Reading “Citizenship and Rights in the New Republics” helped me to understand the circumstance surrounding slavery and development of colored rights in Latin America in 19th century. While reading this document I noticed some comparison of situation between United States and countries in Latin America, which I found very intriguing.
Ideas such as biological differences were brought in Latin America from Europe which clearly excluded people based on their race. This was called scientific racism. Before I read this chapter, I had some knowledge about scientific racism and it was about using scientific technique to justify racism as well as slavery. Even though it was thought to be scientific, it had little connections to science. It was intriguing to see the lines such as “Different groups had innately different abilities” and “Mixing of races led to the degeneration of the species”. This enabled direct exclusion of groups other than white and segregation. In addition, Scientific racism enabled colonial system to encourage cleanliness of blood, created notion that whites were smart and superior and treated Blacks and Indigenous as a threat to modernization. The idea of white superiority led people to boost the prosperity or modernize by attempting to reduce the number of colored people by intermarriage or reclassification. For example in 1838, Afro Argentines consisted of 25% of the population in Buenos Aires, but by 1887 the number dropped to 2%. A large number of them were reclassified as trigueño or “wheat colored”. I found this interesting because the number dropped massively in such a short time and idea of “improving the race”.
I was able to see the difference between how USA and Brazil regarded slaves. For instance, Brazil tended to bring more slaves and they were expendables. In often case, many slaves died within a few years of arrival. Life expectancy was also very low in Brazil compared to that of in America. On the other hand, the United States wanted slaves to live longer and encouraged them to have children. In addition race and slavery were not linked in Brazil and Cuba and blacks were free and they could own land and even slaves. These kinds of differences were very astounding to me because I thought that a slavery system in North and South America was basically the same.
Through reading this week’s chapter, I was able to draw the difference between slavery system in the US and Brazil, rights of slaves and the idea of scientific racism.
I also found very interesting the different ways that slaves were seen in the United States compared to areas in Latin America. Its astonishing to see that business and profits played a major role in these views and that slaves were merely assets or “costs” to their businesses. Since it was cheaper to maintain and reproduce slaves than buy new ones in the US it made sense to try to maintain them as opposed to Brazil where it was cheap to buy the slave and probably more profitable to just replace them than maintaining them.
I also found the Afro Argentines situation interesting. Especially since they “dropped” in number by simply changing what they were called. The population of the people did not actually decrease, elites only cared that there was a perception that they decreased.
Similarly, I also had a brief understanding of scientific racism before reading this chapter. I knew that it was used as way of justifying racism, but I didn’t know that it was this prevalent in Latin America’s attempt to cleanse race. It’s interesting to think about how the term “science” can be used to convince the public that certain ideologies are rational, and therefore right.
I also thought that slavery was the same in Brazil as it was in the United States – it was really interesting to read about the differences and the fact that some slaves could actually own land!