coldhearted scientist وداد

The association of race and national identity, and the supposition that race-based inequality in our societies is a superficial rather than a fundamental flaw, are so naturalized by now that it is worth asking again: What is race? What are racialism and racism? What is their relation to the new nation-states? In the United States, racial hierarchization has been seen as a problem to be overcome as the dream of equality was realized, through projects of racial “uplift” in the nineteenth century, or by making good on constitutional guarantees, in the twentieth. In the Latin American nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, racial difference itself was to be superseded by “whitening” projects and miscegenation. National colors would be consolidated and cultural homogenity attained, as with Nicolás Guillén’s “Cuban color:”

Por lo pronto, el espíritu de Cuba es mestizo. Y del espíritu hacia la piel nos vendrá el color definitivo. Algún día se dirá: «color cubano». Estos poemas quieren adelantar ese día.¹

… and I no longer remember when I last had any PTSD-type or Reeducated reactions to anything. If I am even depressed, it is subclinical at worst. This is all quite interesting, as I might be able to #OccupyHE.

Axé.