The Paradoxes Of Racial Politics: The Politics of Race and Globalization, Part II

The first installment of this three-part series, “The Politics of Race and Globalization,” focused on racial and ethnic identities in the Americas. This second installment dovetails nicely with the first by investigating ways in which these identities are used politically-negatively and positively—both by the state and by communities seeking social change. The political application of these identities has become increasingly useful in recent decades as more communities throughout the Americas face new forms of exclusion and marginality in the context of neoliberal structural adjustment.

January/February
2005
Volume: 
38
Number: 
4

Taking Note

Fred Rosen
Though you wouldn’t know it from the evening news, the Bush Administration has not lost interest in the Americas. It is pushing as hard as ever for an “opening” of the region’s economies through an agreement that would give pride of place to transnational business and promote easy cross-border flows of investment, trade and various kinds of services (though not labor).

Intro

NACLA
div align="justify">The first installment of this three-part series, “The Politics of Race and Globalization,” focused on racial and ethnic identities in the Americas. This second installment dovetails nicely with the first by investigating ways in which these identities are used politically—negatively and positively—both by the state and by communities seeking social change.

Updates

Jane Regan
The acrid smell hanging over the once-grand hillside neighborhood of Bel-Aire, near Haiti’s bleached white National Palace, was by then all too familiar: burning human flesh.
G. Derrick Hodge
Roldy was 19 years old and homeless in Havana when I spoke to him in January 2003. He had just been released from prison after serving six months for punching a policeman. Though not a fan of the current government, he nonetheless relied upon Revolutionary ideology to express his discontent.
Andrés Gaudin
When Néstor Kirchner assumed the presidency of Argentina in May 2003 with only 22% of votes cast, few imagined his approval rating would reach 90% only weeks later, much less that such support would last. After nearly 20 months in office, he has managed to maintain record popular support.

Report

Mimi Sheller
At the very moment when Haitians should have been celebrating the bicentennial of their revolutionary overthrow of the most powerful slave regime in the world, they instead found their country thrown into political instability and internecine violence with rival political groupings openly assassinating opponents.
Alejandro Grimson
During the 1990s, Argentina’s government and national media repeatedly called attention to a wave of migration that was supposedly flooding the country with new immigrants, a wave comparable in scale to the influx of Europeans at the turn of the previous century.
Shane Greene
Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo entered office in July 2001 raising ethnic banners to mobilize the masses against the corrupt and authoritarian regime of his predecessor, Alberto Fujimori. Labeled as a modern-day Pachacútec—the Incan emperor widely credited with expanding and renovating the ancient empire—and waving the rainbow-colored flag of the Inca, Toledo configured his place within a centuries-old mythology still lodged in the popular Peruvian consciousness: the return of the Inca.
Mala Htun
When the Brazilian government began considering affirmative action policies based on race, critics claimed they would be impossible to implement because of the ambiguity of the country’s racial categories. Given extensive mixing and fluid identities, how can the state determine just who is black? Yet supporters of affirmative action say the question of “who is black?” is disingenuous.

Tracking the Economy

Katharine Andrade-Eekhoff
North-to-South remittances derived from international labor migration have become a hot topic in the last few years. As international development aid and foreign investment have dwindled, policymakers have become very interested in leveraging remittance monies for so-called “productive uses.”

In Brief

James T. Kimer
A series of high-profile corruption scandals rocked Costa Rica last October, implicating three ex-presidents and forcing one of them to resign from his post of Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS).

¡YA! Youth Activism

Teo Ballvé
“This isn’t a book, it’s a brick with which to shatter cynicism,” said Luther Blisset, a group of Italian anarchists. They could not have been more right: at five by seven inches and 320 pages, this book could do some serious damage to the idea that humans are primarily motivated by self-interest.

Article

Teo Ballvé
HAITI SHOCKED THE WORLD WHEN IT WON ITS independence two centuries ago: a hopeful sym- bol of liberation for the oppressed and a fearful threat of rebellion for the powerful. The so-called "Black Republic" instantly became an international pariah, and was alternately used, abused or ignored depending on the situation's convenience for global powers.