Juliet Hooker

Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America

This article analyses the causes of the disparity in collective rights gained by indigenous and Afro-Latin groups in recent rounds of multicultural citizenship reform in Latin America. Instead of attributing the greater success of indians in winning collective rights to differences in population size, higher levels of indigenous group identity or higher levels of organisation of the indigenous movement, it is argued that the main cause of the disparity is the fact that collective rights are adjudicated on the basis of possessing a distinct group identity defined in cultural or ethnic terms. Indians are generally better positioned than most Afro-Latinos to claim ethnic group identities separate from the national culture and have therefore been more successful in winning collective rights. It is suggested that one of the potentially negative consequences of basing group rights on the assertion of cultural difference is that it might lead indigenous groups and Afro-Latinos to privilege issues of cultural recognition over questions of racial discrimination as bases for political mobilisation in the era of multicultural politics.

Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politics From Democratic Sacrifice to Democratic Repair

This essay seeks to understand the complex response to the current Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, which pose deeper questions about the forms of politics that black citizens—who are experiencing a defining moment of racial terror in the United States in the twenty-first century—can and should pursue. When other citizens and state institutions betray a lack of care and concern for black suffering, which in turn makes it impossible for those wrongs to be redressed, is it fair to ask blacks to enact “appropriate” democratic politics? These questions are explored via a reading of Danielle Allen and Ralph Ellison’s meditations on the problem of democratic loss and Hannah Arendt’s critique of school desegregation battles in the 1960s. I suggest that there is a conceptual trap in romantic historical narratives of black activism (especially the civil rights movement) that recast peaceful acquiescence to loss as a form of democratic exemplarity.

Afro-descendant Struggles for Collective Rights in Latin America: Between Race and Culture

In recent years Afro-descendant social movements have won important collective rights from the state in many Latin American countries. In addition to certain collective rights to land and culture embedded in new multicultural citizenship regimes, in a few countries in the region Afro-descendants have also won specific anti-racial discrimination rights, such as affirmative action in education and employment. However, despite such important achievements, the basis of Afro-descendant collective rights remains a highly contested issue throughout the region. This article will explore the challenges that Afro-descendants face when trying to claim collective rights in Latin America, focusing specifically on the kinds of collective rights and modes of justification of such rights open to Afro-descendant movements in Latin America today.

Inclusão indígena e exclusão dos afro-descendentes na América Latina

The author analyses the causes of the disparity in collective rights gained by indigenous and Afro-Latin groups in recent rounds of multicultural citizenship reform in Latin America. Instead of attributing the greater success of indians in winning collective rights to differences in population size, higher levels of indigenous group identity or higher levels of organisation of the indigenous movement, it is argued that the main cause of the disparity is the fact that collective rights are granted on the basis of possessing a distinct group identity defined in cultural or ethnic terms. Indians are generally better positioned than most Afro-Latinos to claim ethnic group identities separate from the national culture and have therefore been more successful in winning collective rights. One of the potentially negative consequences of basing group rights on the assertion of cultural difference is that it might lead indigenous groups and Afro-Latinos to privilege issues of cultural recognition over questions of racial discrimination as bases for political mobilisation in the era of multicultural politics.

Afro-descendant Struggles for Collective Rights in Latin America

In recent years, Apro-descendant social movements have won important collective rights from the state in many Latin American countries. They have forced Latin American states to begin to acknowledge the persistence of racism in their respective societies. Taking advantage of recent democratization processes that opened up the political system in many countries in the region, Afro-descendants have waged increasingly visible and successful struggles for various kinds of collective rights to overcome the racial discrimination and social and political exclusion to which they have historically been subjected. In the 1980s and 1990s, many Latin American states—including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela—implemented new multicultural citizenship regimes. The features of these multicultural citizenship regimes vary from country to country, but they generally include some combination of the following collective rights: formal recognition of the existence of ethnic-racial subgroups, recognition of indigenous customary law as official public law, collective property rights (especially to land), guarantees of bilingual education, territorial autonomy or self-government, and rights to redress racial discrimination (such as affirmative action in education and employment).1 As a result, Afro-descendants have been able to gain certain collective rights to land and culture although generally to a lesser extent than indigenous peoples. In addition, in a few countries in the region, notably Brazil and Colombia, Afro-descendants have also won certain antiracial discrimination rights.

Hybrid subjectivities, Latin American mestizaje, and Latino political thought on race

This essay interrogates accounts of race in Latino political thought (and hence claims about how Latinos should approach race in the USA) grounded in a selective borrowing from Latin American philosophical sources on mestizaje. It argues that the uncritical reproduction of certain conceptions of mestizaje in Latino political thought ignores the way in which Latin American ideas about race were developed in direct conversation with US empire and US racial politics, is at odds with contemporary racial politics in the region, and might serve to obscure certain fault lines within Latinidad.

Black Protest / White Grievance: On the Problem of White Political Imaginations Not Shaped by Loss

At the end of the nineteenth century, the African American thinker, journalist, and antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells (1970: 70) observed that the cause of the pervasive antiblack violence and racial terror that characterized the post-Reconstruction era was the white Southerner’s “resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income” (emphasis added). Wells’s observation more than a hundred years ago illuminates a key political problematic and philosophical dilemma of our racial present. In the early twenty-first century, politics in the United States and many parts of Europe appears to be driven by white inability to cope with (often symbolic) losses and the racial resentment that accompanies it. Simultaneously, the anti–police violence protests that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015, and the subsequent disproportionate police repression of citizen protesters, marked an important inf lection point in US racial politics. The protests signaled a potential moment of black political radicalization, when pragmatic forms of black politics principally aimed at descriptive representation have been overshadowed by a vocal movement seeking to dismantle some of the key pillars of contemporary

Introduction: On Black Political Thought inside Global Black Protest

Recent global trends in the policing deaths and antipolicing protests of black people urge a reconsideration of the orientations and scope of black political thought. One of its central considerations must be black politics and its anticolonial/antiracial conditions of possibility. This is because the solidarity logics of blackness implicated in the signifier “black politics” continue to be insurgent in and repressed by Western capitalist, liberal democratic polities. Our understanding of the social, cultural, and existential oppositional activities among dispersed populations of African descent has been largely derived from black antislavery/ anticolonial/antiracial mobilizations spanning the sixteenth to twentyfirst centuries. Nevertheless, it remains the case that black politics appears to be one of the least elucidated and most contested concepts in contemporary political discourse. This is partly because whatever has been represented and configured as black politics has also been routinely marginalized, pathologized, repudiated, or attacked in Western political theory and Western polities. Delineating and contributing to a distinctive field of black political thought has always required that we recuperate conceptually the Western-attributed outlaw status of black politics. Here the task also