“There are no blacks in Argentina. That is a Brazilian problem.” Carlos Menem
AFTER THE END OF slavery, all former slave territories decided they had a Negro problem that they had to deal with. The problem was the threat of Africanisation of their societies by all those Africans they had forcibly relocated. This was viewed as a problem because the former white slave-owners now feared the demographic and cultural effect of the millions of Africans they had brought to the Americas and the Caribbean as slaves. On some islands in the Caribbean, there were more people of colour than there were white people.
The white people went into a panic mode and embarked on whitefication – racial whitening of in-coming generations – and demographic dilution. Whitefication was a different ideology from segregation, though in both instances, racism was the common denominator.
Whitefication was done by deliberate miscegenation. In truth, in some societies, the black population themselves led this strategy as there were distinct benefits to having progeny who were a lighter shade of blackness. Demographic dilution was done by importing as many white people as possible, restricting the number of black immigrants, promoting the emigration of black people (colonisation), and decimating the black population in various ways.
Cuba used the importation of more white people, mostly from Spain. South Africa outlawed miscegenation and went the way of white immigration and decimation of the black population. Australia tried everything from trying to exterminate the Aborigines to miscegenation, to promoting immigration of white people, and to limiting the immigration of black people. Finally, Australia pulled out a rabbit: cultural assimilation. They reckoned that the Aborigines could remain black, but as long as they behaved like white people, then “it was okay, mate”.
Argentina tried many methods as well and is an excellent case study in whitefication and demographic dilution. Carlos Menem, when he was the Argentine President, said in an interview in 1997 that “There are no blacks in Argentina. That is a Brazilian problem.” The statement was superficially accurate, but the story beneath the statement is disturbing.
When one looks at the Argentinian national football team, any serious football follower with some knowledge of slavery history can smell a rat, a rotten one at that. In the Football World Cup Final in 2014, in Brazil, Argentina played Germany. Argentina, despite its rich history of slavery, had no single black player; not one. It was Germany, land of the Aryan race, that had black players! You have to go back to 1922 to find a black football player in the Argentinian national team.
Right now, numerically, the population of black people in Argentina is insignificant, and that is why there are few black football players. However, the population of black people has not always been insignificant.
Argentines push back vigorously when reminded of the real reasons there are so few blacks in that country, despite there having been hundreds of thousands in past centuries.
So, where have all the black people in Argentina gone?
The black people in Argentina were mostly slaves, though a few went as immigrants. There were hundreds of thousands of black African slaves in Argentina. But over the last one hundred years, the Argentines have been quietly but efficiently whitening their country. This is in their quest to be as European looking as possible.
The white Argentines decimated the Afro-Argentines in many ways. The first method was the sending of many Afro-Argentine men into the frontlines in their war of independence in the early nineteenth century. They did the same in their war against Paraguay in 1864. The second method was the inevitable intermarriages between Afro-Argentine women and other differently-coloured Argentine men. This was because of a shortage of black men after the wars. Thirdly, there was a devastating yellow fever and cholera epidemic of the late nineteenth century that killed a lot of Afro-Argentines. This was because Afro-Argentines lived mostly in the slums with poor housing and sanitation. These are the areas where the diseases were most predominant. Fourthly, many Afro-Argentines fled to Brazil and Uruguay. The remaining few were encouraged or preferred to marry spouses of lighter skin colour for the sake of having children with lighter shades of blackness, in the words of Erica Edwards. Such children were likely to have a better future in that country.
Now, Afro-Argentines number less than 0.5 percent. This is down from a reported high of 30 percent in Buenos Aires and 50 percent in some provinces a century or two ago. The indigenous Amerindians number just over 2.4 percent. Juan Jose Soiza Reilly wrote in 1905 in Argentina that “…the African race is becoming extinct… the African tree is producing white Caucasian flowers”. How true that was.
The Afro-Argentines have left one big legacy: The Tango dance.
The Americans tried many things to do with demographic dilution. Whitefication through miscegenation was a no-no in America, with some states only changing their laws on interracial marriages as late as 2000 CE!
Their racist American Colonization Society spent good money to send as many Africans as possible back to Africa. The Americans lynched some of the Negroes but not in numbers near enough to depopulate the slaves and freedmen. They encouraged the immigration of white people from all over the world but made the immigration of anyone from countries with black people well-nigh impossible. The Brits were welcomed, the Irish were welcomed, the Poles were welcomed, the Italians were welcomed, the Germans were welcomed, the French were welcomed, the Russians were welcomed, the Greeks were welcomed, the Czechs – with their Budweiser as a sweetener – were most happily welcomed! The Abyssinians were not. The Sudanese were not. The Nigerians were not. The Malawians were not. The Congolese were not.
In 1860, the population of Negroes in America constituted 14.2 percent of the whole. 1.5 percent were free (476,748) and 12.7 percent were slaves (3,950,546) out of total population of 31,118,075. In 2010, the Census showed that the United States population was 308.7 million. Out of the total population, 42 million people – 14 percent – identified themselves as black or coloured. 13 percent identified as black alone and 1 percent as black in combination with one or more other races. After 150 years there was very, very little mixing of the genes because of the racist laws barring miscegenation. This clearly shows the depth of racism in America. Contrast with Brazil, where the ratio of slaves (blacks and mulattoes) was 15 percent in 1873 and in 2010 the ratio of blacks and mulattoes was 50.7 percent.
The figures for those formerly called Red Indians (pejorative), but4 now called Native-Americans, are very imprecise because in the early years they were not counted and they were in two locales: mainland USA and Alaska. The approximate population of Native-Americans in 1860 was around 400,000. Now it is around 5 million.
Brazil, despite having had 40 percent of African slaves, has had a difficult time dealing with its slaving past. Racism, prejudice, and discrimination are subtle but widespread. Brazil has also been active in the whitefication game. Its main weapon has been miscegenation and demographic dilution through the encouragement of white immigrants from Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Japan. There were also immigrants of a darker shade of whiteness from Argentina, Chile, and other Andean countries.
The descendants of slaves in Brazil are still in a caste below any other and are widely and disproportionately poor. Though there was more social and physical intercourse and no legal separation of races after slavery ended in 1888 – unlike America – discrimination was still bad, bad, bad. The slaves on gaining freedom in 1888 were like many in other western countries: no money, no land, no education. All this equated to extreme poverty. Over the years, therefore, the blacks in Brazil actively tried to have progeny who were lighter skinned than them, as this improved their caste status. Brazil, in fact, is the most unequal society in the world, according to the Gini Coefficient.
With four million Africans imported to Brazil, the number of their descendants should now be in the tens of millions. But the last census in 2010 put the number that identifies as blacks at only sixteen million. From 1872, the ratio of blacks and mulattoes – who formed the slave population – has increased from 15 percent to 50.7 percent. The white population is 47.7 percent, Asian 1.1 percent, and indigenous 0.4 percent.
Brazil has tried to ignore and sweep its history of slavery under the carpet. A substantial number of whites in Brazil are racists and bigots who only like fleet-footed blacks like Edson Arantes do Nascimento – AKA Pele – and others like him for their footballing skills.
Have the former slave territories succeeded in limiting Africanisation of their white societies? Argentina has definitely succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. The whitefication program has also been very successful in Brazil. The United States of America has also succeeded in its own way, by limiting the percentage of people of Africa-American extraction at a steady 14 percent of the general population for over 150 years. That takes some planning and dedication.
In the language of Apollo 13, Houston, the Americans have a new problem, or they think they have a new problem: Hispanisation, instead of Africanisation. The Anglo-Saxons in America are now shit-scared of the Hispanics/Latinos of Central and South American extraction.
All other former slave territories, too numerous to mention here, have had varying degrees of “success”. Haiti, Jamaica, and Barbados are the exceptions because they had very large populations of people of African descent.
