Racism and Human Development


Book Description

This book addresses the lifelong effects of racism, covering its social, psychological, family, community and health impacts. The studies brought together in this contributed volume discuss experiences of discrimination, prejudice and exclusion experienced by children, young people, adults, older adults and their families; the processes of socialization, emotional regulation and construction of ethnic-racial identities; and stress-producing events associated with racism. This volume intends to contribute to a growing international effort to develop an antiracist agenda in developmental psychology by showcasing studies developed mainly in Brazil, the country with the largest black population in the world outside of Africa. Racism as an ideology that structures social relations and attributes superiority to one race over the others have developed in different ways in different countries. As a response to the 2020 social and health crisis, some North American developmental psychologists have started promoting initiatives to openly challenge racism. This book intends to contribute to this movement by bringing together studies conducted mainly in Brazil, but also in Germany and Norway, that adopt a racially informed approach to different topics in developmental psychology. Racism and Human Development intends to be an inspiration to students, scholars and practitioners who are seeking tools and examples of studies of race and racism from a developmental perspective. The establishment of an antiracist agenda in developmental psychology will never be possible without a commitment to the study of race as an indispensable social marker of human ontogeny in any society. This book is another step towards racial equity and towards a developmental science that leaves no one behind.




Psychoanalysis as Social and Political Discourse in Latin America and the Caribbean


Book Description

This book offers a regional, intersectional, and transnational perspective of psychoanalysis in Latin America and the Caribbean that illuminates psychoanalysis's role as social and political discourse through a collection of original interventions in the fields of psychoanalysis, cultural studies, psychology, anthropology, health sciences, history, and philosophy. The authors contribute to discussions about the applicability of psychoanalytic concepts to reading Latin American and Caribbean sociopolitical phenomona as well as how these regionally specific dimensions challenge and transform traditional psychoanalytic notions. Firstly, the book offers a regional overview of psychoanalysis as a discourse that reflects on the imbrication between the psychic and the sociopolitical. Secondly, it showcases intersectional perspectives that illuminate psychoanalysis's potentials and limitations in addressing contemporary problematics around race, gender, sexuality, and class. Finally, the book attests to the area's role in advancing psychoanalysis as a transnational discipline. By providing both a balanced regional overview and an interdisciplinary perspective, the volume will be essential for all psychoanalysts and scholars wanting to undersrand the place of psychoanalysis in Latin American and Caribbean discourse.




Racism and Discourse in Latin America


Book Description

Racism and Discourse in Latin America investigates how public discourse is involved in the daily reproduction of racism in Latin America. The essays examine political discourse, mass media discourse, textbooks and other forms of text, and talk by the white symbolic elites, looking at the ways these discourses express and confirm prejudices against indigenous people and against people from African descent. The essays show that ethnic and racial inequality in Latin America continue to exacerbate the chasm between the rich and the poor, despite formal progress in the rights of minorities during the last decades. Teun A. van Dijk brings together a multidisciplinary team of linguists and social scientists from eight Latin American countries (Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru), creating the first work in English that provides comprehensive insight into discursive racism across Latin America.




Blacks & Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988


Book Description

In Buried Indians, Laurie Hovell McMillin presents the struggle of her hometown, Trempealeau, Wisconsin, to determine whether platform mounds atop Trempealeau Mountain constitute authentic Indian mounds. This dispute, as McMillin subtly demonstrates, reveals much about the attitude and interaction - past and present - between the white and Indian inhabitants of this Midwestern town. McMillin's account, rich in detail and sensitive to current political issues of American Indian interactions with the dominant European American culture, locates two opposing views: one that denies a Native American presence outright and one that asserts its long history and ruthless destruction. The highly reflective oral histories McMillin includes turn Buried Indians into an accessible, readable portrait of a uniquely American culture clash and a dramatic narrative grounded in people's genuine perceptions of what the platform mounds mean.




Black eyes crossed the sea


Book Description

Brazil is a racialized country. Its social history is recorded in the spaces occupied by the colonial invasion, the domination of native peoples, slavery and European immigration. Walking through this large territory, it is clear that this story has imprinted marks on the land, colonized bodies and minds, which translates and is updated daily in relationships, in the purposeful invisibility of a part of the population. Everyone participates in this system, black, white and non-white, and it is essential that this is known. The racist ideology, propagating ideas of inferiority and subordination of certain peoples, crosses everyone, although from different places and experiences, and oppressed peoples (black and indigenous) suffer immensely from the consequences of social inequalities, leading to physical and psychological illness. The white race enjoys opportunities, but exempts itself from responsibility in an unfair system. The African diaspora portrayed in this book, "Black Eyes Crossed the Sea", reveals the impact of the psychic effects caused by racism and its consequences in inter and intrapsychic relations, singularly in black people. The theme is a call with the intention of sensitizing professionals from different areas of knowledge to understand what is inscribed in addition to skin color. It is a statement where everyone needs to recognize and review themselves. It is a door that opens in the hope of elaborating and transforming thinking about values, colonialist beliefs, and a possible emancipation. Going through the theoretical bases of therapeutic action, based on Wilhelm Reich's corporal analysis, on Alexander Lowen's Bioenergetics, on David Boadella's Biosynthesis, on Frantz Fanon and Neusa Santos Souza's psychoanalysis and on Pichon Riviére's operative group, the corporal work is highlighted, stage of individual and collective history with a view to this transforming place. Not only starting from verbalization, but having the body as a protagonist, home to joy, suffering and trauma. A group experience is also shown in the encounter of black bodies, a place for exchanging reflections and experiences in relation to blackness and whiteness, which over time proved to be affirmative in the strengthening of identity. In the words recorded here, it is stated how vital it is for institutions that aim to transmit knowledge to review themselves so as not to reproduce behaviors that lead to inequalities, injustices, suffering and illness. This book is about believing, fraternal value, respect, caring for yourself and others, so that you can have better days for everyone.




Negras in Brazil


Book Description

For most of the twentieth century, Brazil was widely regarded as a "racial democracy"-a country untainted by the scourge of racism and prejudice. In recent decades, however, this image has been severely critiqued, with a growing number of studies highlighting persistent and deep-seated patterns of racial discrimination and inequality. Yet, recent work on race and racism has rarely considered gender as part of its analysis. In Negras in Brazil, Kia Lilly Caldwell examines the life experiences of Afro-Brazilian women whose stories have until now been largely untold. This pathbreaking study analyzes the links between race and gender and broader processes of social, economic, and political exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic research with social movement organizations and thirty-five life history interviews, Caldwell explores the everyday struggles Afro-Brazilian women face in their efforts to achieve equal rights and full citizenship. She also shows how the black women's movement, which has emerged in recent decades, has sought to challenge racial and gender discrimination in Brazil. While proposing a broader view of citizenship that includes domains such as popular culture and the body, Negras in Brazil highlights the continuing relevance of identity politics for members of racially marginalized communities. Providing new insights into black women's social activism and a gendered perspective on Brazilian racial dynamics, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American Studies, African diaspora studies, women's studies, politics, and cultural anthropology.




The Sorcery of Color


Book Description

An examination of how racial and gender hierarchies are intertwined in Brazil.




Beyond Racism


Book Description

This study explores issues of race, racism, and strategies to improve the status of people of African descent in Brazil, South Africa and the USA. The authors provide in-depth information about each country, together with analyses of cross-cutting themes and trends.




The Prism of Race


Book Description

Brazil has developed a distinctive response to the injustices inflicted by the country’s race relations regime. Despite the mixed racial background of most Brazilians, the state recognizes people’s racial classification according to a simple official scheme in which those self-assigned as black, together with “brown” and “indigenous” (preto-pardo-indigena), can qualify for specially allocated resources, most controversially quota places at public universities. Although this quota system has been somewhat successful, many other issues that disproportionately affect the country’s black population remain unresolved, and systemic policies to reduce structural inequality remain off the agenda. In The Prism of Race, David Lehmann explores, theoretically and practically, issues of race, the state, social movements, and civil society, and then goes beyond these themes to ask whether Brazilian politics will forever circumvent the severe problems facing the society by co-optation and by tinkering with unjust structures. Lehmann disrupts the paradigm of current scholarly thought on Brazil, placing affirmative action disputes in their political and class context, bringing back the concept of state corporatism, and questioning the strength and independence of Brazilian civil society.




Racism, Violence, Betrayals and New Imaginaries


Book Description

This anthology consists of academic essays, creative non-fiction, poetry and short stories on race and racism by black women from South Africa and Brazil. Through these different genres, the book engages with the complexities of race in social, political, economic, institutional and personal spaces. Concerned with social justice, human rights and freedom, these writings spotlight the amalgamation of racial, gender and class subjectivities and how these are marked, un-marked, re-marked and re-made on bodies. The book connects globally and locally to social and political phenomena in the modern-day world. The contributors interrogate their political and personal worlds, revealing layered, intersecting ways of being that were essentially centred by colonial histories but not defined in totality by coloniality and oppression. In speaking to the proximity of these experiences, they reflect and narrate the past, contemplate the present and imagine the future. This curated anthology asks questions centred around freedom. What does freedom mean? When do we have it, and when do we not? Most importantly, how do we get it? Print edition not for sale in Sub Saharan Africa.