Read on Twitter
i need you all to understand racial relations in latin america don& #39;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& #39;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& #39;ll go.
i& #39;ve mention this a hundred times but in brazil, the same family can have Black people, white people, native-looking people, and we don& #39;t know anything other than what our grandparents can remember. and sometimes the memory is so painful they won& #39;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& #39;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?
