Lélia De Almeida Gonzalez: Racism In America

According to the biography made by Bairros (1999), Lélia de Almeida Gonzalez was born in 1935, in Minas Gerais . She was the daughter of an indigenous woman and a black man. Her mother was a domestic servant and her father worked in a railroad. In total, the couple had 18 children. Lélia Gonzalez, in spite of the family financial difficulties, passed from a nanny to a student of History and Philosophy and followed a career as a teacher. When she was young, Gonzalez had tried to whiten and had denied her racial identity. However, when she married, her husband’s white family did not accept her. This process, as well as the suicide of her husband, led Gonzales to rethink and assume her racial identity.
Bairros still points out that in 1974, Gonzalez

According to the author, colonialism occurred along with the emergency of theories of the white supremacy and the conception of modern science, which attributes to the non-white peoples the characteristics of wild, exotic, absurd and superstitious. These theories and colonialism led to the formation of two types of racism: the open and the disguised. The first would be typical of the countries of Anglo-Saxon, Dutch and Germanic origin, which rejected the miscegenation (although they raped black women). In this type of racism, everyone with ‘black blood’ is black, not always considering the color of the skin. Then, ethnicity/color would be given by lineage. The purity of the white race, thus, was exalted. Differently, the disguised or denigrated racism was practiced mainly in the countries of Portuguese-Spanish colonization, and evoked racial democracy and miscegenation (Gonzalez, 1988:72). The difference is due the Moorish and Arab presence in the formation of countries as Portugal, Spain and France (Gonzalez, 1984; Gonzalez, 1988), which leads to the absence of a ‘pure people’ in these places. The ideology of whitening would one of the main forms of manifestation of this type of racism and sophisticated enough to keep blacks and Indians “as subordinated segments within most explored class” (Gonzalez, 1988:73, own

A black child in these countries, for example, knows that he is black, contrary to what happens in countries of disguised racism. The consequence of this segregation is a more autonomous scientific production in relation to the white world. Differently, in a country where disguised racism predominates, would be no strong racial consciousness, but African culture would withstand over the years and affect the formation of national culture. Gonzalez points out that this strong resistance of African culture would not have occurred in countries of open racism, because part of its strategy was the denial to blacks of their forms of organization and life. This process was such that the African-based religions, in these countries, are hardly evident. Thus, the blackness of countries with open racism began to seek in the countries of disguised racism, where the African culture merged with the others, the rest of its connectivity with Africa (Gonzalez,