Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities

By João H. Costa Vargas

Never Meant to Survive presents a historical, political, and social assessment of anti-black genocide and liberatory struggles that arose to resist it. Based on fine-grained accounts of community life at the street level, Costa Vargas's work presents crucial examples of political resistance and community activism. By examining two cities linked by common experiences of Blackness, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, this book identifies a prevailing genocidal force that organizes individuals and groups across society. The 1965 and 1992 riots in Los Angeles, the work of the Black Panther Party and favela activists in Brazil, and police brutality in struggles between black communities and the state in both L.A. and Rio de Janeiro all figure importantly in Costa Vargas's compelling account. What emerges from this analysis is a call for the destruction of the conditions that foster the marginalization of black communities and a halt to the internal conflicts between black social groups themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781442203310

Book preview

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Transformative Politics

Series Editor Joy A. James

Transformative Politics presents insightful works that address contemporary concerns and crises in modern democratic societies. Contributors to the series explore critical theory and critical politics as they bear on issues of social justice and human rights in international context, as well as questions of personal, social, and political ethics. In considering the connections between social formations and political change, the conceptual keynotes are critical race theory and feminist theory. Transformative Politics highlights provocative narratives and analyses from authors who stand outside the academic and artistic mainstream.

Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion, edited by Joy James

Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities, by João H. Costa Vargas

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A Litany for Survival. Copyright © by Audre Lorde, from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Published in the United States of America

by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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Copyright © 2008 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Vargas, João Helion Costa.

Never meant to survive: genocide and utopias in black diaspora

communities / João H. Costa Vargas.

p. cm.—(Transformative politics series)

Includes bibliographical references.

9781442203310

1. Blacks—America—Social conditions. 2. African Americans—

California—Los Angeles—Social conditions. 3. Blacks—Brazil—Rio de Janeiro—

Social conditions.

I. Title.

E29.N3V27 2008

305.896—dc22 2007042307

Printed in the United States of America

e9781442203310_i0002.jpg The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

This book is dedicated to the living revolutionary spirit of Black Panther Michael Zinzun, friend and mentor, and to Toussaint Pierre-Vargas, of whom i am blessed to be the father. It is offered as a modest contribution to the ongoing dialogues and efforts toward liberation in and of African Diaspora communities.

Table of Contents

Transformative Politics

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

A Note on the Text

Acknowledgments

Introduction - The Urgency Imperative of Genocide

1 - Genocide in the African Diaspora United States, Brazil, and the Imperatives of Holistic Analysis and Political Method

2 - The Inner City and the Favela Transnational Black Politics

3 - Hypersegregation and Revolt The Los Angeles Black Ghetto in Historical Perspective

4 - The Los Angeles Times’ Coverage of the 1992 Rebellion Still Burning Matters of Race and Justice

5 - Hyperconsciousness of Race and Its Negation The Dialectic of White Supremacy in Brazil

6 - When a Favela Dared to Become a Condominium Challenging Brazilian Apartheid

7 - Black Radical Becoming The Revolution Imperative of Genocide

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Preface

A Litany for Survival

For those of us who live at the shoreline

standing upon the constant edges of decision

crucial and alone

for those of us who cannot indulge

the passing dreams of choice

who love in doorways coming and going

in the hours between dawns

looking inward and outward

at once before and after

seeking a now that can breed

futures

like bread in our children’s mouths

so their dreams will not reflect

the death of ours;

For those of us

who were imprinted with fear

like a faint line in the center of our foreheads

learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk

for by this weapon

this illusion of some safety to be found

the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

For all of us

this instant and this triumph

We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid

it might not remain

when the sun sets we are afraid

it might not rise in the morning

when our stomachs are full we are afraid

of indigestion

when our stomachs are empty we are afraid

we may never eat again

when we are loved we are afraid

love will vanish

when we are alone we are afraid

love will never return

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed

but when we are silent

we are still afraid.

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive.

Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (1978)¹

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 make possible the multiple facets of anti-Black genocide, or We succumb to the dehumanizing values that produce and become reproduced by the systematic and persistent disregard for the lives of Afrodescended individuals and their communities. It is not only Black people that are affected by anti-Black genocide. Inasmuch as the core values We organize our lives by depend on and are energized by the devaluing of 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 presently live well beyond our full potential as solidary, ethical, and just social beings. The urgency imperative of anti-Black genocide is one that calls for the total remaking of our lives and our values.

By focusing on diasporic Black communities that have no choice but to resist and overcome genocide, this book offers blueprints for analysis, resistance, and transformation. The obstacles in the way of formulating analysis and bringing about radical social change are daunting. 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 of possibility for the existence of dehumanization, to marginalization, to neglect; desensitization is a key condition of possibility for anti-Black genocide.

Lest you begin to ask yourself What the hell is this author talking about? or Who does this author think s/he is, speaking about what We are, have become, and need to strive for? let me tell you that all of the insights above have emerged from collective, radical political organizational efforts, in the United States and in Brazil. Activists have been pointing to both the facets 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 imagination. This book draws on those wisdoms—wisdoms forged in the activist practice: fighting police brutality, challenging the role of the state in the maintenance of residential segregation, searching for alternatives to the everyday forms of terror perpetrated against (and sometimes by) Black people.

The purpose of the book is, first, to bring attention to the ways in which anti-Black genocide is at the core of our society’s self-understanding, 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 dependent on the ultimate exploitation and dehumanization of African laborers. As anti-Black genocide is at the core of our society’s foundations, anti-Black genocide is at the core of our cognition—We make sense and seek the good society, often unknowingly, according to the often silent expectations that Blacks are not fully human and therefore not worthy of full inclusion in it. As important, this book is about the work that Afrodescended persons, in collective efforts, have done in identifying the facets of anti-Black genocide and in combating them. And finally, this book takes seriously and thus explores the full theoretical implication of the pervasiveness of anti-Black genocide: 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.

Ultimately, Never Meant to Survive is about liberation and revolution. It places anti-Black genocide as a centripetal force organizing subjectivities and societies such as the United States and Brazil. Anti-Black genocide indicates that We are dependent on hierarchies according to which human lives are valued. Thus, 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 the notions of belonging that depend on nation, social class, gender, sexuality, age, and place of residence, just to name a few. Recognizing and combating anti-Black genocide means recognizing and combating the various forms of foundational oppression on which our societies are based; recognizing and combating anti-Black genocide locates the impossibility of the Black existence as the condition of possibility for our present subjectivities and polities. If We were never meant to survive, then We must destroy the conditions under which this statement continues to be true and invent alternative realities.

A Note on the Text

Some of my autobiography is relevant to this study. A light-skinned Black Brazilian by birth and nationality who speaks (Belo Horizonte) Portuguese as my first language, i have lived in the United States for a decade. While i have maintained close contact with Brazilians and have intensified my visits in the last two years, Brazil has become a familiar but distant place, one that i cannot claim as home. Born in a mixed-race family light enough so that our Blackness was carefully concealed by our middle-class status, yet growing up among overwhelmingly European Whites in the interior of São Paulo state, France, and England, many (although not close to all) of the racial dynamics around Whitening and self-hatred i discuss here were experienced first hand. Although in Brazil darker-skinned Blacks often consider me White, for Whites in Brazil my Whiteness is a concession, the nature of which unmistakably emerges in what they consider playful comments concerning their impressions about my African traits. Nevertheless, as it commonly happens to all of us mixed-race Brazilians who claim Blackness, Whites will often engage with such a claim with but you are not Black, you are my friend. At work here, once again, is the hyperconsciousness/negation of race dynamics, so prevalent in Brazilian social relations. Undeniably, light skin generates much relative privilege, in Brazil and in other countries of the African diaspora. Still, there cannot be a book long enough to list and analyze the myriad of comments and actions non-White Brazilians are subjected to about color, hair, nose, lips, mouth, teeth, smell, intelligence, marriage, heritage, work, and politics—only to name a few.

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As it draws on collective, radical, and revolutionary perspectives consolidated in the African diaspora, this book intends to suggest necessary disruptions—personal, collective, theoretical, political—We all need to engage in if the moral and cognitive apparatus that sustains this corrupt social world is to be toppled and replaced with solidarity and social justice. My use of the lower case i is part of this strategy: to render exotic our all too familiar deification of the Individual in Western societies. This ex-oticization may be beneficial as a first step toward the analysis of our anti-Black biases and how those biases are central to our self-understanding and to the ways in which our societies make sense of and reproduce themselves. ¹ Accordingly, the capitalization of the We is an attempt to underline the unique nature of collective efforts: how they produce social environments, theories, and subjectivities that have the potential to bring about the radical revolutionary changes that are urgently required if anti-Black genocide is to be averted and a better world is to begin.

Acknowledgments

Part of the research presented here was funded by two LLILAS/ Mellon Summer Research Fellowships (2006, 2007), and a Summer Research Grant from the Center for African and African American Studies (2005)—both at the University of Texas at Austin. An Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship on Race, Crime, and Justice, at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City, between 2002-2004, allowed for some of the initial writings to be completed and discussed. Tim Ross, Khalil Muhammad, Hester Lyons, Jon Wool, Chris Stone and many others at Vera made valuable contributions. Thank you.

This work draws on, and is part of an ongoing dialogue with the wisdoms, courage and beauty of companheir@s in the Black Diaspora struggle, in the United States and in Brazil.

In Los Angeles, at the Coaltion Against Police Abuse and Community in Support of the Gang Truce: Michael, Bilal, Twilight, Mabe, Florence, Red, Jasone, Tony, and many others. In Rio de Janeiro, at the Jacarezinho neighborhood association: Arlete, Regina, Antônio Carlos, Rumba, Biquinho; the Movimento Popular de Favelas: all organizers of various Black Rio communities, as well as Itamar, Iracema, and Jurema; at Sem-prenegro, Magali Almeida, and at Criola: Lúcia Xavier, Jurema Werneck, Sônia Santos, and Luciane Rocha; in Leimert Park, LA, musicians, visual artists, healers, and poets: Phil Farris, Tracy, Ralph Gibson, Don Muhammad, Rizza Kalilullah, Juno Lewis, Billy Higgins, Richard Fulton. Juno, Billy, and Richard have passed, but their beautiful spirits are always with me. Thank you.

Joy James made this book possible. She, Charles Hale, and Dylan Rodriguez have not only read the whole thing, but provided generous commentaries that much improved the manuscript. Drs. Susan Gordon and Edmund W. Gordon contributed to conversations about genocide while i was at the Cejjes Institute’s W. E. B. Du Bois House for Visiting Scholars in Pomona, NY. At Rowman & Littlefield, Alan McClare, Michael Mc-Gandy, and Catherine Forrest Getzie made the publishing process smooth and efficient. Thank you.

George Lipsitz read most of this at different times; his mentorship, support and friendship are in every line i try to write. Faye Harrison, Jemima Pierre, and Nichole Rustin provided important commentaries on different chapters. At Williamstown, the evening before the conference on Policing the Black Body, Joy James, Kim Holder, Frank Wilderson III, Edmund Gordon, Jared Sexton, and Kara Lynch much helped me think through the genocide argument. Claudine Michel, George Lipsitz, and the department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara organized the conference on Multiethnic Alliances in 2007; at the occasion, Claudine, George, Howard Winant, Nadège Clitandre, and Clyde Woods were generous with their insights and suggestions. Thank you

Members, participants, and supporters of the African Diaspora Graduate program in Anthropology in Austin provide the much needed fresh ideas on Black liberation: Adam Williams, Andréia de Souza, Alix Chapman, Alysia Childs, Amari Johnson, Amy Brown, Athayde Motta, Bárbara Abadia-Rexach, Briana Mohan, Celeste Henery, Chris Loperena, Courtney Morrison, Damien Schnyder, Jacqueline Pólvora, Jaime Alves, Jason Cato, Juli Grigsby, Márcia Lopes, Martin Perna, Mitsy Chanel-Blot, Mohan Ambikaipaker, Naomi Reed, Nedra Lee, Nora Deveny-Valiela, Pablo Gonzalez, Raquel de Souza, Samori Camara, Silvia Lorenso, Sônia Santos, and many others whose names escape me but whose ideas make an impact. It has been gratifying to work on the consolidation and expansion of the program with Jafari Allen, Maria Franklin, Edmund Gordon, Jemima Pierre, and Christen Smith. Edmund Gordon and Omi Osun Olomo selflessly, with beauty and might, coordinate our Quilombo, otherwise known as the Center for African and African American Studies in the middle of the plantation, together with the invaluable work of Stephanie Lang, Jin Lee, and John Flemming. In the Anthropology department, Pam Becker, Adriana Dingman, Gabby Yearwood, and Jenni Jones are always helpful and friendly. After years of planning, the African Diaspora program and course finally took off in Rio, in collaboration with Semprene-gro at the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro, and Criola. Six weeks of intense and gratifying work with some of the most impressive Black activists have kept me hopeful and attuned to wider horizons. Even though i can’t remember all your names, your insurgent spirits are present and strong: Sônia, Athayde, Magali, Lúcia, Jurema, Luciane, Conceição, Ana Flávia, Maria Estela, Margarida, Paula, Marina, Elielma, Rosenilda, Marco Antônio, Daniele, Luciene, Jurema, Eliana, Daiane, and Oswaldo. Ted and Christen, i appreciate your hard work and putting up with me while in Rio. Thank you.

Comrades, colleagues, and friends, part of various communities and collectives, helped constitute the conditions from which this work emerges: the Cultural Dynamics collective, Vivian Newdick, Elvia Mendoza, Kamran Ali, Martha Menchaca, Charles Hale, Shannon Speed, Kaushik Ghosh, and Jemima Pierre; the Arin Hill Collective, Juli Grigsby, Courtney Morrison, Matt Richardson, Jafari Allen, and Stephanie Lang; and the 3jazzcollective, Kevin Witt, Philippe Vieux, Mitch Butler, Pete Rodriguez, Paul Matthews, Melba Garcia, Pedro, Alex, Doug, and the lovely folks at São Paulo’s, Jeff at the Elephant Room, as well as Stephanie, Laurie Wagner, Sharon Bridgforth, and Bruce Saunders. To them, as well as to Ben Carrington, Simone Browne, Frank Guridy, Wura Ogunji, Van Jordan, Sharmila Rudrappa, Jeff Solomon, Sam Wilson, Kamala Visweswaran, James Brow, Andrew Willford, Chela Sandoval, Michael Ray Charles, Vincent Woodard, Joel Zito Araújo, and M. Jacqui Alexander, thank you.

In Austin, Rio de Janeiro, Nice, Campinas, Honk Kong, Seoul, Portugal, New York, San Diego, Harlem, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Salvador, Urbana, Durham: Phillip and Jafari; Moon-Kie; Gabriela; Kátia and Kim; Ney and Lélia; Heitor, Bia, Tiago, and Marina; Tayari; Marcia, Hermes and Picur-rucha; Lindy, Kyle, and Glenn; Vitor, Tais, Gabriel and Luisa; Marcia F.; Regina; Paulo, Tais; Khalil; Jon; Guilherme, Dani, Paulo and Laura; Asale; Kaushik; Sharmila; Stephanie, Laurie; Kevin, Julie, and Carson; Melissa, Amalia, Sofia, and Charlie; Ted, Daisy, Wyatt, and Ishan; and of course, Toussaint!: i am fortunate to be the recipient of your loyal, enabling, and loving friendship—all in spite of my too many flaws and often downright unbearableness. Charlie’s ideas and insurgent revelations on foot and on bike, including marathons and daylong treks, are much appreciated. Thank you.

Jemima and the Pierres, loving grandparents, aunts, and cousins—Mrs. Lisette, Rev. Delanot, Milca and Moselye, Felton and Marc, and Zoe and Zumir—my parents, Anna and Helion, as well as Zaira, Flávio, Anna Clara and Pedro Paulo, Mônica, Jim, and Uma: muito obrigado por tudo, Toussaint e eu agradecemos a família diaspórica, fazendo com que o Haiti seja aqui e agora, urgentemente, sempre.

Introduction

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The Urgency Imperative of Genocide

One of the persons to whom this book is dedicated, my dear friend and mentor Michael Zinzun, lived his life in pursuit of justice in the here and now at the same time he tirelessly worked toward the always unfinished revolution. His unbounded love for humanity translated into carefully devised self-presentation symbology aimed at reaffirming Black people’s will to resist and survive, and often into confrontational actions. Beyond his predictable flaws, Michael’s transformative vision could not be contained in his body. He exuded revolutionary energy, compassion, always pushing toward an indeterminate yet necessary utopia. His unboundedness also made him extremely vulnerable. He lost an eye at the hand of the police and was many times the object of physical and symbolic violence by various state surveillance organizations. At the same time, however, Michael cultivated vulnerability in various ways: it was not only his infectious childlike laughter that disarmed all of us more accustomed to his calculated booming fearlessness; it was also a willingness to be self-critical, to listen, to engage with ideas, people, and worlds that were not immediately acceptable to him. A consummate Marxist theoretician, Michael was always talking about, embracing, and putting into practice the dialectic—i can hear his coarse voice repeating the concept he so valued. His cultivated vulnerability squarely fit the orientation as it confronted the multiple manifestations of anti-Black genocide with a consciously developed acceptance of his limitations, of critique and self-critique, and reformulation of his temporary truths. It is precisely this revolutionary unboundedness that renders Michael’s living spirit part of the insurgent utopian constellation this book is ultimately concerned about. i now realize once again what Coltrane’s love supreme means: it is this required, calculated yet impulsive, vulnerable and whole unboundedness that suggests infinite process, that reflects the urgency with which We need to confront our genocide, and that conjures up blueprints for revolutionary radical change. These blueprints constitute and further a historical and constantly replenished archive of concepts and practices useful in resisting and overcoming the dehumanization that sustains this ever more fragmenting and domineering and globalized neoliberal heteropatriarchal capitalist White supremacist world. In it, Black people were never meant to survive. The degrees of infrahumanity according to which Black communities exist and against which they resist only attest to the continuity of modernity’s genocidal impetus.

In this work, in line with the strategy that organized Black radical organizations have adopted, i utilize the United Nation’s definition of genocide that reads "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such:

Killing members of the group;

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

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

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."¹

The debate about the meaning of genocide, as chapter 1 will show, has been marked by attempts to define the nature, scope, and enforcement of punishment against the perpetrators of genocide. While i recognize (and will later elaborate on some of) the nuanced takes on genocide, i consider, as several genocide scholars have, the UN’s perspective one that can be strategically made workable—one that provides a widely recognized definitional and juridical framework according to which We can make sense of and intervene in specific social realities.² The strategic appropriation and the hesitation that comes with it serve as caveats about the ultimate effectiveness and applicability of this legal edifice.³

The moral, theoretical, and practical imperatives genocide presents should be hard to ignore. Why are We so resistant, incapable, unwilling to confront the systematic and enduring disproportionate death of Black people? The sad fact that these imperatives are routinely ignored reveals the hegemonic spell over our cognitive and political tools. We have gotten used to expecting and witnessing the death—physical, spiritual, political—of Black people and communities. Yet, if genocide is indeed in place, there is no other practical and ethical acceptable stance than to confront it. Our cognitive frameworks need adaptation, destruction, reinvention. What are We to do? How do We begin to revert the deadly legacies of centuries of anti-Black social institutions and everyday practices? As importantly, how do We acknowledge and revert the roles that Black people ourselves perform in energizing our own genocide?

A first step toward recognizing our complicity in anti-Black genocide is to locate what Lorde calls the oppressor within, that is, the categories and assumptions that We, often unknowingly, defend and actualize that perpetuate marginalization, sometimes our own. Until We realize the critique of the oppressor within, We are complicit in the reproduction of the power relations that sustain our present polities—power relations that are capitalist, objectifying, and that depend on the devaluing of human beings according to both market values and to ascriptions of race, gender, social class, sexuality, nationality, age, and others. As i will show in the following chapters, the oppressor within is the product of a socially constructed set of values that enable the organization of the lifeworld according to clear lines of belonging. It is telling that, while hypersegregated Black communities are prime objects of power technologies that include invisible but clearly demarcated borders defined by the police, zoning policies, lending practices, and environmental hazards, they also enact forms of marginalization within their boundaries according to social class, sexuality, gender, and nationality, among others.⁴

It should be clear that, while the oppressor within and our complicity in anti-Black genocide are graspable realities, they are products of a much broader constellation of societal norms and power structures. The terror that characterizes Afrodiasporic communities is a product of imperialist, White supremacist capitalist patriarchal society, as many critical authors and activists have pointed out.⁵ To raise the problem of complicity, however, is not only to emphasize a hegemonic dynamic that requires the participation of even marginalized groups in the consolidation of privileges and exclusions, but it is also to bring to the forefront the responsibility We share in perpetuating varied barbarisms. Once this responsibility is located, it can be used as a lever to devise critique and change.

Genocide requires nothing but radical revolutionary transformation of our most intimate forms of thinking, how We relate to each other, how our societies distribute resources and recognize how different communities contribute to our collective, whole existence. i use radical and revolutionary purposefully. By radical i indicate a political and theoretical perspective that searches for the historical, cultural-cognitive, and causal roots of oppression. In our societies, this often means locating the state and the monetarization of social relations energizing and drawing fuel from modes of racial, gender, and sexual domination, among others. These modes of domination, in turn, depend on and inflect representations, stereotypes, expectations—a complex symbology that is simultaneously performative, normatized and normatizing, often unconscious, that We can denominate as culture. By revolutionary i mean a frontal, unapologetic challenge to the institutionalized, cognitive, and cultural sources of oppression, which translates into various forms of combat against the state, corporations, the elites, and all forms of bourgeois segments, even those within the left.⁶ The revolutionary stance also requires a shifting set of ideals, dreams, utopias—templates that guide our hearts and minds and bodies that are constantly revised.

In the various chapters of this book i will focus on the ways in which Black communities have conceptualized and acted upon social difference: how are differences in race, class, gender, sexuality, place of residence, national origin, among others rendered meaningful? How do concepts of difference reinforce hierarchies of socially scripted value? When Audre Lorde discussed the master’s tools, she was referring primarily to how, by default, our perceptions of difference—the master’s tools—are necessarily structured according to hierarchies that ultimately reproduce unequal relations of power and thus marginalization—the master’s house.⁷ The genocidal consequences of the employment of hierarchical tropes are clearly connected to racial classifications and the way those systematically devalue Black life. Race, however, is only one among a multiplicity of ascriptive categories that include gender, nationality, sexuality, and others. As bell hooks remarked as she reflected on hegemonic black masculinity:

Wise progressive black women have understood for some time now that the most genocidal threat to black life in America, and especially to black male life, is patriarchal thinking and practice. Wise progressive black women have understood that any coming together of free, whole, decolonized black males and females would constitute a formidable challenge to imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.⁸

An important aspect of Black complicity in our genocide is the default patriarchy under which most of us operate. Hegemonic Black masculinity actualizes patriarchy in extremes of contradiction and tragedy. As a model of self-understanding, a survival strategy, and an element of a broader ideological constellation that values authority, conformity, fear, and violence—mostly symbolic yet often actual—hegemonic Black masculinity devalues not only femaleness and queerness (just to mention the most obvious), but also expresses self-hatred that is potentially turned against all Blacks.

While Black self-hatred is part of the predictable explanation for the endemic violence that characterizes hypersegregated areas in the United States and in Brazil, it needs to be contextualized as part of our dominant culture and the political economy that necessitate and actualize it. Normalized Black masculinity reproduces the set of hegemonic values with added contradictions since patriarchal masculinity, as it intersects with, depends on, and seeks privileged class position, heteronormativity, and valued citizenship, is a design of power, of social relations in which men dominate, talk, define, and decide. Fear defines the resulting social atmosphere. Yet, when enacted by Blacks, patriarchy, and especially hegemonic masculinity, reach semantic and practical exhaustion: the apparent gains in power that are derived from theoretical and frequent actual control over other men, women, gays, and lesbians end up ravaging the Black community and furthering the genocidal processes We will be looking at later in this book. Examples of such semantic and practical exhaustion are not only the much-talked-about-but-seldom-critically-analyzed high incidence of lethal violence perpetrated by Blacks in Black communities, but also domestic violence against children and women. As well, the disproportionate incidence of AIDS/HIV among Afrodescended peoples in the United States and in Brazil along with widespread unwillingness to confront the pandemic are tragic reminders of the political limitations that patriarchy and its attendant sexism, homophobia, and conservative Christianity produce in Black communities.⁹

Identifying and challenging patriarchy is therefore part of the struggle against anti-Black genocide. The women and especially the men who organize against more obvious forms of state and everyday terror seldom address patriarchy, sexism, and homophobia as part of the necessary revolutionary work. The rare individuals and groups who see patriarchy as an urgent concern often embrace the wisdoms of visionary revolutionary Black women as part of the struggle toward an emancipated political identity. Forms of masculinity that transform, enable, and humanize: such is the challenge for us Black men in search of a just and solidary world. Some of the men that appear in this work and that have dedicated their lives to radical transformation struggle(d) to shed their patriarchy in several ways: by listening more than talking, by self-reflection, by taking responsibility for their education about progressive feminism, by seeking collaboration, by eschewing leadership, by welcoming criticism, by recognizing and challenging male privilege, and by embracing vulnerability. The uncertainty that vulnerability equates with—the uncertainty that comes from open dialogue, that arises when previous modes of behavior and thought are questioned, that emerges when formulaic guidelines for personal and political action are disposed of—is an effective antidote to the certainties, assertiveness, monologues, and indeed fascist germs that patriarchy requires and reproduces.¹⁰

From a purely pragmatic stance, the work of the Black Panther Party, of the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA), and of the favela activists in Brazil—the main