Kara Ireland
AMST 6201
December 5, 2020
Dr. Rudy
Anti-Blackness in the Americas: The Necessity of a Global Black Lives Matter Movement
In most white (or white adjacent) countries, it has become clear that Black life is not revered, protected, or valued––if not outright dispensable. This idea is not the product of a few blunders or mishandlings of social moments, but several myths that have made it easy to disregard the systemically imposed social limitations, abuses, and deaths that Black people face internationally. Using various sources by transnational race scholars from across the globe, I will be taking a hemispheric approach to unveiling the factors that predicated and continue to necessitate a global Black Lives Matter movement. For the purposes of this paper, these factors have been narrowed down to mythic narratives of racialized inferiority and superiority, living in a post-racial society, and equality.
As a stigmatized group, the Black Lives Matter movement was born out of a dire need to address and correct the injustices imposed on Black and Afro- peoples in the United States; it was soon recognized that it was a crucial and relevant movement around the world. Anti-Blackness permeates societies and negatively impacts cultures on a global scale. It is perpetuated by racism in media, legislative policy, and popular sentiment and has infected the attitudes of various societies of the Americas. There is a general sense of disregard for the quality and efforts of preservation for Black lives, demonstrated by discriminate policing, apathetic communities, and the resistance the movement has faced. To emphasize the severity of this issue, I will be conducting a hemispheric study of anti-Blackness across the Americas, including the United States, Mexico, and Brazil.
In our study of the Americas, it has been revealed that anti-Black views are not at all exclusive to the United States. This has offered tremendous incentive toward the expansion of the human rights movement ignited by three Black women in response to the failure to indict George Zimmerman, the killer of the Black, unarmed teen Trayvon Martin. Many race scholars argue that George Zimmerman is the product of a society that emboldens acts of violence against Black people because it is often done with impunity. This is the case in the United States, but it is a familiar story that is applicable to most nonblack nations; hence, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi have started a revolution that has transcended borders and language barriers. It is called Black Lives Matter because it is a simple plea to recognize the humanity of an over-politicized, over-stigmatized group—a group that has been pleading the same case for generations.
The Origin of Anti–Black Racism
Most discussions of anti-Blackness can be traced back to slavery, but I will take it a step further: the notions that predate normalized instances of racism are the etymological functions of color symbolism. Before detailing specific anti-Black conditions in the United States, Mexico, or Brazil, I believe it is important to explain how and why anti-Blackness grew to the level of omnipresence it has today. It begins with the semantics of color. Colors have been assigned positive and negative connotations for a number of factors that are independent of race. Civilizations in several geographic regions have curated distinctly negative connotations of the color black, those of which can be traced to the thirteenth century. When the color black is defined as “the symbol of darkness and darkness expresses all evils … [which signifies] chaos, ugliness, vice, guilt, sin, and misfortune” it becomes more difficult to quell those associations (qtd. in Davis 57). The color black is further demarcated by associations with “the color of death, hunger, [and] melancholic bodily fluids” (qtd. in Goldenburg 57). And what is one color without its opposite, its complement? Alternatively, the color white is representative of “divinity or God ... the color of purity and holiness,” granting it ameliorative qualities that conventionally juxtapose the color black (Davis 57). Associations with blackness came to be used pejoratively with whiteness as its superior antithesis.
However, perceptions of black and white did not end at the oppositional definitions; such attitudes were then conflated with classist biases that stratified groups of people. To understand how these attitudes spread to countries who have cultures and societies independent of one another, one must understand how color symbolism was used to justify the oppression of certain lower-class peoples. There is a reason why only dark-skinned people are condemned to harmful assumptions of inferiority, moral deviance, and imbecility. Although systemically disenfranchised, a lack of resources fueled popular aristocratic belief that lower-class people were “intrinsically lazy, childlike, licentious, and incapable of life without authoritative direction” and that they were thus “filthy, stupid, and bestial” (Davis 50). Slavery was an institution that borrowed oppressive, classist ideologies and applied them to the captured Africans they would soon enslave. Colonizers who had been exposed to those beliefs spread them in their conquests, cementing and reinforcing those biases on the world stage.
Globally, Black people have taken the brunt of many racist jokes, propaganda, and exclusionary practices that originated during slavery. The effects of slavery are still felt in modern times as Black caricatures, mythic prescriptions realized by systemic oppression, and a generalized disadvantaged perception are all symptoms of the peculiar institution that survived. Mythical, damaging narratives that discredit the intellectual capacity, work ethic, and value of Black people have persisted and are continually perpetuated as fact.
How Anti-Blackness Appeared in Mainstream Media
The caricature of Blackness has been branded with detrimental connotations that disenfranchise entire groups of people based on fabled attributions. In the United States, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a popular caricature of Black people in cartoons that depicted them as jet-black beings with grotesque, large red lips; it became dubbed “Sambo.” These Sambo characters were usually depicted as sneaky, stupid, and devious—an extension of Black stereotypes and presumptions. These depictions cannot be dismissed as victimless slapstick humor because they instilled and perpetuated a narrative of imbecility at the expense of Black people that has survived for several generations. By creating a character that upheld racist sentiments, it became much easier to assign those qualities to Black people in real life. The barrier between fact and fiction blurred to the point of inextricable perceptions. Hasty judgments have the possibility to end lives—Black Lives Matter is tasked with dismantling negative assumptions. Black people are not afforded the benefit of the doubt, and it is a result of careless and harmful depictions of them as such. Those narratives have the power to shape the framework and limitations of racialized empathy. In a hemispheric study, images like those can be used to concentrate the origins of public apathy and contempt.
Exaggerated, stereotypical images of Blackness are not exclusive to the United States. In Mexico, there was an extremely popular comic book character named Memín Penguin, who was designed in Sambo’s image. Much like Sambo is memorialized in certain museums, according to Bobby Vaughn of the Hemispheric Institute, “in July of 2005, Memín Penguin, a black Mexican comic book character who resembles Curious George, or even a little black Sambo, was celebrated with a postage stamp in his honor.” The usage of the term “celebration” demonstrates a lack of social awareness for the degrading qualities of the character and how they dehumanize and marginalize that group. Vaughn continues to write that “while generally well-received in Mexico, the stamp was derided as offensive by many African Americans,” and I posit that this is due to the racialized disparities between Mexico and the United States. According to Taunya Banks, a race scholar from the University of Maryland, “Anthropologists and civil rights advocates characterize the once-popular cartoon created in the 1940s as a “well-intentioned but hapless [boy whose] … mannerisms and speech reinforce 1940s stereotypes of Blacks as lazy, mischievous, and uneducated” (201). This is not a far-reaching correlation because “Mexican images of [Blackness] were pitted against those of African Americans,” illuminating the ways anti-Blackness is a pervasive issue beyond borders (Vaughn). Despite the backlash and accusations of racism, many people denounced that analysis to pass it off as merely a joke and a harmless character. Offenses against Blackness seem to go unresolved and receive little to no punishment or backlash for it; they are instead encouraged and celebrated.
Despite the overt racism in the visual design of Sambo and Memín Penguin, there are much harsher subliminal messages that come from them. Entertainment is often brought at the expense of a minority group, but damning Black caricatures are popular transnationally. Stereotypical ideas have the propensity to generate state-sanctioned policies that uphold and reinforce those tropes. This brands the community and stifles their social mobility. People often underestimate the humanity of politicians; they are only people who are also susceptible to subliminal messaging--and then they rise to positions of power, making decisions based on those inferences. While institutional bias does not make it impossible, it severely hinders the ability of the average Black person to break the cycle of systemic racism. This level of impunity generates a lack of respect for Black people and little incentive to include Black people in influential spaces to change it. When these images and ideologies become internalized, they become deadly.
Sambo and other outright racist depictions of Black people may have gradually disappeared in mass marketing media, but his unfortunate legacy remains; the idea that Sambo is an unessential creature whose sole purpose is to provide entertainment for white audiences is a trope that still plays out in the contemporary United States. It has become increasingly clear that Black culture is influential for Western popular culture, but the commercial and entertainment value is where their virtue ends.
In modern-day popular culture, Black celebrities have received critical backlash for endorsing Black Lives Matter by the same audiences who had once consumed their art. From stars like Beyonce to athletes like Colin Kaepernick, the message has always been to silence themselves and perform; the response to their support of Black Lives Matter demonstrates the ephemerality of public acceptance and esteem. Joseph Boskin suggests that “mirth and merriment was [Sambo’s] trademark in a society in which entertainment came to assume major proportions in the lives of the people” (4). This is a consequence of the Sambo character: the purpose of the Black body is for production and entertainment; if those qualities cannot be fulfilled, the body and life has little to no value. In consideration of this ongoing and transnational occurrence, it bolsters the implicit idea that Black people are still merely in the role of servitude without agency.
Colorism and the Limitations of Social Mobility
Many nations can be historically described as anti-Black, whether one looks at the individuals and policies in power, the impoverished populations, or the popular media. It has become clear that race is a construct that is much more important within the United States than it is in Mexico or Brazil. However, in all of these countries, skin pigmentation is a symbol of social currency. The color symbolism that fueled chattel slavery was already a widespread ideology across the world as preferential treatment was given according to skin tone. Colorism, the rebranded symptom of color symbolism, is what dominates race relations in Brazil. While race is not necessarily an indicator of class, color certainly is.
Skin color and social mobility have a direct relationship. In the book, Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States, Converging Paths?, G. Reginald Daniel claims that “in Latin America, race is generally viewed in a way that incorporates phenotypical, social, and cultural characteristics” (226). I want to highlight the inclusion of “social characteristics” in that description, assumed to mean class (including social income, wealth, and quality of living). If race can be assigned based on arbitrary distinctions of class, but also phenotypical attributes (skin color and Afro features), then it can be argued that many of these definitions have become institutionalized and internally reinforced. For example, the race-mixing that was rampant during slavery produced new identities such as the mulatto and the mestizo, both of which are distinguished Brazilian identities. Benito Cao describes it well, saying that in Brazil,
“social mobility was determined by several physical traits: “light-colored people had better chances than dark; straight hair was more favorable than kinky; and [an] aquiline nose was better than a broad flat one … The relation between physical traits and social mobility translated into the aspiration of wealthy mulattos to marry white or whiter women. In other words, the general tendency was to combine upward social mobility with the “purification of the blood” (170).
In light of that, it is not surprising that adjacency to whiteness is still the preferred label. “In the 1990 [Brazilian] census, just over half of Latinas/os counted themselves as racially white and 40 percent as racially “other,”” providing more evidence that proximity to whiteness is more socially acceptable than proximity to Blackness (Daniel 226). Daniel continues to argue that “Latinas/os view themselves as neither European American nor African American by virtue of their Latin national-cultural origins, even if they consider themselves racially black, white, mulatto, or mestizo in their respective communities” (226). This is an attempt to erase the presence and validity of Blackness and also to negate the importance of skin color and the role it plays in the social order.
The Black Lives Matter movement has a place in Brazil because the same conditions that helped it rise to public consciousness in the United States are rampant there too. The level of impunity regarding police brutality, the way their Black populations are ignored, and the systems in place that continually oppress Black Brazilians are comparable to those of the United States. Therefore, the evidence of how claiming one’s Blackness can hurt their societal advances makes a case in point about why Black Lives Matter protests grew. The circumstances are replicated in so many nations; my focus on Brazil, Mexico, and the United States only provides a glimpse into the realities of how structurally anti-Black most countries are. Being Black has the potential to inhibit one’s life prospects; Black Lives Matter sheds light on the institutions that enable this and stifle new generations.
The erasure of Blackness is a ubiquitous tactic that allows people better employment, educational, and housing opportunities. It is the case in this hemispheric study that distancing oneself from any association with Blackness has proven to yield better results in any context. From this assessment of the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, it is clear that darker skin pigmentation and other Afro aesthetics directly impact the allowances and limitations of one’s social mobility. The idea that Blackness is implicitly associated with poverty, violence, and deviance is present amongst all these nations, although their cultures, economic systems, and populations differ significantly. According to Cao, “studies on poverty, social mobility, access to health, housing, education and employment indicate the pervasive nature of inequality and racial prejudice in Brazil,” but the statement is accurate and applicable to much more than just Brazil (1).
In Mexico, pigmentation is traced back to hierarchical social order too. Although race relations do not explicitly function as they do in the United States,
“Spanish colonialists, disturbed by a growing population composed of offspring from relations between Spaniards, Africans, and Indigenous people in colonial Mexico, developed a complex set of rules creating a race-like caste system with a distinct anti-black bias” (Banks 204).
David Agren, a reporter for The Guardian, claims that “the Afro-Mexican population has long struggled for recognition in an overwhelmingly mestizo country where the indigenous past is lionized but lighter skin colour is often reflected in social advancement and higher incomes.” By contrast, if lighter skin indicates higher social mobility, then darker skin must insinuate a lower social order and esteem. Negative assumptions are given to the dark-skinned populations in Mexico by virtue of the typical population of impoverished areas. Banks says, “Latino/as avoid openly acknowledging African ancestry because the consequences are so severe—one is labeled Black, a historically non-mobile category” (202). She continues to write that “many legal scholars who write about Mexican mestizaje omit references to Afromexicans, Mexico’s African roots, and anti-Black sentiments in the Mexican and Mexican American communities” (203). That assertion gives rise to Banks’ claim that “in Mexico, racism takes the form of denial” (202). In addition to that, “non-racial language was used for laws that disproportionally impacted Afro-mestizos and Indians” (Banks 215). The same principle goes for the United States, the so-called “melting pot” of the world.
In the United States, race carries a much larger weight on social mobility than nationality, color, or class. Often, race dictates class due to discriminatory and hypocritical laws that reinforce systemic racism. I lieu of the American dream, many hold the belief that Black Americans are lazy and/or greedy because of their apparent inability to overcome their circumstances or to escape their underprivileged neighborhoods and lifestyles. Kelisha Graves, a scholar of pan-African studies, offers a compelling explanation for this because “high rates of engineered poverty in the inner cities and educational achievement disparities are not seen as tied to a legacy of chattel enslavement, or nearly a century of Jim Crow” (64). In the United States (like Mexico and Brazil), social mobility is defined by the resources available, and when those resources are not offered in certain places, the area suffers and becomes impoverished by design.
When some parties are alienated as the burden of a state, it becomes easy to make them the scapegoat instead of turning a scrutinizing lens on the government that failed them and allowed their circumstances to worsen for generations. Rallying cries to hold the government accountable and to propose reparations for decades of mistreatment are at the heart of Black Lives Matter; the simplest pleas are to stop killing Black people and to recognize them as valuable assets who will thrive when given the chance. But alas,
“all problems are privatized as the results of biological determinism. Such a worldview makes it easier to see how certain people are labeled as more deserving than others and why some lives have historically mattered more than others” (Graves 64).
I believe that Black Lives Matter has a premise in every nation state because Black people face injustices everywhere; the United States just has the luxury of having it televised.
So while some claim that “money rather than color explains social discrimination,” they offer nothing of the relationship between the public perception that Blackness is often equated to poverty nor the reasons why that is unfortunately sometimes true (Cao 5). Such missed connections give incentive to promote inaccurate statements like, “there are no Blacks or whites in Brazil; only Brazilians” (Cao 1). It gives people a reason to make sweeping, glorifying statements such as “I don’t see color” without knowing the severity of such a claim.
The Myth of the Post-Racial Society
Perhaps the most mythical narrative floating amidst the public sphere is the concept that our contemporary global societies have evolved to the post-racial status. Drawing conclusions can be informed by cultural biases, so in the field of American Studies, it is imperative to conduct research before making sweeping statements; with that in mind, all three of these countries have posited some form of post-racial atmosphere. Because overt anti-Black racism is no longer sanctioned and emboldened by legislation (i.e Jim Crow in the United States, the Catholic interracial [Indian and Black] marriage ban in Mexico, the state-mandated eugenic racial whitening in Brazil), many disengaged people believe these issues are a thing of the past. Unfortunately, people hold the opinion that racism ended with the abolition of slavery; this could not be further from the truth. The reality of this outlook (which at best can only be described as naive and idyllic, if not an outright preposterous and intentionally obtuse demonstration of historical amnesia) is generations away because the current systems that control the healthcare, hunger, homelessness, and violence crises caused by systemic racism are still in place. Graves poignantly phrased this perspective when she said that those who hold that opinion believe that “race is an anachronism that prevents human beings from harmonizing into a utopian form of non-racial living” (60). Race is not an anachronism but a pillar that constantly dictates the dichotomies of society that span across borders and oceans.
Conversely, while the United States and Mexico have institutionalized racial dimensions, Brazil prides itself on being a state that celebrates hybridity. It is important to use comparative methods of gathering information to make a case in American Studies. According to Cao, there is a widespread belief that the celebration of hybridity (namely, of the Mulatta) is evidence of Portuguese cordiality and tolerance. This is a widely disputed claim because Brazilian race relations have experienced tension, usually to the disadvantage of their Afro-Brazilian population. It is also yet another instance of mythic white exceptionalism in which the Portuguese have controlled and manipulated their historical atrocities. This is a process that is very similar to that of the United States. Contrary to that constructed narrative, Cao asserts that “race plays a role in the reproduction of social inequality in Brazil” (6). Of the data I’ve compiled here, it is clear that this is not exclusive to Brazil. Brazil has adopted a rebranded identity of a supposed “racial democracy,” but their racialized police brutality numbers rival those of the United States, according to statistics from the New York Times (Andreoni & Londoño). Michael Mitchell and Charles Wood, writers from the Journal of Social Forces, provide that
“Analysis of the regulated and relational character of citizenship in Brazil, as well as observations about the attitudinal dispositions of the members of the criminal justice system, suggest that Afro-Brazilians are likely to benefit from fewer protections compared to whites and are more likely to suffer discrimination at the hands of the police.”
The idea that Brazil would cling to such an oxymoronic label as a racial democracy demonstrates a complete disregard for the abuses and killings of Afro-Brazilians. This is representative of the way most nations respond to the genocidal methods of Black erasure. When the people in power neglect to acknowledge injustice or to recognize it as an issue, it affects public opinion and it eventually becomes a non-issue because it does not dominate the media. This is one of the greatest successes of Black Lives Matter: as a social movement, it was able to bring these issues to the forefront of international public discourse.
The Unifying Link: Police Brutality
Even for those nations who do not have tense race relations that target and disenfranchise their Black populations, many countries banded together to hold Black Lives Matter protests to fight instances of police brutality. One of the most important pillars of American Studies seems to be broadening the conversation to include cultures outside of one’s own. Using a transnational lens can help provide additional perspective to the issues going on at home. For example, the power imbalances generated by my aforementioned points (racial inferiority, dispensability, and willful ignorance of the issue at hand) have created a climate of rampant police brutality. Police brutality is a peak issue for the United States, Mexico, and Brazil respectively. According to Andreoni and Londoño,
“Officially, the police in Brazil are allowed to use lethal force only to confront an imminent threat. But an analysis of four dozen police killings … shows that officers routinely gun down people without restraint, protected by their bosses and the knowledge that even if they are investigated for illegal killings, it will not keep them from going back out onto the beat.”
This analysis is comparable to the United States’ recent handling of the police shooting death of Breonna Taylor, whose killers have yet to be arrested or indicted. The descriptions of Mexican police forces seem to align with Brazilian and American conditions:
“Mexico’s police forces are infamous for their corruption, their use of torture and violence, and their ties to organized crime,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “These protests, which echo the global wave of outrage sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in the US, also express the profound and longstanding mistrust and frustration that many Mexicans feel toward their abusive police forces” (Human Rights Watch).
The Mexican, Brazilian, and American police enjoy the privileges of killing with impunity. In states where the police are protected at all costs (often at the expense of an unarmed Black victim), it can be extremely difficult to fight back or receive justice. The Black Lives Matter movement is tasked with disassembling the police protections and confronting the systems that allow them to continue these brazen, avoidable murders. By applying public pressure, Black Lives Matter is able to redirect attention to the systemic issues such as the over-policing of Black neighborhoods, racial profiling, and insufficient training. It may be an over-simplified statement to suggest that it is more about protecting Black lives than it is about corrupt police institutions. The outpouring of support and demonstrative protests in solidarity with Black Lives Matter were concentrated on the unchecked police brutality rampant in the United States, Mexico, and Brazil. This issue is something that many of the American nations have in common.
Conclusion
Black Lives Matter was able to accomplish bringing racialized violence and other systemic issues to the forefront of the discussion. The Black Lives Matter movement demanded these stories be told and that there be consequences for the slaughter of their people--a brazen and recurring injustice that has proven to be a worldwide occurrence. The small hemispheric study I have done is only a glimpse into the similar detriments Black populations face at the hand of white-ruled nation-states. The United States is often illuminated as the state with the most racial tension, but these are common ideologies and practices throughout the Americas and across the world. My intent with this paper was to reveal how similar all of these nations are in their handling of race and how it impacts their nations respectively. The United States is not unique in its racism; it just always gets the spotlight on the world stage.
There is a reason that the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer of 2020 were historical. Black Lives Matter is proposed to be recognized as the world’s most expansive civil rights movement by the New York Times. But Opal Tometi, a co-founder of the movement says they are misguided because “it isn’t a civil rights movement … it’s a human rights one.” Despite the political merit, the Black Lives Matter movement has demonstrated protests in over sixty countries and on all seven continents, surpassing data for the Women’s March, Gay Pride, and the March on Washington. The reason why these protests were so contagious is because the same conditions that sparked the movement in the United States are seen across the world; in some capacity, in over sixty countries, there were demonstrations to counteract the idea that Black people are dispensable.
The intended purpose of this paper was to localize the need for Black Lives Matter movement on a global scale by demonstrating pervasive anti-Black attitudes held by diversified societies. Such an observation provides substantial grounding for the need for a Black Lives Matter movement far beyond the confines of the United States. If these attitudes are held by people who are not directly associated with the anti-Black police brutality in the United States that incited Black Lives Matter, then it is representative of a much larger humanitarian issue. The welfare and happiness of Black people rests on the mercy of various societies that deem them unworthy and as a burden. Upon consideration of all the indicators of systemic racism, I feel that it can be simplified by the notion that Black people are ultimately expendable in most societies. It comes from microaggressions such as a racially insensitive cartoon character, or by inextricably linking Blackness with non-mobility, by the refusal to associate with Blackness, or by the continual perpetuation of damaging narratives.
I hadn’t been expecting to encounter so much anti-Black racism in Mexico or Brazil because the populations didn’t seem as diverse as the United States. In order to challenge our cultural biases, it is imperative to conduct research beyond our borders. Hemispheric studies such as this one are arguably the backbone of American studies. In this case, because the research was consistent, it suggests that this issue of invaluable lives is much broader than anticipated. I believe that my argument that Black Lives Matter protests were necessary around the world has been substantiated because the conditions are universal.
Works Cited
Agren, David. “‘We exist. We're here': Afro-Mexicans make the census after long struggle for recognition.” The Guardian. 19 March 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/afro-mexicans-census-history-identity
Andreoni, Manuela, and Ernesto Londoño. “License to Kill’: Inside Rio’s Record Year of Police Killings.” New York Times. 18 May 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/world/americas/brazil-rio-police-violence.html
Banks, Taunya. “Mestizaje and the Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay Sangre Negra, So There’s No Blackness.” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 199-234, Spring 2006. https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=fac_pubs
Bennett, Herman L. Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico. Indiana University Press, 2009. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=e000xna&AN=313472&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Boskin, Joseph. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester. Oxford University Press, 1988. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=e000xna&AN=294814&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Cao, Benito. White Hegemony in the Land of Carnival: The (Apparent) Paradox of Racism and Hybridity in Brazil. 2008. University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics.
Daniel, G. Reginald. Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=cat06545a&AN=ken.997094113902954&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Davis, David B. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford University Press, 2006. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=e000xna&AN=169153&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Graves, Kelisha B. “Blackness as a Pedagogic Tool Against the Dishonesty of a Post-Racial Teleology.” Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 12, no. 7, Dec. 2018, pp. 59-68. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=edsglr&AN=edsglr.A573095315&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Human Rights Watch. “Mexico: Overhaul Police Forces Protests Highlight Abuse, Impunity, Corruption, Lack of Training.” 24 July 2020. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/07/24/mexico-overhaul-police-forces#
Michael J. Mitchell, and Charles H. Wood. “Ironies of Citizenship: Skin Color, Police Brutality, and the Challenge to Democracy in Brazil.” Social Forces, vol. 77, no. 3, Mar. 1999, pp. 1001–1020. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/3005969.
Tometi, Opal. “Black Lives Matter Is Not A Civil Rights Movement.” N.D. https://www.opaltometi.org/black-lives-matter-is-not-a-civil-rights-movement/
Vaughn, Bobby. “Memín Penguin, Changing Racial Debates, and Transnational Blackness.” Hemispheric Institute. N.d. https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-5-2-race-and-its-others/5-2-dossier/memin-penguin-changing-racial-debates-and-transnational-blackness.html