Latin America Today
Rethinking the Argentine Blackness
Omer Freixa Argentine Africanist Historian Professor and Researcher at the University of Buenos Aires and Tres de Febrero( UBA- UNTREF). Professor at the Superior Council of Catholic Education. Buenos Aires, Argentina
Argentina is a nation that prides itself from an absolute whiteness. In the twentieth century, blackness leads to a very particular and contemptuous statement that refers to the beginning of Peronism— October 17, 1945— and therefrom, as identity category, it arrives to the present time. From a sociological perspective, interpreting what implied this October 17 in the way of conceiving the Other, we must explain the birth of Peronism in historical context, but firstly blackness must be characterized.
Blackness in Western Civilization The word black recurs in speech and its characterization is predominantly negative throughout history. Today it has negative sense in most contexts. The Afro-groups prefer other words to define themselves with identity categories: Afro-Latin Americans or, more recently, African descent. As per the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, black denotes almost always imperfections and / or absences: an object whose surface does not reflect any visible radiation, the absence of any color, or whatever lacking of the corresponding whiteness. As an adjective, black becomes always negative: extremely sad and melancholic; unhappy, unlucky or unfortunate, very dirty. It is also associated with the clandestine and illegal world— black( evil) magic, black( crime) novel— and even with the bad luck: going through dark times. The only positive definition is as term of affection or, at best, as reference to a person with dark skin color.
In the latter regard, several social representations circulate as a cultural product from the vision that the West has built about the subject. Argentina is a good example. The assumption is the ontological superiority imposed over Africa by the Western civilization, which colonized America(: 2003, 25; Picotti: Solomianski 1998, 17). The prejudices about congenital ability are repeated to condense the irrational image made from about three thousand years ago( Iniesta: 2009, 11, 15). Contemporary works point to two stereotypes about the image of the black people: a childish and joyful person, or a bestial and savage one, less than human( Frigerio: 2000, 76). The two representations intersect and are a historical product dating back to the Greco-Roman world. The compendium of negative characterizations from the past led to think black people as irrational inhabitants of societies without history, as German philosopher Hegel reasoned. In the nineteenth century, an evolutionary scale was constructed with blacks occupying the lowest rungs in the diversity of human races. Even the infamous Middle Passage reached the paroxysm of denying the humanity of enslaved Africans for more than three centuries. In the eighteenthcentury, no " civilized " person from the West disagreed on the inferiority of the black, pushed to a peripheral place( Iniesta,
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