inasmuch as structural and historical social inequalities are not addressed up front, the racialized systems of hierarchies—that feed from and inflect social inequalities—remain the logic determining life chances. An example of this logic serves as an introduction to the multifaceted manifestations of anti-Black genocide. In the city of Rio, where Blacks are 40.2 percent of the population, they are 66.5 percent of inmates. If criminal justice policies are part of a web of racialized understandings of the lifeworld, then the overrepresentation of Afro-Brazilians in cages is an index to analogous discrimination in education, work, housing, and health.

It is in this moment when programmatic changes are being enacted, but in the context of a permanently racialized structure, that there is a predictable reaction from those who have always benefited materially and symbolically from the racial paradise mythology. In this moment the alliances between Black U.S. and Brazilian activists offer important insights and strategies that may contribute to the actualization of citizenship for Afro-descended people. These activists know that there is more at play than formal recognition of rights and access to resources. As pressing as the pragmatic battle is, the larger war is one about Black people’s fully recognized and guaranteed humanity—indeed, it is a war of survival. What are the diagnoses Black Brazilian and U.S. activists elaborate about their polities? What real and imagined communities are they crafting and conversing about?

Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro: Difference, Repetition

Michael Zinzun, co-founder of the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) in Los Angeles and the main driver of the transnational activist alliances I discuss in this essay, passed away in July 2006. Yet the interchanges he initiated over a decade ago, and the Black radical tradition in which they were embedded are alive. The battles have been carried forward and engaged on varied fronts. There are now collaborations going on between U.S.-based activists and people and organizations in Rio that are the direct product of that first dialogue. One example is the course on the Theory and Politics of the African Diaspora, organized by Criola, a Black woman’s organization based in Rio, Proafro, a center at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, and the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Planning extended over three years, but the course was finally offered in June 2007. Most of the participants were Black Brazilian women activists.

This alliance started in 1993, when a group of fifteen Black residents of South Central Los Angeles (members of two local grassroots organizations, CAPA and the Community in Support of the Gang Truce (CSGT)), traveled to Rio de Janeiro to meet with Brazilian activists and exchange knowledge about their political struggles. CAPA and CSGT were built on their older members’ participation in the Black Panther Party, whose programs for community empowerment combined with transnational perspectives oriented much of the U.S. activists’ approach to the Brazilian political connections. The Black U.S. militants interacted with several non-governmental organizations (among them one of the first Black NGOs in Brazil, the Instituto de Pesquisa das Culturas Negras—IPCN), but primarily with inhabitants of one of the poorest, most violent, stigmatized and dilapidated neighborhoods in Rio, the Jacarezinho favela, where more than 150,000 people live under the despotism of drug dealers and state-sanctioned brutality exercised by the police.

In Jacarezinho, as in many of the larger and more politicized favelas in Rio, groups of courageous women and men have, since the early 1990s, begun to challenge the control that corrupt police officers and drug dealers had over the favela’s everyday life and politics. Whereas the repressive presence of the police in the favelas is as enduring as the fave- las themselves, the dominance of drug dealers is a relatively recent phenomenon. Since the mid-1980s, drug dealers have exerted life-and-death powers over the favelas dwellers and their neighborhood associations. As CAPA and CSGT members met women and men who were organizing in Jacarezinho under the banner of full citizenship, autonomy, and racial pride, they not only became interested in the reforms and programs Jacarezinho organizers were proposing to the community, but offered their support with strategies and limited, but much valued, financial resources. Brazilians and U.S. Blacks shared experiences of police brutality, poverty, unemployment, and the effects of the drug trade. While they recognized the specificities of each context, they nevertheless emphasized the possibility for the development of common strategies and the necessity of addressing local problems through a global prism.

The collaboration between Black Americans and Afro-Brazilians began by focusing on community organizing and tactics to address the various sources of racialized social injustice. What made the dialogue possible, above all, was the recognition of common problems. Zinzun frequently remarked on the depressingly similar conditions Blacks experienced in U.S. ghettos and in Brazilian favelas. Imminent death at the hands of drug dealers and police officers were only the most obvious. The recognition of common problems revealed a deeper recognition—that of the Black diasporic condition. Zinzun often stated that ‘‘you are me, and I am you’’ when communicating with fellow Brazilian activists. There was a mutual understanding of what it meant to be Black in nation-states that, by different means and discourses, managed to marginalize and kill Black people while presenting themselves as democratic and inclusive. The U.S.’s color-blind, post-affirmative action ideology, and Brazil’s racial democracy mythology thus produced similar genocidal results, despite their political, cultural, and geographical specificities. Denouncing police brutality, formulating analyses that identified differences but emphasized commonalities between the U.S. and Brazil above all, and proposing police reform were prominent themes of the dialogues. Since that first meeting, Brazilian community organizers have visited Los Angeles and other U.S. cities for periods of time ranging from a week to several months, and members of CAPA and CSGT have done the same in Brazil. During these interchanges, Brazilians and U.S. African–Americans participate in workshops and seminars on the theory and praxis of community organizing. They also visit different cities, becoming more familiar with each other’s realities and political programs. The Internet has provided an additional channel through which information is communicated instantaneously and frequently. [12]

For the U.S.-based reader, a brief contextualization of the material and symbolic context within which genocide takes place in Brazil may be useful. The conditions in Rio’s favelas and much of their negative hegemonic representations in news media and academic publications are related to at least two processes that intensified in the 1980s: the trade in cocaine and its militarization by dealers and the police; and the employment layoffs that disproportionately affect the less affluent working class and favela dwellers. [13] In Jacarezinho, for example, the sharp rise in unemployment was largely due to massive layoffs by General Electric, assailing one of the few segments of the community that was part of the formal job market. In the absence of critical analyses of the conditions in which the drug trade flourished, the negative racialized stereotypes long associated with the favelas was recycled, stressing the alleged effects of drugs on these supposedly already degraded, amoral, and violent communities. [14] Although the number of people—mostly young males between the ages of 10 and 25—who participate in the drug trade as a replaceable army of labor represents an infinitesimal proportion of the favela population, the drug trade and police violence have come to dominate both the everyday life of the favelas and the city’s broader collective imaginary. [15]

Militarized police operations targeting the predominantly Black favelas are common. For example, the 1994 Operação Rio put the military on the streets with their tanks trained on the favelas, and suspended the civil rights of favela dwellers. [16] A 1996 Human Rights Watch report concluded that the operation was ‘‘punctuated by torture, arbitrary detentions, and warrantless searches and at least one case of unnecessary use of lethal force.’’ [17] Such operations reveal the prism through which the police and the broader society conceive of the favelas: as places to be repressed and contained by any means necessary. I will further illustrate this point with ethnographic data below.

Given such a history, organizers concerned with securing dignity and citizenship for the people of the favelas must devise theories and pragmatic strategies whose ultimate validity lie in the survival and betterment of Afro-descended communities. The latitude for error is reduced. Either the imagination of social justice succeeds in rolling back the anti-Black genocidal practices and constructing a more just polity, or Black people will continue to die. Genocide creates the imperative of analysis and action.

Black Genocide: Then and Now, Here and There

June 2007, same intersection in Ipanema, about 7:30 p.m.
I’m coming back from Uerj, the state university of Rio, where I had been teaching a class with colleagues from the University of Texas. Ted Gordon and I decide to take the scenic route back from the Cantagalo subway stop. As we approach our street from the beach, we see a group of military police officers in full riot gear. There are about ten of them. They are boisterously talking and laughing. Some smoke. They carelessly hold their automatic weapons, and soon they depart in two vehicles. We go to the sidewalk where the police officers were standing. There is a large pool of blood, still fresh. I ask someone at the hotel what happened. The story I hear from workers who witnessed the scene confirms the obvious: as he was running away from the police, a young man tripped and was shot in the leg and then in the head. Two other young men, allegedly accomplices in the failed robbery, managed to get away in a car. According to the people I talked to, the young man that stayed behind was holding a gun. The police officer that caught up with him asked that he drop the gun. As he did not, the officer shot him in the head several times. (Activists in Jacarezinho told me that such is standard procedure: to create the appearance of non-lethal intentions, police officers will often shoot a suspect in the leg or arms first and will murder the victim either on the spot or on the way to the hospital.) [18]

Less than two weeks later, all of us in Rio heard about the ‘‘occupation’’ of the Alemão favela, in which nineteen people were killed in a military police-national guard special operation that included snipers, helicopters, modified tanks, and an arsenal of precision weapons, scanning devices, and bombs. [19] Among the dead there were at least three teenagers. Photos of the effects of the operation, taken by the press and by residents, made an unmistakable link between what happened in the mostly Black segregated area of the Alemão favela, and the mostly White segregated Ipanema neighbor- hood: the dead were Afro-descended persons while the agents of the state, although at times embodied by Black individuals, carried through a policy of social and spatial control whose drive and results were in essence anti-Black. The state of Rio de Janeiro’s branch of Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil (OAB-RJ), the Brazilian equivalent of the U.S. Lawyers Guild, filed a dossier showing evidence of execution in the bodies of at least thirteen of the nineteen people killed in the operation. [20]

A mutual awareness of Black genocide consolidates in the transnational collaborations between activists in Rio and L.A. and is rooted in a history of imposed marginalization and in efforts Blacks have undertaken to conceptualize and counter their dehumanization. This awareness is often explicit in activists’ analyses, such as when they remark on the accumulated effects of police operations in the poor and mostly Black areas in Rio, and call these effects genocide. At other times, the awareness of genocide is more diffuse, and is expressed by reference to disparate phenomena such as early death from preventable disease, murders in Black communities perpetrated by residents, and high incidence of AIDS/HIV. The concept of genocide may not be used in these instances, but this does not preclude the understanding that Afro-descended communities are preferential victims of structural social processes that are realized through active (as in the case of police brutality) or passive public policy (of which inadequate health care is an example). In this section, I demonstrate that the awareness and perception of genocide is the product of present and past activist initiatives. The writings of activist-intellectuals, as well as reflecting pragmatic action and theories employed by political actors, are sources of systematic perspectives on genocide. By providing structural and historical groundings, these writings can also help us to understand and contextualize the activists’ contemporary theorizations of genocide. Activist initiatives that combat anti-Black genocide have a genealogy that not only goes back in historical time, but also reveals theoretical rhizomes that traverse nation-states.

From the U.S. standpoint, William Patterson, Manning Marable, and Joy James can be considered examples of diasporic activist intellectuals who have theorized Black genocide and linked it to political practice. Not surprisingly, given the global nature of Black genocide, this body of work intersects with that of Black Brazilian activist, elected repre- sentative, screenwriter, actor, and painter Abdias do Nascimento. Below I (a) delineate key aspects of the ways in which genocide was understood by such activist intellectuals, beginning with the Civil Rights Congress definition of genocide developed in the early 1950s, (b) discuss the applicability of the concept to our times and to diasporic Black communities, and (c) close this section with specific data on the contemporary manifestations of anti-Black genocide in the U.S. and Brazil.

On December 17, 1951, William Patterson led a delegation before the United Nations Secretary-General charging the United States government with genocide. The delegation’s arguments were meticulously compiled in a landmark publication edited by Patterson, then National Executive Secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, entitled We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People (1951). Patterson’s work remains relevant, not only as a testimony to political will and analytical depth, but also because genocide continues today. Perhaps not as explicit in public policy and openly racist behaviors as it was in the 1950s, the contemporary genocide of Black people in the U.S., Brazil, and other countries of the African diaspora is nevertheless pervasive. The point of this analysis is to utilize the theoretical tools as well as the political commitment embodied in We Charge Genocide as strategies to make sense of and begin to combat the multiple forms of genocide that are taking place before our eyes. For Patterson and his collaborators, the persistence of lynchings and of Jim Crow policies were, in those post-war times when the U.S. invested in its self-image as the guardian of world democracy, the main objects of the campaign. [21] Yet, We Charge Genocide is far more complex than a compilation of systematic, institutionalized, and everyday atrocities committed by whites against Black people in all parts of the U.S.—not just the South—between 1945 and 1951. As Malcolm X frequently remarked, and Patterson’s volume confirms with ample evidence of terror against Blacks, the (racist) South in the U.S. is anywhere south of the Canadian border.

In Patterson’s volume, genocide, besides referring to the killing of Black individuals, implied domestic and international fascism, often leading to genocidal war against racialized nations: ‘‘White supremacy at home makes for colored massacres abroad.’’ [22] Genocidal practices included the economic and political oppression of Black communities, justified and advanced by public statements and policies ‘‘not plotted in the dark, but incited over the radio into the ears of millions, urged in the glare of public forums by Senators and Governors’’ (5). These practices are embedded in widely shared yet seldom expressed racial knowledge, ‘‘a part of the mores of the ruling class often concealed by euphemisms, but always directed to oppressing the Negro people’’(6), which translated into low wages, continued residential segregation, and political disenfranchisement. Genocide of Blacks in the U.S. resulted in deep psychological and physical terror, perpetrated not only by the Ku Klux Klan, but also sanctioned and justified by public figures such as Governors J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Fielding M. Wright of Mississippi, and Frank M. Dixon of Alabama—all inciting violence against Blacks to pre- vent them from voting (16–19). The various facets of anti-Black genocide squarely questioned the nature, scope, and alleged universality of democracy in the United States.

Genocide is expressed in deadly physical violence, institutionalized discrimination by and in the police, courts, and legislatures; in psychological terror, economic and political marginalization, and militarization. These multidimensional manifestations demonstrate that, at the core of Black genocidal processes in the U.S. lies a set of dominant values and representations that dehumanize Blacks, restricts their access to rights and resources, excludes them from full citizenship, and justifies their continued disrespect and death. A crucial aspect of anti-Black genocide is that it brings considerable advantages to the perpetrators: intimidation and death of Blacks is clearly linked to political power (preventing Blacks from voting), and economic power (preventing Blacks from competing with whites in job and housing markets).

What Patterson and his collaborators knew about the ideological justifications and multiple manifestations of genocide can be theoretically utilized today to make sense of countless representations, actions, and public policies whose result is the unmistakable dehumanization, exclusion, and death of Black people. I emphasize theory here to both preserve the forms of genocide specific to the 1950s, and also to call attention to Patterson’s analytical perspective, which is a powerful tool for uncovering the contemporary facets of anti-Black genocide. We Charge Genocide is a unique document and political tactic in that it utilized international legal grammar to denounce the benefits U.S. whites accrued from systematically discriminating against Blacks—a complex dynamic of overt, genocidal violence and no less effective tacit race knowledge that George Lipsitz has described as the possessive investment in Whiteness. [23]

Why Now?

What is to be gained from an analytic and political perspective emphasizing genocide against Black people in the African diaspora? Inspired by the multidimensional concept of genocide suggested by Patterson and his collaborators, I advance an argument for the necessity of coming to terms with the deadly, often state- and society-sanctioned, yet seldom overt, contemporary campaigns against peoples of African descent. As in the case of Katrina, historically persistent racialized effects of state and corporate (in) actions have yet again produced disproportionate dislocation, suffering, and death of Black people. [24] Approached from various angles, the concept of genocide allows us to understand seemingly disparate phenomena as they relate to each other, contributing to the continued oppression and death of Black people in Africa and its diaspora. Building on critical analyses of and comparisons between the U.S. and Brazil, as activists have developed them, I offer a heuristic framework around which we can recognize the multiple forms that anti-Black genocide acquires in late capitalist polities. Such a framework— whose completion cannot be carried out by a single researcher in one discipline—requires both intellectual vigor and political will. There cannot be an effective political strategy to combat anti-Black racisms without a deep and broad—indeed global—perspective on the multiple facets of genocidal discrimination, nor can there be a sound and ethical research agenda without on-the-ground engagement with real problems as they are experienced by real people and real community organizations. [25] Which is to say: rather than adopting the self-proclaimed detached social-scientific gaze, I argue for an analytical approach that gains insight and depth precisely because it is informed by grassroots efforts, past and present, to analyze and intervene in racist genocidal processes.

How can we transpose the theoretical importance and vitality of the political will contained in We Charge Genocide to our times, while being aware of the historical specificity within which Patterson and his collaborators elaborated the document? In the words of Manning Marable, writing on U.S. economic and social policies in the 1980s:

What is qualitatively new about the current period is that the racist/capitalist state under Reagan has proceeded down a public policy road which would inevitably involve the complete obliteration of the entire Black reserve army of labor and sections of the Black working class. The decision to save capitalism at all costs, to provide adequate capital for the restructuring of the private sector, fundamentally conflicts with the survival of millions of people who are now permanently outside the workplace. Reaganomics must, if it intends to succeed, place the onerous burden of unemployment on the shoulders of the poor (Blacks, Latinos and even Whites) so securely that middle to upper income Americans will not protest the vicious suppression of this stratum. Unlike classical fascism, Reaganism must pursue its policies without publicly attacking Blacks or Puerto Ricans by obvious racial slurs. . . . But the final results of these socio-economic policies, carried to their logical conclusions, would be the total destruction of all-Black institutions, the political separation of the Black elite and intelligentsia from the working class, and the benign but deadly elimination of the ‘‘parasitic’’ ghetto class that has ceased to be a necessary or productive element within modern capitalism. . . . The genocidal logic of the situation could demand, in the not too distant future, the rejection of the ghetto’s right to survival in the new capitalist order. Without gas chambers or pogroms, the dark ghetto’s economic and social institutions might be destroyed, and many of its residents would simply cease to exist. [26]

Marable’s formulation points to the contemporary symbiosis between the self- proclaimed color-blind polices that characterized the Reagan era and the unmistakably racialized character of those policies’ social effects. This symbiosis reveals the ways in which cultural understandings—about those in poverty more generally, but also specifically those who live in the U.S. ghettos—sustain and indeed make the application of policies feasible. A necessary aspect of the logic Marable locates in contemporary U.S. capitalism is its anti-Black (and indeed anti-non-straight U.S. white male) animus. It is this animus that allows us to talk about a genocidal continuum. The continuum includes both the policies Marable describes and the cultural understandings about those most negatively affected by the policies, in such a way that the obliteration of Black communities is acceptable.

Analogous to formulations contained in We Charge Genocide, a genocidal continuum was recently elaborated by anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes: ‘‘it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders—and even by the victims themselves—as expected, routine, even justified.’’ [27] This is precisely what William Patterson and his collaborators conceptualized as they described the everyday forms of psychological, physical, political, and economic oppression Blacks experienced in a white-dominated polity. While lynchings, segregation, and police brutality were structural occurrences, they necessitated a shared cognitive matrix in which Black lives were systematically and unproblematically devalued. The notion of the genocidal continuum allows us to link these various genocidal phenomena into a permanent, totalizing, and ubiquitous event—in much the same way that Omi and Winant interpret the significance of race in the U.S. [28] —and trace the resulting mass killing of Black people to quotidian acts and representations of discrimination, dehumanization, and exclusion. Reaganomics was possible and successful because it drew from such quotidian acts and shared representations.

Everyday acts of hostility can be equated to symbolic violence, which is central to the microphysics of capitalist heteronormative white supremacist hegemonic practices, and which also energizes institutions such as schools, hospitals, workplaces, news media, and of course the criminal justice system. [29] Symbolic violence offers the conceptual and factual link between a myriad of seemingly disparate events and the systemic physical violence that leads to massive incarceration and premature death. While genocide cannot be subsumed into symbolic violence, symbolic violence can be seen as integral to the process of genocide. The concept of symbolic violence indeed provides a tool with which we can see the connections between the representational and the factual, the local event and the general trends, everyday violence and genocide, history and present reality.

When we take into account symbolic violence and the multifaceted aspect of anti-Black discrimination, we are able to understand genocide as culturally rooted. Cultural under- standings of what is acceptable and expected make possible the marginalization of negatively raced individuals and communities Joy James has remarked on the ways in which ‘‘[t]he moral import of racism is virtually meaningless after it has been severed from genocide.’’ [30] This important insight requires that we reconnect that which the dominant discourses have severed: the everyday acts of hostility toward non-whites, women, the non-hetero-normative, the non-propertied, the structural marginalization and persisting de-humanization of such groups, and the ultimate, concrete manifestation of these political and ideological processes, which is the premature, preventable deaths of excluded social groups, among them a disproportionate number of Blacks. If we reconnect these processes, the cognitive map generated allows us to give meaning to apparently disparate phenomena in time, space, quality, and number. M. Jacqui Alexander has recently theorized on the necessity of ideological reassembly as a technique to interrogate normalized (raced, sexed, sexualized) relations of power:

[W]e will destabilize that which hegemony has rendered coherent or fixed; reassemble that which appears to be disparate, scattered, or otherwise idiosyncratic; foreground that which is latent and therefore powerful in its apparent absence; and analyze that which is apparently self-evident, which hegemony casts as commonsensical and natural, but which we shall read as gestures of power that deploy violence to normalize and discipline. [31]

Locating and combating genocide requires precisely these methodological steps: to conjoin, destabilize, reassemble, foreground, and analyze. As Black activists and artists in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro reassemble the various pieces of the genocidal processes that mark their lives, destabilize their objectification, and analyze and interrogate their naturalized subordination, they also forge powerful critiques of our ingrained vertical modes of classifying the social world. In the following sections, I explore some of the quantified and ideological contemporary manifestations of Black genocide in the U.S. and in Brazil. This will show that anti-Black discrimination occurs not only in systematic policies, but also in less perceptible, but nevertheless equally effective, shared representations of non-whites— and especially Blacks—dehumanizing them and justifying their continued marginalization and death. It is in relation to the genocidal effects of institutionalized and everyday cultural racism that transnational practices become vital for the survival of Afrodiasporic communities and as projects of social organization that suggest alternatives to our dehumanizing, hierarchical, and ultimately unjust life world. It bears repeating that such genocidal effects are themselves multifaceted and affect the existence of Black peoples in a variety of ways: the genocidal killing is of the body, mind, and spirit. The urgency energizing Afrological worldviews is a testament to how vital it is that these killings be addressed and prevented. Genocide creates theoretical and practical imperatives of radical transformation.

Multiple Facets of the Anti-Black Genocide Continuum in the United States

Dimensions of anti-Black genocide in the contemporary U.S. include mass imprisonment, police brutality, high infant mortality, early death (of children, men, women, and the elderly), deficient medical treatment, lack of competitive education and economic opportunities, everyday violence in the inner cities, and chronic depression.

As Mike Davis wrote in his now classic City of Quartz, the future can be excavated in the City of Angels. [32] Consider, for example, that in 2001 the murder rate in Los Angeles increased by 10 percent. Police Chief William Bratton, predictably, pushed for a new anti-gang campaign. State interventions such as his leave untouched the conditions that led to high murder rates, some of which should be obvious: substandard education, physically deteriorated neighborhoods, and the negative impact of mass incarceration in the lives of young men and women. Young Black men are four times more likely to be murdered than young Latinos, and eighteen times more likely to be killed than young Anglos. Blacks are 40 percent of the murder victims, even though they are about 11 percent of the total population. [33] Break such numbers down by gender and age, and the disproportions will be even more apparent: young Black men are the overwhelming objects of violence and the preferred victims of death by violence.

The available data on the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex are unequivocal. Whereas 1 in 3 young African American males is under the supervision of the criminal justice system today, by 2020, if the trends recorded between 1980 and 1993 continue, 2 in 3 young Blacks with be either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. [34] At this point, there is almost no doubt that, if you are a Black man, you will be arrested at least once in your lifetime. In Washington, D.C., conservative data reveal that such probability is greater than 75 percent. [35]

Almost 70 percent of the 2 million people currently incarcerated are Black or Brown, the great majority non-violent offenders. Men are not the only targets. African–American women are the fastest growing prison population. [36] While in the 1990s the male prison population increased 77 percent, the number of women in prison more than doubled— an increase of 110 percent. [37] What these numbers suggest is that the continuing war on drugs is significantly a war on women, especially Black women. [38] The program is this: dismantle welfare and lock them up, but not before attempting to sterilize as many African–American women as possible. [39] The consequence is that ‘‘welfare mothers’’ are transformed into the newest unpaid army of labor, producing office furniture, license plates, clothes, or making airline and hotel reservations via telephone from prison. The logic behind the concept and expansion of the prison industrial complex dates back to, at the very least, Nixon’s rise to power. [40] As Angela Y. Davis frequently remarks, the prison of the plantation, characteristic of slavery and the convict lease system instituted shortly thereafter, has become the contemporary plantation of the prison, in which inmates make a fraction of a dollar per hour of work. [41]

If this weren’t enough, another little talked-about process has been advancing the genocide of Blacks in the U.S. as well as in the Americas and in Africa. In 1990, adult Blacks were disproportionately represented in the numbers of those with AIDS/HIV in the U.S., comprising roughly one-third of all cases. 1998 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that Blacks represent 57 percent of all new HIV infections; Black children under 13 represent 58 percent. [42] Whereas official 1998 data revealed that among women, Blacks represent 56 percent of all new cases, 2003 data show that Black women were 67 percent of all of those diagnosed during that year. [43] AIDS is increasingly a disease disproportionately affecting communities of color, especially Latina/os and Blacks.

Creating or tolerating such conditions is genocidal. We do not have to dwell upon the intent of policies, everyday practices, symbolic forms of violence—or the intent behind the absence of redressive policies and practices—to comprehend that what really matters are the results of such (in)actions, results that are unquestionably racialized and gendered and produce massive harm and death. In this regard, the debate about intentionality surrounding the definition and prevention of genocide becomes irrelevant, as a number of authors have proposed: there is enough evidence of the death of substantial numbers of people to define the event as genocide regardless of whether or not these facts conform to core intentions. [44] Wallimann and Dobkowski, furthermore, remind us of how, in highly bureaucratized and anonymous social organizations, it becomes almost impossible to locate intentionality structuring institutions and policies. [45]

Rather than looking for intentions, therefore, we should recognize that in a context defined by racial hierarchies—by white supremacy—apparently neutral policies necessarily become molded by the hegemonic social order. The concepts of symbolic violence and genocidal continuum allow us to understand genocide as part of a constellation of phenomena ranging from everyday forms of individualized discrimination, to structural marginalization (residential segregation, unemployment, barred access to credit), to the historically persistent killing of those deemed less than human. If we were to divert our attention to the search for intentions, or if we did not adopt a systemic and incremental perspective on genocide, such phenomena would appear disparate in space, time, and nature, and there would be no genocide to be accounted for.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counter-Intelligence Programs, which explicitly targeted Black and Indian organizers for elimination, [46] and the government’s complicity in the ‘‘crack epidemic,‘‘ [47] are only some of the most visible faces of a system that works by devaluing the lives of non-whites and perceiving their autonomous and legitimate organizations as threats. There is no room for detachment in these matters. The inescapable fact is that Blacks are dying, being incarcerated, and monitored in unprecedented numbers. Most of these processes take place in segregated communities, invisible and sealed off to the great majority of whites.

As many specialists have argued, blaming the victim is just plain absurd because, regardless of individual efforts and aptitudes, people of color eventually find themselves affected by one of the various manifestations of genocide in disproportionate numbers. [48] As we blame the victim, we thus participate in the genocide, for we abstain from engaging with this society’s historical, systematic, and structural exclusion and dehumanizing. As we do nothing to understand and combat such exclusionary societal architecture, we let things run their course, and the course is unequivocally genocidal. Black activists’ often repeated phrase ‘‘What have you done today for liberation?’’ recognizes this dilemma, and posits comprehension and action as the solution for it. Genocide creates moral, theoretical, and political imperatives requiring deep and broad change.

Reflection on premature deaths among African–Americans gives us a well-defined sense of the dimension of anti-Black genocide. In the last 30 years, premature deaths—from disease, homicide, accidents, suicide, and problematic birth outcomes—are estimated at 2,368,530 among Blacks. Had whites experienced the death rate of Blacks for the same causes, there would have been 19,427,250 premature deaths of whites in the same time period.

Why the silence around the conditions Black experience? Would such silence exist if whites endured what Blacks experience? Would there be such indifference if young whites were being killed at the rate young Blacks are? Would there be so many crime bills, so much support for them, and so many new prisons if whites were the main objects of such policies and corporate ventures? Why are we so unwilling to put the facts together and recognize that premature deaths, combined with massive incarceration and its collateral consequences—broken families, chronic unemployment, neighborhood deterioration, and generalized lack of perspective—especially for more disadvantaged Blacks, is leading to the physical and spiritual destruction of this racialized group? Would there be such inertia if whites were the ones undergoing such processes?

Black Genocide in Brazil: A Synopsis

Abdias do Nascimento utilized the concept of genocide in his Brazil: Mixture or Massacre: Essays in the Genocide of a Black People. [49] In this book, as in his plays, paintings, and public pronouncements, Nascimento denounced, on one hand, the farce of Brazilian racial democracy, and on the other, the material and psychological effects of anti-Black racism as it translates into unemployment, low-quality education and earnings, low self-esteem, and premature death—all determined by race when compared to how whites fare.

Indeed, Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and its inequality is profoundly marked by race. Median annual income for the richest 20 percent is $21,134, roughly equivalent to that of France, 26 times greater than median income of the poorest 20 percent, which is $828, roughly the same as that of the Congo. That is, the richest 20 percent have 64 percent of the total national income, while the poorest 20 percent have only 3 percent of the total national income. [50] The parallels with a mostly white country and with a mostly Black nation are not accidental: they illustrate how deeply economic inequalities are racialized.

At this time, when Lula’s presidency is entering its second term, there is an evident paradox. While the myth of racial democracy is challenged, the ideological and material facets of anti-Black genocide intensify to unparalleled dimensions. Never has Brazil had so many Black NGOs focusing on health, violence, media, culture, and electoral politics. Never has Brazil had such a number and quality of Black music and dance groups engaging with, openly criticizing, and proposing alternatives to endemic Brazilian racism, among them Olodum and Ilê-Aiyê in Salvador, Cidade Negra and Afroreggae in Rio, examples of a vital movement that does not shy away from the national public sphere while immersed in local grassroots anti-racist efforts. Never has Brazil had such vigorous debate on affirmative action, reparations, and historical forms of racialized discrimination. Never has Brazil had so many self-defined Afro-Brazilian elected representatives in local, state, and national politics. Never has Brazil had so many weekly magazines run by and targeted to Blacks. And, it seems, never, sadly, has Brazil had such levels of deadly police brutality and other forms of violence perpetrated against Blacks, especially in large cities like São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, and Recife. Blacks continue to be the main victims of preventable diseases, malnutrition, joblessness, AIDS/HIV HIV infection, and clinical depression.

Consistent with the theoretical framework Patterson and his collaborators elaborated in We Charge Genocide, anti-Black genocide in Brazil is multifaceted. The various dimensions of anti-Black genocide can be schematized into two dimensions—material and ideological— both of which are perpetrated and (at least tacitly supported) by the wider society.

The ideological elements of anti-Black genocide in Brazil are at first difficult to distinguish. As I have argued elsewhere, Brazilian social relations—their practices and representations—are marked by a hyperconsciousness of race. Such hyperconsciousness, while symptomatic of how Brazilians classify and position themselves in the world, is manifested by the often vehement negation of the importance of race. This negation suggests that race is neither an analytic nor morally valid tool, nor does it play a central role in determining Brazilian social relations, hierarchies, and its distribution of power and resources. Try talking to Brazilians of varied racial backgrounds, places of residence, occupation, age, gender, sexual orientation, and levels of formal instruction about the matter, and most often you will find yourself accused of racism for insisting on a theme that allegedly has no relevance in that country and/or the conversation will swiftly be redirected away from race. [51]

The focus on this hyperconsciousness/negation dynamic opens a window into hegemonic racial common sense. [52] The ideological dimensions of anti-Black genocide in Brazil include whitening ideals according to which Afro-Brazilians are encouraged to identify as white, dissociate themselves from Blacks and seek lighter-skinned friends and partners. It is common in non-white families to hear from elders that ‘‘we need to purify our blood,’’ a purification that is well understood as getting rid of as many Black traits in our appearance and behavior as possible. The resistance against identifying as Black was well exemplified in weekly meetings in favelas I attended during the months of June–August 2001, when persons of color often refused to identify themselves as negro/a (Black) or Afro-Brazilian. According to this logic, Black people who have managed to attain some level of social status can affirm that they know what it is to be Black since they, alas, have been Black themselves. [53]

The relevance of race, however, is not restricted to the realm of mythology and every-day talk of color. Analyses of political economy confirm and give a concrete dimension to the white/non-white binary that informs Brazilian social structure: greater differences in life chances and outcomes (in employment, education, infant mortality, susceptibility to police abuse, for example) exist between non-whites and whites than among non-whites. [54]

The 1996 Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD, the National House- hold Sample Survey) revealed that whereas in the richest Southeast region—the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and Espírito Santo—infant mortality for whites stood at 25.1 per thousand infants born alive, for Blacks the rate was 43.1. In the country as a whole, whereas barely 50 percent of Black households are connected to a sewage sys- tem, the rate is 73.6 percent for white households. When we apply the United Nation’s Index of Human Development, utilized as a measure of life quality on a scale of 0–1, we see that though it is 0.796 for the Brazilian population as a whole, it is 0.573 for Afro-Brazilians. Black infant mortality in the Southeast reflects such inequalities and for Black children under 5 years old, mortality is 52.7 per thousand born alive; it is 30.9 per thousand for white children born alive. [55]

Salary disparities confirm the white–Black gap. In São Paulo’s metropolitan region, Blacks make an average of R$ 2.94 per day; whites make R$ 5.50. [56] All social–economic data reveal that ‘‘non-whites are subject to a ‘process of cumulative disadvantages’ in their social trajectories,’’ which blocks their social mobility. [57] Whites, on the other hand, are markedly more successful in attaining upward social mobility. This process, by which Blacks and whites have distinct life-trajectories, is similar to the U.S., as demonstrated in the analyses of Oliver and Shapiro. [58]

Police brutality, as it disproportionately affects Blacks in Brazil, is also comparable to the U.S. The reality for Afro-Brazilians, however, is far worse than it is for African– Americans. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, the police killed 900 people between January and August 2003, almost 75 percent of them in favelas, predominantly Black communities. [59] Paul Amar reminds us that ‘‘this trend, if continued, would have pushed the tally of police executions above 1,500 in 2003 in Rio state alone, approaching parity with Baghdad, beyond the realm of media metaphors, as the Iraqi capital suffered around 1,700 civilian fatalities during this year’s war [of occupation].’’ [60] In a month, Rio police kill more than 2.5 times more people than the New York Police Department kills in a whole year. [61] Ubiquitous cases of police misconduct are part of an emblematic, persistent pattern of anti-Black racism that pervades Brazilian society. [62] Rio newspaper clippings for the period between December 1990 and September 2003 are replete with descriptions of extortions, kidnappings, and fatal beatings and shootings—all enacted by police officers, and mostly against people of African descent. [63]

Liberation or Genocide: The Imperative of Revolution

White supremacy and anti-Black racism are genocidal. Complementing their most obvious manifestations, white supremacy and anti-Black racism also work through silence, inaction, and ignorance. White supremacy and anti-Black racism happen both because of what we and others do as well as what we and others don’t do. Consequently, silence, inaction, and ignorance are as genocidal as the most overt racist acts and thoughts.

What is to be done? A crucial step in the organized struggle against anti-Black racism in Brazil is to denounce genocide against people of African descent. This includes both the genocide that is facilitated through hegemonic whitening ideals, [64] but also the genocide that is more direct and causes the physical and civil death of African–Americans—here understood as people of African descent in the Americas—through multiple forms of marginalization.

In times of recrudescing public sentiment and political campaigns against affirmative action in both the U.S. and Brazil, in times of the increased institutionalization of ‘‘mixed-race’’ classifications (the results of which are the dilution of the already fragile political clout of Black populations), there is a need for committed research and political agendas. Such commitment is embodied in the ongoing political alliances between United States Blacks, members of local grassroots organizations in Los Angeles, and Afro-Brazilian activists in Rio de Janeiro. The fight against police brutality, drug commerce violence, and a gamut of health problems affecting Blacks, especially women, of the diaspora constitute the agenda around which courageous and vibrant transnational efforts are opposing and building alternatives to a genocidal continuum.

The developments of the alliance established in 1993 serve both as templates for struggles and also to remind us that such transnational initiatives can have effective and long-lasting impact. Let me briefly comment on a few of the outcomes of such alliances.

The founding of the Zinzun Center in the Jacarezinho neighborhood in 2001, as short- lived and embattled as it was, put into practice a series of strategies that go beyond that particular experience. First, and perhaps most important, the Zinzun Center was a clear indication of the fact that Jacarezinho’s militants were not alone in their fight against police brutality and for greater social justice. Second, the Zinzun Center adopted many of CAPA’s tactics to document cases of police abuse, providing juridical assistance to the victims of police misconduct and, as important, transforming such cases into catalysts for popular mobilization. As was the case in Los Angeles at least since 1975 when CAPA was founded, the various cases of police misconduct in Jacarezinho served as starting points for organizing people against unjust law enforcement and against the various social and economic problems afflicting the favela.65 The third strategy informing the inauguration of the Zinzun Center called media attention to the new neighborhood administration in Jacarezinho. The tactic is contradictory because, even though public exposure may raise the stakes for the execution of activists, it can also generate greater resentment and resolve from those who are threatened by the activists’ agenda. Still, the dialogues with U.S. organizers who have embraced mass communications networks as a necessary arena of struggle have convinced Jacarezinho’s activists to seek out the media. Thus, when activists announced the inauguration of the Zinzun Center, the event was reported in most of the major local newspapers and television channels, and even in Sa ̃o Paulo’s main daily, Folha de S.Paulo. [66]

All of this indicates that international alliances constitute a fundamental aspect of the favela struggle by providing an expanded ideological and practical horizon of possibilities. The favela movement’s adversaries are powerful and deadly. The symbolic and practical effects of alliances with former Black Panthers and Los Angeles gang members working to maintain the truce on the local police, politicians, and drug dealers should not be under-estimated. Because of their well-known history of confrontational politics against law enforcement in particular and oppressive institutions in general, CAPA and CSGT militants provide Brazilians with a tactical edge insofar as they embody a tradition that has proven to be effective in fighting institutionalized forms of power.

As significant, alliances with progressive Black U.S. activists work to diffuse the frequent accusations of involvement with drug commerce against favela representatives. These accusations have become common since the end of the dictatorship. Whereas during the military repression, politicized communities and their leaders were tagged as communists (and thus, from the state apparatus’ perspective, justifiably harassed, imprisoned, and killed), beginning in the 1980s, representatives of the favelas who did not automatically subscribe to official party guidelines and discourses were frequently dismissed as spokespersons for drug dealers. The irony is that even leftist parties such as the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Worker’s Party) were, through some of their members in Rio, quick to condemn the efforts by Jacarezinho’s neighborhood association to curb police brutality in these same terms. Because the women and men working in the favela have dialogued with Los Angeles gang members who established the gang truce in 1992, they are able to deflect accusations of drug trade involvement by stressing their commitment to constructing peace between the different drug commerce factions.

Transnational alliances in the Black diaspora therefore provide counternarratives that are as crucial to maintaining and expanding liberation movements as they are vital to the survival of communities under permanent siege; they generate, at the very least, a sense of diasporic security, a groundedness and confidence that cannot be achieved otherwise.

The Zinzun Center was short-lived. A combination of events—the harassment of activists by local civil and military police, negative press coverage, and competing interests in the community [67] —contributed to the end of the experiment. Yet the Center can be seen as the materialization of a radical vision, of a revolutionary utopia. Although the practical goals of the initiative are not to be ignored, if we are to continue the struggle in ways that search for the yet-to-be known, in ways that accept ‘‘failure’’ as pregnant with lessons and inspiration, then we must balance our indisputable need for pragmatic, concrete objectives and results with a commitment to the experimental, to the need to continue with efforts against anti-Black genocide that recognize our vulnerability and yet make that condition the creative ground from which liberation and transformation can germinate.

Other political fronts have been established since the 1993 encounter. The ongoing flow of Black activists between Brazil and Austin is an indication of the political possibilities within U.S. hegemonic institutions such as the University of Texas. Since 2001, and in my view due in large part to the connections that can be traced back to the ones Zinzun established in 1993, the African Diaspora program of the department of Anthropology and Center for African and African American Studies has been able to attract and institutionally support Brazilian student-activists pursuing their doctoral degrees. The program presently has five Afro-Brazilian activists enrolled, and one finished her PhD in 2007. Together with the post-docs and visiting scholar we have been able to bring, the campus in Austin has become arguably the locus of the largest concentration of Black Brazilian doctoral students anywhere in the world. This is no small feat, especially considering the fact that many of these students come from and will certainly continue their organizing work in important Black organizations such as Criola and Educafro, among others. [68]

The battles, however, are not only against hegemonic, white-dominated institutions exercising their historical dominance. Just as urgent, internal conflicts among distinct Black social groups also define the effectiveness with which genocide is facilitated or opposed. In other words, the strategies of individual survival and political programs defended by progressive Black community organizations are not only directed against institutionalized and everyday forms of racism originating in the wider polity, but are also reflections of the internal divisions among Blacks in the African diaspora. Which is to say: We are also responsible for our genocide, be it because we passively watch as it unfolds, because we agree with the rationalizations for the wretchedness and death of our people, or because, after all, we have been so thoroughly colonized that we are as hierarchy- dependent, oppressive, and therefore as indifferent, as our worst oppressors. The responsible and liberation-oriented people and organizations whose lives we need to learn about are challenging all facets of the genocide—they have no choice but to resist and imagine and work for a better world.

To imagine this better world, we need first to destroy our institutional and cultural architectures. If anti-Black genocide is at the core of our society’s self-understanding, if it is at the core of our purported ethical standards, and indeed is the foundation of modern polities in the Americas (especially those with a past in slavery economies dependent on the ultimate exploitation and dehumanization of African laborers) then it is the very power relations and cognitive apparatuses that sustain our polities that need deconstruction. As anti-Black genocide is at the core of our society’s foundations, anti-Black genocide is at the core of our cognition. We will only overcome it when and if our society, our collectivities, and our subjectivities are radically transformed, stripped of the premises that require, perpetuate, yet desensitize us to, the manifestations of anti-Black genocide. Such radical transformation is revolution.

As ubiquitous and persistent as anti-Black genocide is, it is only a manifestation of our learned dependence on social classifications that are immanently hierarchical and thus excluding. In the same way that we are hierarchical beings, we are complicit in anti-Black genocide; in the same way that anti-Black genocide requires exclusion and desensitization to the origins and consequences of such exclusion, so do hegemonic notions of belonging that depend on nation, social class, gender, sexual orientation, age, and place of residence, just to name a few. Recognizing and combating anti-Black genocide means recognizing and combating the various forms of oppression on which our societies exist; recognizing and combating anti-Black genocide locates the impossibility of the Black existence as the condition of possibility of our present subjectivities and polities. If, to quote Audre Lorde, we were never meant to survive, [69] then we must destroy the conditions under which this statement continues to be true, and invent alternative realities so that we can.