An international perspective on color consciousness: Brazil and the universalization of antiracist counter-publics.

Abstract

On the eve of the centennial of the abolition of slavery in the United States, James Baldwin (1963) offered the following counsel to his nephew: "You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you, and please don't you ever forget it" (p. 18).To follow such advice is not easy in the present, but it was even more challenging in the era of Jim Crow segregation in which anti-Black discourses emanated from almost every corner of White America. Baldwin, however, was no utopian. Black men and women could avoid such a fate because a vibrant Black counterpublic sphere existed-Nancy Fraser's (1990) word for the political space where "subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses" and "formulate oppositional interpretations of their needs, identities and interests" (pp. 56-80). Over the centuries, Black churches, songs, schools, abolitionists, poets, journalists, activists, artists, educators, and essayists hadCopyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution. 90jonathan warren managed to forge a Black country against great odds (Singh, 2005). In this world, one heard a different story about nation, Blackness, and Whiteness. Here Blackness was celebrated rather than pathologized, Whites criticized and pitied, racism named and discussed, and American myths of fairness, individualism, exceptionalism, and freedom conditionalized, if not exploded.Fifty years hence, it should be obvious to most that the liberation of the United States, and not just Black America, requires building on and universalizing the Black counterpublics that have allowed so many to escape selfdestruction. Yet as the United States, or at least White America, has moved from essentialist racism (i.e., race as a marker of ontological or biological difference) toward racial color blindness (i.e., race as a marker of racism and thus something that should be overlooked), these counterpublics have been attacked rather than nurtured. This is largely because Black counterpublics practice color consciousness. For example, within these arenas, it is viewed as racist if one does not see race and the difference that it makes in people's lives. The racially color-blind code of conduct, in contrast, values avoiding or attempting to overlook race. Thus, from the vantage of racially color-blind America, these counterpublics should be reduced, if not eradicated, if racial progress is to be had. This built-in antipathy toward Black and other racecognizant counterpublics is one of the central reasons critical race scholars have targeted racial color blindness for change. An understanding of race in Brazil, as I detail here, helps greatly to advance this project of undoing racial color blindness and building color consciousness in the United States. THE BURDEN OF NOT BEING BLACKA classic example of the attack on Black counterpublics in the era of racial color blindness is Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu's (1986) thesis of Black educational underachievem...