To end racism and change the world, we need to burn down the past
The demolition of statues
The white base of a statue. Two men on the base. One of them pushes the other one. The man who is pushing is wearing a white shirt, a little bit stained, probably because of work in the fields. In his left hand he is holding and leaning on a sledgehammer. His skin is dark, brown, he wears a cap, and his right hand is fully extended, with a gesture of contempt and pride toward the other man whom he has toppled.
The man who is pushing is an indio.[2] Around him many other indios see the event, it is all of them who are pushing the same man against whom they direct their rage. It is daytime, the sky is clear. The pushed man is white, he has a prominent beard, he wears iron armor, a little worn out by time, he still has his helmet on and the gaze of a proud animal. The white man is far from knowing his outcome, he is being thrown to the void by some indios, the same ones he accused of being uncivilized and heretics, with languages and customs that were not/are not those of god, because for him, god is white. Those same indios, who today like yesterday live in misery, know that he has much to do with their current situation. The indios’ push on the white base finally brings down this white man, to whom homage has been paid as a tragic but necessary event.
Before pushing, the indio remembers all the injustices he has had to endure during his life. Which are also the grievances of his parents and of his parents' parents. That is why he never doubts or regrets this moment. He concentrates all the strength of his right hand and throws the white man to the void. He looks slightly down, and a smile is drawn on his face.
On October 12, 1492, America was 'discovered' by Europeans. That explanation is still repeated today because it is the basis of a civilizing project that is built on oppression, violence, dispossession and racism, although it has no historiographical basis.
On October 12, 1492, America was “discovered” by Europeans. This explanation is repeated today because it is the basis of a civilizing project that is built on oppression, violence, dispossession and racism, although it has no historiographical basis. The historian Edmundo O’Gorman, points out that one does not discover what already exists, it is curious that Columbus died thinking that he arrived in India, and not that he had “discovered” another continent; instead, an identity was created, that of the “American”, and the name was attributed to all those who inhabited those lands. [3]
The “price of civilization”
Despite this, October 12 is a national holiday in Spain. The “encounter of two worlds” is celebrated, a euphemism also used by Latin American historians who yearn for the monarchy and defend the Hispanic world as a bastion of “progress”. In reality, this encounter is/and has been the violent imposition of a civilizing project, that of capitalist modernity. Colonization, the dispossession of the original peoples, murder, the imposition of the Catholic religion and Spanish as a language are part of this process.
Despite this, until a few years ago, Mexico celebrated “el día de la raza” (day of the race), a way of thanking the Hispanic Empire for taking us out of the barbarism and improving our lives once and for all, even though in the process some indios were exterminated. After all, this is the “price of civilization”.
The fact that we have this interpretation of the conquest and colonization of Mesoamerica to date is due in large part to the fact that after Mexico's independence in 1821, and during the 19th and 20th centuries, a model of the creole nation triumphed, from which the current political and economic elites have been nurtured. It is the descendants of the creoles who occupy spaces in politics, those who speak on TV, act in movies, produce mediocre and vulgar intellectuals, and give their opinions in newspapers. This model of the creole nation has two main foundations: capitalist development (impossible in a dependent country like Mexico) and the crossbreeding of the population. “Mestizaje was never meant to Indianize the whites, but to whitewash the indios, it was never intended for the national elites to learn from indigenous, Afro-Mexican and other cultures, but to teach them and impose their western culture, which they consider undoubtedly superior.” [4]
Mexican Liberalism
Neither one nor the other element has been fulfilled. For Mexican liberalism it is/ was necessary to do away with the indigenous people, because in their eyes they represent the characteristics of a pre-capitalist society, and as such, not directly exploitable in favor of capital. Hence, October 12 is a reason for celebration for these elites and their project of nationhood.
This celebration was questioned in 1992 when the indigenous people marched and toppled the statue of Diego de Mazariegos, a military man in charge of the conquest in what is today southern Mexico. Within the framework of the 500 years of the “discovery of the Americas” indigenous people knocked down a symbol that is still alive: that of racism and conquest. Photographer Antonio Turok managed to capture the exact moment when they tore down the statue in front of the Convent of Santo Domingo in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.
The context, a decade of opening up to transnational capital, privatization of state and parastatal enterprises, and a year later, the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the definitive abandonment of the Mexican countryside and the legal reforms to privatize land. NAFTA came into effect on January 1, 1994, the day when the night was illuminated by the armed uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
The Multiple Faces of Racism
Police violence against George Floyd sparked a wave of anti-racist protests in the United States. That widely documented murder, far from appeasing the protests, generated larger and larger mobilizations, showing that racism has extremely violent consequences. But this murder, far from being an exception, is the rule. Both for African Americans and for Latino immigrants from poor countries living in the United States, who in the eyes of their racist, white, fellow citizens, do not belong there because of their skin color, culture or having another mother tongue. In addition to the fascists of the Klan and Trump's fascistic discourse these imaginaries about immigrants allow such prejudices to implant themselves into the population and function as political practice of discrimination and physical and symbolic violence against “others,” those who are not white and English-speaking.
The tearing down of statues, defacing them with paint or placing objects on them ironically is a sign that for our colonized societies (inside and outside) racism has very deep historical roots.
The anger triggered by the murder of a single person demonstrates two things. The first is that the life of any human being is important, and that skin color, and the stigma and racism towards a certain skin color, can no longer be tolerated today in any of its forms and expressions. Racism, even if it is a joke, has catastrophic consequences because it generates the reproduction of the dominant social relations of production. Secondly, it shows that the recognition of civil rights for African Americans, obtained by mobilizations during the 20th century, is far from having resolved the multiple faces of racism. The recognition of these rights is formal, as long as there is no substantive transformation of the economic system that engenders racism.
Capitalism and racism, for us dark-skinned people, are one and the same. Hence the task is urgent anti-racist methods and actions, to raise awareness and mass condemnation. But they must also be understood as measures of transition towards the radical transformation of the capitalist world. Without this, one aspires to that danger that Frantz Fanon saw: the place of the oppressor is sought by the oppressed.
Class Interpretation
The statues, like many other documents, give an account of the world through a class interpretation. Those who erect them do so knowing their political purpose. Those who tear them down do so fully aware that they do not want to perpetuate the legacy of that which was transformed into bronze. Tearing down a statue or setting fire to the past does not seek to suppress the past itself, but to end once and for all with the praise of a political-economic project that segregates, subdues and binds the oppressed hand and foot. More importantly, it shows a critical reflection on history that this historical process cannot continue to happen as it has.
In this sense, it is necessary to put an end to all those monuments that honor our domination, that reproduce it in a symbolic way and force us to think that it was and is the only possible way. As long as any monument to Leopold II of Belgium, Hernán Cortés or to the Hispanic monarchy, which is heir to the 16th century monarchy, remains standing, we will know that things have not changed much for us.
At the same time that we are putting an end to these symbols of domination, we have to put an end to the present domination, because the conquerors of the past are closely related to those of today. In the same way, the oppressed of yesterday have a close relationship with us. Thus, ending capitalist civilization means settling accounts with all those who have ever benefited from the exploitation of labor: the capitalists.
The “legend of mestizaje“
In Mexico, the project of nineteenth-century liberalism to build a “modern” industrial and capitalist nation is still entirely in force, proof of which are the mega-projects (the Mayan Train, the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the Integral Morelos Project) promoted in the last decades and which have found their crystallization in the present government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. [5]
This is connected to liberalism in its way of homogenizing the population, in the case of Mexico this happened with the “legend of mestizaje” that Federico Navarrete skillfully describes and grounds:
As our parents, teachers, and too many historians and intellectuals have told us and continue to tell us, we are all mestizos because we descend from a conquering Spanish father, none other than the implacable and feared Hernán Cortés, and from a conquered indigenous mother, the Malinche herself, the beautiful but treacherous native interpreter. […] The legend goes on to say that from this difficult union the mestizos were born, a new class of human beings that would combine the best attributes of the two races that constituted it. [6]
Navarrete argues that the central ideas on which “mestizaje” is based don’t hold up in any way, it wasn’t a biological process between “races”, it wasn’t cultural, nor was it carried out only between white men and indigenous women, nor is. It’s not true that in Mexico only indigenous people and the Spanish lived together, as this denies the presence of people from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Likewise, “mestizaje” did not begin on a large scale since the conquest but only until the second half of the 19th century. “In fact, the Mexicans called mestizos did not become a majority of the national population until the end of the nineteenth century in independent Mexico, not during the colonial period. [7]
The ideology of mestizaje as a phenotypic combination of different and varied skin colors has given rise to a nation of mestizos, who speak Spanish and are believers of the Catholic religion, that is, they are Mexican. But this approach is deeply racist because it does not recognize the cultural and ethnic diversity of the indigenous, African and Asian communities that make up the country:
“What we mistakenly call mestizaje was not the natural culmination of a 300-year process, but a radically new phenomenon resulting from capitalist modernization and state consolidation, which involved changing the languages, culture and political ideology of the majority of the population, as well as defining a new national identity. It was a process of political, social, economic and cultural confluence, but not racial, a very different history from the one we have been told.” [8]
The tragedy of liberalism is that behind its handful of apparently universal ideas such as equality and freedom – which function only for the proprietors – it hides a deeply conservative and perverse face: that of subjecting the population to the domination of capital. That is why López Obrador empathizes so much with the liberals of the 19th century, because within their ideology there is no room for different or other ways of living.
In this context, directing our gaze to the past – which is present and still here – is a demand for the oppressed to the extent that we seek and build alternatives to the world in which we live. Setting fire to the past is part of the affirmation of the memory, the tradition of struggle and, potentially, the new order of the oppressed.
Notes
1] The original Spanish version: “Incendiar el pasado para acabar con el racismo (y transformar el mundo)”, was published on August 14, 2020 at https://www.prtmexico.org/post/incendiar-el-pasado
2] Indio is a word used to refer to the original population of Latin America/Abya Yala in a derogatory manner, from a colonial perspective that refers to the period of the conquest of the continent by the Hispanic Empire and homogenizes all the original peoples under a single ethnic/racial category. In this text, the author consciously uses the term and claims it as a person who experiences ethnic/racial stigma in his or her body. (N. del tr. al italiano: https://lamericalatina.net/2020/09/03/incendiare-il-passato-per-porre-fine-al-razzismo-e-ricostruire-il-mondo/)
3] Edmundo O'Gorman, La invención de América. Investigación acerca de la estructura histórica del nuevo mundo y del sentido de su devenir, 3rd ed., Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006, p. 193.
4] Federico Navarrete, México racista. Una denuncia, Mexico, Grijalbo, 2016, pp. 112-113.
5] Liberalism is a European social project with great relevance in other continents between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Its central focus is the defense of private property, economic freedom, and the establishment of relative legal equality for its citizens. While liberalism represented various progressive aspects with respect to “old regime” or pre-capitalist societies such as the secularization of the State, it also has a dark side in which capital is developed through more explicit violence. See: for liberalism in different national contexts Harold J. Laski, El liberalismo europeo, Spanish translation by Victoriano Miguélez, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1969, 248 p. For the Mexican liberalism of the 19th century I recommend the excellent text by Charles A. Hale, El liberalismo mexicano en la época de Mora (1821-1853), Trad. de Sergio Fernández Bravo y Francisco González Aramburu, México, Siglo XXI Editores, 2009, p. 347.
6] See: Chapter 5, “La leyenda del Mestizaje,” Navarrete, op. cit.
7] See Chapter 6, “Cinco tesis contra el Mestizaje,” Navarrete, op. cit
8] Ibid., p. 123.
Gerardo Rayo is a historian and editor of Los Heraldos Negros, a magazine of literature and political analysis. He is a member of the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT), Mexican section of the IV International.
