Daniel Cohen

Discussion Blog Post #1

Ginetta E. B. Candelario wrote a splendid analysis of the Anacostia Museum’s Black Mosaic exhibit, which covers the history of black immigrants in the Washington, D.C. area. Candelario’s principal argument is that the U.S. has a very binary concept of race, whereas many black immigrants from regions such as the Carribean don’t place as much emphasis on race or ethnicity, which creates discrepancies between Black Mosaic’s portrayal of African-American history and the perception of the people whom it portrays on the subject.

The argument is very interesting, but what struck me the most about Candelario’s text is her statement that “African American history originated in Latin America” (62). As an ‘American’ (that is, a citizen of the United States of America), I had been conditioned to associate the word ‘American’ with the United States specifically. But, from a certain point of view, every human being born in the ‘Americas’ (that is, the U.S.A, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Canada, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Cuba, Haiti, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Surianame, to list just under half of the total countries in this region) is technically an ‘American.’ It’s in the name after all. However, there may be another dimension to this small snippet of her article: According to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, “Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were imported into the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US had a quarter of blacks in the New World.” While the United States contained a large portion of the black population of the Western Hemisphere by 1825, early in the slave trade Latin America by far contained the most enslaved Africans. Thus, using a more expansive definition of ‘American,’ it can be safely said that Candelario is correct in writing that “African American history originated in Latin America” (62).

African-American history is intrinsically tied to Latin American history, not just the history of the United States. In accepting this notion, we import the discrepancies between Latin American concepts of race and U.S. concepts of race. In the U.S, race is a strong factor in society. It permeates every branch of our society, from education (affirmative action, for example) to law enforcement (racial profiling, to list just one instance) to entertainment (The Boondocks, 8 Mile, Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row). Meanwhile, in Latin America, race is not institutionalized, and a person who is considered black in the U.S. is not necessarily black in Latin American countries. It is important to consider this discrepancy when attempting to portray Latin American immigrants of color in the United States.