Racial Injustices and Global Justifications

In every region where black people exist — after the so-called “black diaspora” — reign over this group has been deeded a kind of “manifest destiny.” Of course, the destiny imposed to the black population is one of social, political, and cultural exclusion.

If we walk through Latin America and Caribe, and of course Africa and Europe, wherever black people are present, we see how much they are below the possibilities of ascension, trapped in the lowest classes of social scale. Some nations where there are black people in the population, even if in incipient number in some of them, are Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Brazil. In all the nations cited, blacks are inserted in the lowest social strata. Therefore, we must ask an important question: Why in Latin America and Caribe black people are always in disadvantage?

To answer this question we must return to history. The process of black slavery showed up as a way to sustain economic necessities of the nations with power. After the failure of the use of white labor, the hunger for wealth and power drove them to look for the cheapest manpower. This manpower, fit for the hardest tasks was found: the black African. Several justifications to keep blacks undervalued, even considered as objects, came from this economic perspective. They needed to create ideological apparatuses to sustain colonial foundation. The colonies should be profitable, and they would not have been so if their products had not been cultivated by cheap manpower with low costs to the conqueror nations. Social Darwinism, which established blacks as an inferior race, fed the logic of those who struggled to maintain the system intact. The idea of Europe as the center of the world prevailed, giving “conquerors-oppressors” the prerogative to deprive the Latin and Caribbean colonies that, like Africa, were considered inferior and underdeveloped. By concealment of the others the nations enriched.

This oppressor logic was absorbed by religious groups too, mainly by Christians that, grounded by the understanding that work was for God`s glory. However, they needed to forge racist theological thoughts and interpretations from the Bible in order to confirm this perspective of profit. Several texts were used to sustain the idea of black inferiority and to support slavery in the world. Texts like Genesis 4:1-16 and Genesis 9:18-29 were used by many Protestants around the world in racist ways to justify wealth acquired trough injustice, violence, cowardice, and deprivation of black people seen as objects that could be destroyed or used in any manner for the oppressor’s satisfaction. These racist interpretations became for many the most trusted belief. Many priests that became missionaries spread around the world believed that these and others texts were the basis of maintenance of blacks misery and inferiority and whites supremacy.

Obviously, postures like those prevented black people that take part in Christian churches around the world to become aware of their own identity. Even Pentecostal leaders cultivated racist and excluding prerogatives, although Pentecostalism has its origins associated to black presence.

However, one can see changes in many Christians’ and non-Christians’ consciences regarding what happens to black people. Although emotional, social, and cultural advantages are still experienced by whites around the world, the hope is that discrimination will be faced as a sin and that racism will become so shameful it will hurt anyone who commits it and that societies will consider as universal law the reproof of such affront — that justice will run as a river and that blacks will become reconciled with themselves and with others (Amos 5:24), because injustice hurts the Creator.