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i need you all to understand racial relations in latin america don't work the same and are not under the same rules of the usa. the level of racial miscigenation latin america went through makes it nearly impossible to determine race/ethnicity by blood.
not only we're not even aware of our own ancestry the majority of the time, records were few and in between and interracial marriage was the norm. most brazilians are a degree of mixing of natives, slaves and settlers.
which part of this culture can i claim? which part of this racial/ethnic background can i say i belong to? colonialism strips us of belonging. exploitation makes us wander around not knowing where we came and not knowing where we'll go.
i've mention this a hundred times but in brazil, the same family can have Black people, white people, native-looking people, and we don't know anything other than what our grandparents can remember. and sometimes the memory is so painful they won't tell us anyways.
my grandmother knows her own grandfather was a slave, but he was the child of the slave owner. my grandfather is probably the child of forcibly assimilated natives who were massacred if they didn't comply. do you know the weight of this?
the fact that i am living and breathing right now is because people were killed, women were raped, natives were butchered, Blacks were enslaved. I am all of them and I am no one. How do you go forward with this? How do you manage the weight of not knowing and knowing too much?
the concepts and limitations of american-centric racial relations do not apply here. my own faith is a mix of different oppressed people coming together to resist the sheer brutality of colonization. it's not clear cut and it's painful as fuck. i don't know what to make of it.
