Here’s a statistic for you: Out of the 11 million Africans who survived their involuntary boat trip overseas, only 450,000 reached the shores of the United States. The rest were dispersed throughout the other America – Latin America.
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores what the rest of the Middle Passage Africans went through in their new lands in the four-part series, “Black in Latin America,” premiering on Tuesday, April 19 on PBS. (Check local stations for times.)
“Everyone knows about black people from Africa; everyone knows about the black American community,” Gates said in a PBS interview. “But surprisingly - and this is why the series is so important - not many people realize how 'black' South America is. So, of all the things I’ve done, it was the most difficult to get funded, and it is one of the most rewarding because it is so counter-intuitive. It’s so full of surprises. And I’m very excited about it.”
Gates visits Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Peru and Mexico. In each country, he finds different representations and reactions to race, and sadly, in each country he finds that having more “African” looking features and complexion tends to land you in the bottom of the social strata. He recounts the troubled history between Haitians and Dominicans, who share the island of Hispaniola, and the strength of the color divide in countries like Cuba and Brazil, which claim that racism doesn’t exist.
“There are 134 categories of blackness in Brazil. Like everywhere else, the poorest people in each country are the darkest, African-looking people. The elite in Cuba were white Cubans. The elite in Brazil are white Brazilians,” Gates told Boston.com.
He also found that in all the countries he visited, only Haiti didn’t invest in “whitening” the population. The rest of the countries tried somewhat successfully to encourage European immigration because of their high black populations.
Gates wrote and reported the series, his 11th for PBS.
Source: BlackAmericaWeb.com
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