eBook | BLACK BRAZIL - An Opressed Perspective

Just as it is necessary to know the past to understand the life process of each person, without knowing the history of a people, it is not possible to understand how it was formed. Insofar as we are naturally social, each person discovers himself simultaneously as an individual and as a member of groups. And as human inclinations and talents are diverse, collective life demands dialogues that establish understandings and coexistence agreements. But because it is possible to both cooperate and compete, relationships can occur as partnerships or disputes.

When worldviews meet and there is empathy, community feelings arise. Those who cooperate understand that they are stronger together, as each one has a natural talent, which invaluablely enriches the group's set of responses to the challenges of reality. Through dialogues and collective investigations, everyday issues stimulate the spontaneous emergence of culture, and individual and social identities are strengthened.

If relationships are built in a competitive and oppressive way, however, the fragmentation of individuals and life is encouraged. Those who compete understand that there is not enough space or resources for everyone, and that the survival of some depends on the exploitation or elimination of others. For them, culture serves as an instrument of control, which must program, lead, distract, contain people, in order to prevent social processes from denouncing or threatening models and protocols established authoritatively.

Life happens in the midst of advances and setbacks, and we need to see it in perspective. Although facts are irrefutable, the story always depends on the narrator's point of view. Historical investigations stimulate reflections on social processes, behaviors and identities. With the study of the past, we can understand the processes of construction of the present. Thus, we gain perspective to visualize paths and possibilities in the future. When we understand where we came from and where we are, we realize who we are and can identify where we want to go. Thus, spontaneous and connected to reality, we can be the best of ourselves. The contact of Europeans with colored peoples implied clashes between opposing understandings about the meaning of life, as white culture and lifestyle were imposed on humanity through warlike superiority. In the midst of genocide, slavery, land theft, looting of wealth and knowledge, whites created institutions and structures that allowed the exploitation of people and nature, and appropriated everything they considered useful. The cynically romanticized white perspective on history disguises the perverse nature of European culture and goes to great lengths to hide the identity of colored peoples. They distort the history of humanity (by presenting themselves as culturally superior and responsible for the development of civilization) and consolidate oppressive perspectives (by glorifying violence, crimes, genocide). For centuries, white people see themselves as superior to other peoples on Earth, and they use ideologies (racism, evolutionism, economism) as resources to build, through the exploitation of people and nature, the world of privileges they dream of, and to justify the biocidal and suicidal system they call civilization. The Brazil’s formation as a white company, without a popular project and with structural social inequalities, resulted in a reality in which colored peoples represent the majority of the country's oppressed populations. The lack of this understanding favors the emergence of palliative and excluding solutions, which do not deal with the origin of the problems and worsen symptoms. White peoples’ lifestyle, which ignores and disregards the Sacred, and has the market as the maximum reference of human existence, promotes a model that operates as a parasite, which intends to explore the Earth and life to the limit of what is possible to guarantee perks and mirages to the holders of power. In order to convince humanity that they represent the interests of all and to maintain positions of leadership and control, however, they even make promises, adjustments, reforms, concessions, as long as they are nothing more than harmless changes to the structure of the system they created. The perspectives of colored peoples, however, in denouncing the brutality of white colonialism, are critical, painful, but realistic, revealing and liberating. Survivors, colored peoples continue to fight for the right to be authentic protagonists of their own existences and of an ethnically diverse society, which needs to be fundamentally human. The priority of any nation should be to promote and protect life, but ideologies such as racism and evolutionism cause divisions and wars. Despite being enslaved, underestimated, excluded, denied identity, perceived as fauna to be exploited, colored peoples built Brazil. Their cultures, however, condemned by whites as "primitive" and harmful to society, were violently repressed and persecuted. Even so, they are what we emphasize when we describe Brazil socially to foreigners. The oppression of colored peoples and Nature by the white man’s way of life is the main cause of the social, political, economic and environmental crises that humanity is going through. And it is in their perceptions of the world that white people can find understanding to live in cooperation, in an inclusive way, naturally happy, grateful for the miracle of existence. If we are the result of dialogues between civilizations, we can live free from colonial monologue, maintained authoritatively with the use of force (which represses the expression of other understandings of existence), and with the support of illusions (which falsify reality). This work, the result of about twenty years of experiences, dialogues, research, studies and reflections, presents, in a brief, fluid, panoramic and accessible way, a black perspective of the history of Brazil. Without pretending to exhaust an immense subject, we combine political, economic, cultural, scientific, spiritual and strategic elements of African, European and Brazilian historical processes and characters to motivate reflections on African identity, white colonialism, slavery, consequences of abolition, privileges of color, fallacies of white “civilization”, and vital contributions of blacks to Brazil and humanity. In order to prioritize the flow of reading, we avoided making footnotes. For those who wish to go deeper, we present, in the Bibliography, works that we researched during the preparation of this study. In addition, nowadays, one should always take advantage of the possibilities of online research to compare information or different interpretations on any topic. We continue the partnership with Paulo do Amparo, who once again presented us with illustrations and a commentary (which immeasurably enriched this work), and with Professor Clayton Avelar, who affectionately provided the synopsis of this study and the historiographical review (which avoided inaccuracies or errors). Even so, possible errors are my responsibility. We hope that this work, carried out with effort and personal dedication, will contribute to alleviating the scarcity of information in Portuguese about Africa and Africans in the country with the largest number of blacks after Nigeria. We also hope that this reading brings liberating and empowering reflections on life and living, and that this motivates the expression of feelings, understandings and talents in works for the uplifting of humanity. One Love and Maximum Respect.

The author was born in Recife (PE) in 1974, graduated in journalism, became a translator and interpreter of the English language and specialized in international relations. Since 2010, through a public contest, he has been an Indigenist at the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI). In the mid-1990s, André discovered Rastafari in England, and was drawn to investigating the African diaspora and Brazil's black roots. Back in the country, he approached Capoeira and deepened his studies on how Africa and Africans contributed to the formation of Brazil.

In the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, motivated by studies on international relations and the history of Brazil and the world, the author began to combine information from different readings and experiences to formulate visions about Black Brazil. This book was written between the years 2017 and 2018, after the release of the author's first book (Rastafari - Healing for the Nations - A Brazilian Perspective). Result of about 20 years of studies, experiences, dialogues and reflections, this work intends to contribute, in a brief, fluid and accessible way, to the advancement of reflections on the history of black people in Brazil, but through African perspectives, and not colonial.

The author considers that this type of reflection is fundamental to unlocking social impasses in the country that received the most enslaved Africans in the world, which has the largest number of blacks outside Africa, and which still suffers daily from the ignored consequences of the culture of slavery.