Black and Indigenous Resistance in The Americas Fr... - (1 A Time To Recalibrate)

Chapter One
A Time to Recalibrate
Analyzing and Resisting the Americas-Wide
Project of Racial Retrenchment
Charles R. Hale and Leith Mullings
Today we find ourselves in the midst of a liminal political state, akin to what
Antonio Gramsci (2011 [1929–1935]), called an “interregnum, [when] . . .
the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” His further observation—that
in this state, “morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass”—
also applies to the resurgent “racial project” that we confront today. While
Copyright © 2020. Lexington Books/Fortress Academic. All rights reserved.
we noted the broad outlines of this project in the original research proposal
that resulted in this volume, it unfolded with a violence and virulence that we
could not fathom four years ago when we began. Drawing on research car-
ried out in the seven sites of struggle, we offer here a preliminary analysis of
this Americas-wide transformation, with special attention to both commonal-
ities and variation across the region, and a concluding emphasis on “action-
able” analysis. That is, we contend that insights gained from putting these
seven experiences in horizontal dialogue with one another advances a global
analysis of the current phase of racial capitalism, contributes to critical think-
ing about strategies of resistance in each site of struggle, and perhaps, to a
sharpened vision of shared political horizons. The fundamental commonality
among the Black and Indigenous protagonists of these seven sites is historic
structural racism, which has dispossessed communities, destroyed lifeways,
exploited labor, and conferred social death, even if it did not succeed in the
primordial objective of breaking our collective spirit of resistance. However,
while this structural racism has been a constant over the past five hundred
years, its particularities have varied, across both space and time. The chapters
that follow provide data and analysis crucial for understanding the current
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Black and indigenous resistance in the americas : From multiculturalism to racist backlash. (2020). Lexington Books/Fortress Academic.
Created from utoronto on 2024-02-24 04:26:03.
22 Charles R. Hale and Leith Mullings
phase, which we characterize as an Americas-wide project of racial retrench-

ment.
Following a methodological principle established in our collective discus-
sions, we take our analytic cues in the characterization of this emergent (and
in some respects resurgent) racial project from close observation of people’s
resistance to it. While these strategies of resistance are multiple and varied, a
strong current, somewhat novel and almost certainly on the rise, is what the
Mapuche team refers to as rupturista and we render in English as “radical
refusal”: deep disillusionment with the state’s incapacity to meet basic de-
mands, or to remedy historic inequalities through the established framework
of rights, be they rights grounded in the recognition of cultural difference or
in the promise of fully equal access to the privileges of citizenship. 1 Later on
we offer a more detailed examination of this rupturista current, and its rela-
tion to the array of contrasting political strategies present in all seven sites of
struggle; here it provides the catalyst for our central argument. We are enter-
ing an era when movements for Black and Indigenous rights—as convention-
ally understood—are suffering from diminishing returns; and resistance to
the ideological and discursive expressions of racism—battles that seemed to
have been mostly won—also are losing ground. That is, not only have rights
begun to “ring hollow,” but humanist critiques of racism are beginning to
ring hollow as well. As deeply troubling as these affirmations are, they also
carry the promise of ground-clearing: an opportunity to recalibrate our analy-
sis of racism, and to rethink our strategies for anti-racist struggle from here
forward.
This shift to an era of racial retrenchment has been a long time in the
making. In the United States, tell-tale signs began to appear before the ink on
hard-fought civil rights legislation had dried. By the late 1970s “reverse
discrimination” had become a rallying cry for attacks on affirmative action.
The discontent was exemplified in the infamous Bakke case in 1978, in
which a white male applicant sued the University of California for discrimi-
nation. Though the court upheld the abstract legality of affirmative action,
the Bakke challenge was the first in a successful series of attacks on the
underlying principle that structural racial inequality could only be remedied
by institutional change that directly addressed the unequal racial distribution
of resources, privileges and benefits that the system upheld. By the early
1990s, throughout Latin America, the limited recognition of rights grounded
in cultural difference helped give a respectable face to a political economic
model that produced deepening conditions of inequality for the very peoples
whose rights were ostensibly favored. 2 For a long period—two or three
decades at least—this strategy continued to hold sway in many quarters:
fighting the good fight to expand the reach of rights that were limited by
design; tireless efforts to call out and contest racist ideologies; persistent
arguments that the legacies of colonialism, scientific racism, and exclusion-
A Time to Recalibrate 23
ary modes of citizenship provide a justification for racial hierarchy that must
be dismantled, one act of symbolic violence, one perpetrator, at a time. We
now have reached a time when the limitations of this strategy, viewed
through a Gramscian lens, have become painfully evident. We argue that the
strategy requires recalibration, in response to the dual question: Can strug-
gles over these particular representations be won? Will winning them change
the structural foundations of racism? In the face of racial retrenchment
throughout the Americas, we argue that increasingly, protagonists’ answers
to both parts of the question is a qualified “no.” 3
Broadly speaking, the ideological justification for this tectonic shift to-
ward racial retrenchment is an unstable fusion of (or at times alternation
between) post-racialism and post-humanist racism. Nancy Fraser (2017) and
Achille Mbembe (2016) both have characterized the shift in the latter terms:
the deep and durable fusion between liberal democracy and neoliberal capi-
talism—what Fraser calls “progressive neoliberalism”—which emerged in
the post–World War II era, and gradually consolidated through the end of the
last century, has been shattered. While this fusion was contradictory from the
start, it had enormous hegemonic potential: liberal democracy provided the
humanist principles, which held out promise that the most rapacious and
predatory features of neoliberal capitalism could be reined in and held at bay.
The low-octane, anti-racism of the multicultural turn in the 1990s fit neatly
within this scheme: substantive enough to open a narrow path of upward
mobility for a select few, while assuring that the vast majority of racialized
peoples remained locked out, injured by the same structural inequality as
always, with the added insult that they could now be blamed for being inca-
pable of seizing the opportunities that the newly granted rights conferred.
Yet even while many of us concurred with this critique for some time, an
added element took some of us by surprise: not only did “progressive neolib-
eralism” fail miserably to address historical problems of structural racism, it
also failed to address the basic needs and aspirations of large sectors of the
dominant majority-culture populations of the Americas: whites in the United
States and white-mestizos in Latin America. Not only have these sectors
grown steadily more disaffected from progressive neoliberalism, their most
vehement critiques have been channeled to place responsibility, not with the
general failures of neoliberal capitalism, but with the hypocrisies of liberal
democracy. In the wake of this backlash, every single step forward of pro-
gressive neoliberalism—however modest, partial, and contradictory—has
come under intense fire: from gender and sexual rights, to environmental
stewardship, to the multicultural turn, to humanist decency toward the plight
of immigrants.
Here the question of racism and anti-racist strategies comes back into
focus, more centrally in our view than either Fraser or Mbembe make clear in
their otherwise important interventions. Contesting racial retrenchment by
focusing on the rise of white supremacist ideologies is essential in ethical

terms, but it makes little strategic sense in this historical moment, for three
interconnected reasons. First, given the lines of political polarization as they
are currently drawn, this critique would tend to align us with the defense of
progressive neoliberalism, essentially an indefensible project. There may
well be compelling reasons for “big tent” opposition to the direst political
manifestations of racial retrenchment, gathering support from all sectors that
find it untenable and reprehensible. Yet this approach only makes strategic
sense if informed by the clear acknowledgement that one large sector of this
anti-racist coalition bears considerable responsibility for the problems they
are now confronting, and if—for that very reason—returning to the status-
quo ante is precluded as an option. These two conditions, however, make for
a delicate and difficult possible process of “coalition building.”
Second, while the successor project to progressive neoliberalism—what
we are calling racial retrenchment—has largely abandoned multiculturalism
and has rolled back key dimensions of equal rights guarantees, it has not, in
all cases, adopted an explicit discourse of white supremacy to justify domi-
nance and consolidate power. This affirmation is paradoxical because, to take
Trump’s America—the emblematic case of nihilist neoliberalism—white su-
premacy is rampant, and Trump’s ascent has enabled and empowered white
supremacists of all stripes. We argue, however, that racial retrenchment is
most effectively justified by an aggressive post-racialism, which defends
racial privilege by lashing out at any expression of collective identity or
demand for racial justice as unreasonable, undeserved, and conflictive. This
punitive and threatening accusation of “reverse racism” (one hallmark of
post-racialism) enables a rising tide of white supremacy, without drawing

explicitly on it. Rather, against the backdrop of continuous violence against
racialized peoples throughout the Americas, explicit manifestations of white
supremacy will come and go, reeled in or rolled out as dictated by political
conditions. White supremacy is so immanent in the productive relations and
resource distribution of contemporary racial capitalism that it needs no spe-
cifically tailored justification; in most cases, post-racialism does the same
work more effectively. For this reason, struggles against the worst ideologi-
cal manifestations of racism (a rescinding of the Muslim ban, opposition to
racialized hate speech, prosecution of Nazis and perpetrators of genocide),
have the prospect of lasting impact only if they confront the structural fea-
tures of the emergent project head-on. Put differently, “group differentiated
exposure to state sanctioned and extra-legal premature death”—Ruth Gil-
more’s (2002) parsimonious definition of racism—may grow in the era of
racial retrenchment, without consistent recourse to an ideological justifica-
tion affirming that Black and Indigenous peoples (among others) deserve to
die young.
Third, and finally, the need to recalibrate comes from a race-centered

analysis of the perplexing question: why have large swaths of the dominant
culture expressed their disaffection with progressive neoliberalism by lashing
out at liberal democracy, rather than against neoliberal capitalism? A central
explanation, we contend, is that their existential pain, fears, and anxieties—
produced fundamentally by the failures of progressive neoliberalism—have
been understood and channeled in racial terms. By this reasoning, if they
continue to suffer in an ostensibly “post-racial” era, it must be because liberal
democracy has mandated an unfair and excessive distribution of benefits to
people who they view as inferior. To attack the ideology of racial inferiority
inherent in this logic is reasonable—even indispensable—in ethical terms;
but it is strategically dubious. Predicated on an equal rights framework, it
makes recourse to shared humanist values of liberal democracy, in which
impoverished members of the dominant culture have lost faith, and which
racialized peoples (for good reason) never fully endorsed. This approach runs
the risk of reinforcing post-racialism, rather than focusing critical attention
on how this ideology encompasses a robust defense of the inherent inequities
of racial capitalism.
This book argues for a successor strategy of anti-racism predicated on
efforts to bolster the political-economic power of racialized peoples, with
primary recourse neither to state-centered (and state-sanctioned) humanist
values of liberal democracy, nor to state-endorsed minority rights. Instead,
we argue for a contestation of white supremacy that begins with a fundamen-
tal critique of racial capitalism, a social formation predicated on colonial
dispossession and racial terror over the past five hundred years, whose basic
features have remained in place, while its ideological manifestations have

evolved with the political times, including a long period of explicit critique
of white supremacy itself. In sum, we should not have been surprised by the
virulent racial eruptions that the Trump presidency has brought to the fore,
not because our hard-fought battles against racism had not advanced quite far
enough, but because neoliberal capitalism has such a prodigious capacity to
evolve and adapt, neutralizing (if not reversing) hard fought achievements of
racialized peoples in the previous era. Howard Winant’s (2015: 321) affirma-
tion focused on the United States could apply just as easily to multicultural
reforms throughout the hemisphere: “though modernized and ‘moderated,’
structural racism has been fortified, not undermined, by civil rights reform.”
This does not mean that struggles for rights and for racial inequality have
been unsuccessful; but rather, that their success has brought on powerful
neutralizing counter-measures. We must learn from these setbacks. In the era
of racial retrenchment, contestation of racism and white supremacy will be
deeply consequential only if it attacks the problem by focusing squarely on
its structural underpinnings.
This is the central lesson we have learned from the resistance movements
associated with the seven sites of struggle encompassed in this volume, even
if the particularities and complexities of each site require careful attention,
and push toward further refinement of that overall conclusion. We develop
this analysis through reflections on five questions, each of which frames one
of the ensuing sections:
• Is it helpful to think of the present era as an emerging racial project?

• Whatever the precise characterization of this moment, how did we get
here?
• What are the commonalities and variations across the seven sites of strug-
gle, in the relations of oppression that the protagonists confront, and their
strategies of resistance?
• What political horizons are opened, once we have assigned “rights talk” a
lower priority, and given greater currency to strategies and sensibilities of
“radical refusal”?
• How might this analysis be “actionable” in antiracist struggles across the
Americas?
This last question is of course the most crucial. Racial retrenchment is a

different adversary from its “progressive” neoliberal cousin, even if the
underlying conditions of racial capitalism are basically similar. On the one
hand, it comes with a dangerous increase in racial insult and injury, both
everyday and existential, which demands vigorous, immediate resistance.
This resistance draws on a wide range of tools and methods, and seeks allies
from every quarter, raising the possibility that a return to a “big tent” pro-
gressive neoliberalism must be—out of sheer necessity—the politics of the
day. On the other hand, if we look closely, we find a second current in some
of these anti-racist resistance politics: a trenchant critique of racial capital-
ism, informing an adamant refusal to return to an updated version of progres-
sive neoliberalism, which would reduce the pain at the cost of a reproduction
of the structural conditions that brought on the emergent project of racial
retrenchment in the first place. While these two currents appear to be diver-
gent, and some will present them as dichotomous, we have learned from the
movements themselves to view them as two components of a single strategy,
two sets of political sensibilities which, though mildly contradictory, can be
creatively combined.
Rather than simply affirming this two-pronged strategy, however, we also
aim to name and explore its obstacles and counterarguments. There will be
many who prefer the safer bet of a return to the status quo ante, downplaying
the critique of racial capitalism in return for incremental diminishment of the
pain; and it is hard to know for sure that they are wrong. Those Black and
Indigenous people who have benefited—however modestly—from progres-
sive neoliberalism, will be especially reluctant to abandon that harbor in the

face of the current political storm. Moreover, waging anti-racist struggles
against a backdrop of deepened skepticism toward liberal humanist princi-
ples of cultural rights and racial equality is uncharted terrain for most racial
justice efforts: beyond the critique of post-racial ideology, these struggles
need groundings, whether in the richness of alternative ontologies, or in a
modernist universalism that avoids the well-known pitfalls of progressive
neoliberalism. Another set of challenges emerge when these movements de-
vote primary energies to refusal and autonomy, deemphasizing the struggle
from within. Proponents of this approach—what we call “rupturista” move-
ments—follow an especially precarious path: they must keep their distance
from powerful state and capitalist forces, resisting their powerful influence,
yet without contesting those forces head-on. Further questions revolve
around cross-cutting inequities—most notably, but not exclusively, those
associated with gender difference—which have corrosive effects on these
movements if not engaged from the start. Yet this engagement is never easy,
and too often defaults to a “unite and fight” position that leaves crucial issues
unattended. These are just a sampling of the questions that our collective
thinking has raised, without clear or definitive answers. However, even to
have raised them, and placed them in relational hemispheric dialogue, has
been a source of solace and energy in the face of an otherwise desolate
panorama.
A NEW RACIAL PROJECT?

Admittedly, our choice of terminology in framing this first question partly

prefigures the answer. The notion of “racial project” (Omi and Winant 1987)
refers to concerted efforts by powerful actors and institutions to achieve a
particular distribution of societal resources along racial lines; mobilization
from below deeply influences this process, whether as catalyst or negotiation
of a preliminary outcome. Our addition of the modifier “new” points to the
ascendancy of both a pattern of distribution and an accompanying ideological
justification that are substantially different from what has come before.
While the hemispheric lurch to the right, and its guiding thrust of racial
retrenchment, does appear to call for just such a focus, employing this frame
also comes with risks, best addressed from the outset. First, highlighting an
epochal shift could give short shrift to our acknowledgment of continuities,
such as the notion of territorial dispossession through elimination of the
original inhabitants (the central axis of “settler colonialism” theory), or no-
tions of anti-Black racism as inherently constitutive of modernity (the prem-
ise of Afro-pessimism and aligned positions). Second, the “racial project”
formulation continues to rely somewhat on the “base-superstructure” meta-
phor, which much of contemporary social theory has set aside, not so much
for being wrong, as incomplete. 4 Complementary emphases on intersection-
ality, spirituality and affect, corporality, and libidinal economies, for exam-
ple, all work to displace this metaphor, offering a richer, more multifaceted
grounding for analysis in its place. We attempt to manage these risks here not
by abandoning the “racial project” terminology, but rather, by affirming
these complementary facets, and incorporating them into our analysis. Our
objective in this section, then, is twofold: to offer our revised understanding
of the concept of “racial project,” and to probe its usefulness for understand-
ing emergent patterns of racial subjection and resistance in the Americas.
Our understanding of the racial project concept in this seven-country
research endeavor has two central points of departure. First, we seek to
develop a relational analysis of Black and Indigenous peoples of the Ameri-
cas, attending to the particularities of racial formation, collective self-mak-
ing, and resistance for both groups of people (including variations within
each group), while attempting also to embed this analysis in one unified
frame. In other words, we seek to advance resonant and actionable analysis
of the broad processes of marginalization and oppression that all racialized
peoples confront, without committing the disturbingly common error of jam-
ming them all into the same theoretical frame, which neither resonates amply
with particular experiences nor offers strategic guidance for action. Our sec-
ond overarching objective is to embed this relational analysis of Black and
Indigenous peoples in a characterization of the broader political-economic
system of which they form part, both as victims of exploitation and dispos-
session, and as protagonists of countervailing collective action. It is not
enough, in this sense, to position Black and Indigenous peoples as battered

by, and episodically resisting, neoliberal capitalism; rather, we seek systemic
analysis that locates both peoples, and associated racial dynamics, front and
center. In pursuing these two objectives, we are fortunate to have a number
of authors working along similar lines, whose work we draw on heavily. 5
An enormous body of critical race theory—much focused on Black and
Indigenous peoples of the American hemisphere—has been produced in re-
cent decades. Peter Wade’s now-classic Race and Ethnicity in Latin America
(1997) set the standard for analyses of race in Latin America that simultane-
ously engaged Black and Indigenous peoples. Yet even this seminal text
reflected the relative absence of Americas-wide analyses, as well as of cur-
rents of critical race theory produced by activist-intellectuals engaged in the
simultaneous task of understanding and contesting racial hierarchy. Since
then, a larger body of broadly comparative analysis of racial formation in the
Americas has emerged, such as Bonilla-Silva (2008), Hooker (2005; 2017a),
Paschel (2016), Safa (2005), and Telles (2014). We take inspiration from this
later work, drawing from it three guiding principles. First, we insist on a
hemispheric perspective, placing racialized peoples in the United States in
relational dialogue with their Black and Indigenous Latin American counter-
parts. 6 Second, we abandon the concept of “ethnicity,” in part because it has
inevitably fed the noxious and spurious implicit supposition that Indigenous
peoples are “ethnic” while Black peoples are “racial”; and in part because
none of the critical race theorists whom we most want to engage (e.g., those
associated with theories of “settler colonialism,” and various strands of the
Black radical tradition) seem to view the ethnicity concept as useful or even
relevant. Third, we highlight the theoretical founding premise of our project,
which gives centrality to insights gained from anti-racist praxis, with the
supposition that these insights contain novel diagnoses of the broader racial
predicaments that they face.
In attempting to develop this relational frame, we begin by highlighting
the inherent racial dimensions of neoliberal capitalism. This first step is
crucial: since its inception capitalism has both profited from and actively
reproduced racial difference, a characteristic that the term “racial capitalism”
helps to capture. The immediate next step is to pursue structural-historical
differences between Black and Indigenous peoples, to acknowledge and ex-
plore site-specific variation within each group, and over time. This compo-
nent of differentiation is especially key as we move toward the present, and
attempt to map epochal shifts. As Andy Clarno (2017) reminds us, neoliberal
capitalism in the era of multiculturalism brought small but highly significant
numbers of racialized peoples into the middle class, while simultaneously
condemning the vast majority to structured inequality. Without fully endors-
ing Clarno’s epitomizing phrase for the emerging era—”neoliberal apart-
heid”—we certainly agree with him that neoliberal capitalism today, at a
global level, is characterized by deepening racialized inequality, and that the

trickle of upward mobility among racialized populations accentuates this
trend, for two interconnected reasons: on one hand, the presence of this
“talented tenth” in positions of relative power helps to conceal the systemic
logic of racial subordination; on the other, even these relatively privileged
few continue to experience racism, which sometimes encourages them to
prioritize multi-class movements that are anti-racist (including various forms
of Black or Indigenous nationalism), but do not explicitly contest class in-
equality.
Three additional dimensions of racial capitalism are especially prominent
in the emergent era, which together comprise its recalcitrance: securitization,
financialization, and accumulation through dispossession. Securitization re-
fers to the novel ways in which technologies and institutions that deploy
coercive power have been incorporated into the very fabric of global produc-
tive relations. While capitalist relations since their inception have been ena-
bled and protected by military force, there are three novel dimensions of
securitization: (1) the extent to which state military institutions themselves
have become major private sector actors (Amar 2018); (2) the privatization
of security operations, such that individuals, corporations and even govern-

ments achieve security objectives according to their ability to pay rather than
as an expression of state policy (Murch 2016); (3) the increasingly normal-
ized premise that neoliberal capitalism requires constant exercise of coercive
force, or at least the threat of such, to remain viable (see: Browne [2015],
Maskovsky and Bjork-James [2020], Harvey [2005]). Financialization re-
fers, in general terms, to global transformations of capitalism through which
earnings from financial transactions comprise an ever growing share of in-
come and profit in the economy (Kotz 2015). Accumulation through dispos-
session, a notion popularized by David Harvey (2006), names an increasingly
important driver of capital accumulation globally that is especially prominent
in the Americas: extractive industries rely centrally on territories, natural
resources, and primary goods production, which in turn requires the dispos-
session of people who previously lived on and with these landscapes. Leith
Mullings (2005) extended this concept to demonstrate its centrality to pro-
cesses of racial subordination, and many others have further elaborated this
insight (e.g., Gomez-Barris [2017]).
All three processes contribute directly to the overall trend—so widely
noted that it has nearly achieved the status of “commonsense”—of deepening
inequality in the global economy (even when economic growth is healthy),
and further political empowerment of the one percent, which in turn allows
these groups to lock the conditions in place to consolidate power further, and
to further enrich themselves (Robinson 2008). We leave it to others to theor-
ize these general dynamics, focusing our particular contribution on their
racial dimensions. That is, on how they come together to constitute a new
phase of racial capitalism: how the deepening inequality is racialized; how

lower-class members of the dominant racial group suffer the consequences of
global inequality, while coming to understand their plight in racialized terms;
how the specter of race-based resistance acquires new significance, as a fatal
threat to the entire edifice.
Rarely contested convincingly, the notion of “racial capitalism” is more
often simply ignored by Marxist and neo-classical economists alike. Con-
ceived a half-century ago, it has steadily gained wide currency in the past
decade, as scholars have demonstrated how racially subordinated peoples
have distinctive positions within, experiences with, and responses to succes-
sive formations of capitalism. One approach in making this case is to lump
all racialized peoples together over space and time, which results in broad
affirmations that are generally valid, but more anodyne than analytically
discerning [e.g., Quijano (2000)]. The Black and Indigenous peoples who are
the focus of this research all certainly have been subjected to colonial/racial
subordination, yet the differences in their experiences and perspectives stand
out as starkly as the similarities. The paradigmatic theoretical divide—be-
tween theories of settler colonialism and Afro-pessimism—is especially use-
ful for working through our general observation, because these theories tend
to place the two peoples directly at odds with one another. In one of the
classic renditions of settler colonialism theory, Patrick Wolfe (2006) stops
just short of lumping enslaved Africans in with European slaveholders, ar-
guing that both contributed to the economic (if not the political) dynamics of
Indigenous dispossession. In eerily parallel fashion, Frank Wilderson’s
(2010) argument for the incommensurability of anti-Blackness with any oth-
er form of racial oppression advances the bracing assertion that “even as
settlers began to wipe Indians out, they were building an interpretive commu-
nity with ‘Savages’ the likes of which Masters were not building with
Slaves” (2010: 46–47). His implication, by extension, is that Indigenous
cultural resistance is a tainted by-product of the genocidal encounter. Glen
Coulthard (2014), for his part, moves us substantially beyond this impasse,
by vigorously critiquing the Native/Indigenous dependence on a “rights to
culture” strategy, recentering neoliberal capitalism as the central obstacle to
Indigenous well-being, and invoking Fanon’s critique of colonialism and
racism, in ways that reestablish substantial Black-Indigenous common
ground. Yet to his credit, rather than leaving the matter in this space of
fortuitous full convergence, Coulthard also attempts to specify the point
where Native/Indigenous struggles depart from Fanonian analysis: whereas
Coulthard assigns fundamental importance to “practices of Indigenous cultu-
ral self-empowerment or self-recognition,” (2014: 153) he notes that Fanon
views these practices with skepticism, at best a “means” but not an “end” of
anticolonial struggle. In the last analysis, then, the antimony remains, though
perhaps reframed as a constructive dialogue rather than an exercise in recip-
rocal de-legitimation.
This is closer to the way we experienced Black-Indigenous dialogue in
the RAIAR research project. By placing racial capitalism and attendant for-
mations of racism front and center, substantial convergences came to the
fore: from the deep history of racial subjection, to the common contemporary
experience of racial retrenchment. The prioritized shared agenda created by
these convergences gave us so much pressing work to accomplish that the
topic of Black-Indigenous difference assumed a markedly secondary role.
Moreover, our strong emphasis on intersectional analysis yielded additional
axes of identification and difference—especially gender but also class—
which cut across the Black-Indigenous divide. Yet another factor that decen-
tered Black-Indigenous difference was the wide variation in political posi-
tions taken by the four Indigenous-centered teams (Mexico, Guatemala, Bo-
livia, Chile) and the three Afro-centered ones (United States, Colombia, Bra-
zil): as explained more fully in a subsequent section, Mapuche researchers
drew on and adapted Afro-pessimist ideas in ways that the other three Indige-
nous teams did not; Afro-Colombians employed legal instruments and strate-
gies designed for Indigenous peoples in ways that the two other Afro-cen-
tered struggles did not. Finally, Black-Indigenous difference may have re-
ceived less emphasis in our project because the country-specific teams had
substantial autonomy in developing their particular analytical-political focus,
and no case specifically engaged Black-Indigenous relations. 7 In no sense
should our experience be taken as a rationale for dismissing Black-Indige-
nous difference; but it does offer a proposed analytical sequencing that starts
with foundational commonalities forged in resistance to racial capitalism, a
convergence that may well be deepening in this emergent era of racial re-
trenchment. This, in turn, allows us to explore Black-Indigenous difference
with greater confidence that the resulting dialogue will be constructive. The
centering of anti-Black racism, for example, regardless of whether or not we
fully endorse the incommensurability argument, takes on central importance
in this approach, not only directed against institutionalized white supremacy,
but also, shining a bright light on ostensibly race-progressive politics (immi-
grant rights movements, Indigenous cultural nationalism, people of color
coalitions, etc.), which far too often inadvertently reproduce the premises of
anti-Blackness. Similarly, the dual logic of physical elimination and territori-
al dispossession, central to the notion of settler colonialism, establishes not
only a powerful critique of racial capitalism, but a vibrant social memory of
radically “other” possible worlds so often missing from “progressive” resis-
tance politics. This connects Indigenous-centered politics, for example, with
various currents of the Black radical imagination that has long nurtured
“freedom dreams” (Kelley 2002) and especially Black feminist thought,
which has envisioned profoundly alternative ways of being (Combahee River
Collective Statement 1977).
Although dialogue on these and other critiques is not apt to yield full
convergence, some intriguing glimmers have surfaced recently. For example,
might Afro-futurism’s call for a radical rethinking of the very notion of what
it means to be human resonate with Native and Indigenous refusals of West-
ern ontologies, and the associated nature-culture dichotomy? The same goes
for a growing current of Black feminism in the United States, including a
sector of the Movement for Black Lives, which combines an explicit critique
of racial capitalism, an active exploration of non-capitalist alternatives, and a
skepticism toward Western ontologies that socialist thought in the past has
too often uncritically endorsed (e.g., The Majority [2018–2019]; Movement
for Black Lives [2016]). If so, this could broaden the foundation for di-
alogue—even if this dimension lies beyond the scope of the research ana-
lyzed here—while reaffirming how the shared critique of racial capitalism
makes that dialogue so generative.
Our assertion that the hemisphere-wide wave of racial retrenchment con-
stitutes a “new racial project” follows from this last observation. The expan-
sion of rights regimes for Black and Indigenous peoples throughout the
hemisphere over the previous three or four decades did not occur evenly for
both peoples, nor did the specific rights gained have uniform effects across
this terrain of racial-cultural difference. Yet even taking these axes of varia-
tion into account, we can still confidently identify a process of retrenchment
in which rights gained are being diminished or abrogated and struggles are
turning largely defensive (to fend off violence, criminalization, disposses-
sion, etc.) rather than expansive (e.g., for new rights, significant expansions
of rights granted, or even, more robust implementation). In this context acti-
vists are increasingly inclined to set their sights on political horizons that
downplay or even refuse the “recognize my rights” framework, in favor of
more autonomous forms of collective self-making, transformative demands,
and most important, efforts to bolster their own political-economic power.
Our diagnosis of this shift takes the three prominent features of twenty-
first-century neoliberal capitalism mentioned earlier—securitization, finan-
cialization, and accumulation by dispossession—and brings them into focus
through a racial lens. Deepened patterns of income and wealth inequality
driven by financialization have acute racial dimensions, as does the increas-
ing recourse to privatized violence to defend and extend these productive
relations, and the relentless depredation and territorial dispossession needed
to fuel the engine. Drawing on evidence of all three processes from the seven
chapters that follow, we can confidently assert that the key defining charac-
teristic of the emergent “racial project”—what makes it a substantially new
“distribution of societal recourses along racial lines”—is met in this disas-
trous three-way convergence. With this scaffolding in place, we can now
begin to parse the second part of the concept of “racial project”: the ideologi-
cal justification of this new arrangement.
We agree with Dawson (2016) that racial capitalism has faced a serious
legitimation crisis from the start. Explicit racial animus divides political-
economic elites, broadly speaking, into two camps: a remarkably wide swath
of these elites is comfortable with the racial hatred spewed by, for example,
Trump or Bolsonaro, while a second countervailing group supports the same
substantive positions, justified by liberal dissimulations and affirmations of
the “post-racial” character of the current era. The latter is powerful enough to
deprive the former of easy recourse to unadorned ideologies of white supre-
macy or other explicit justifications for deepening racial inequality. Both
groups of elites have been bolstered by the intense collective resentments of
lower-class sectors of the dominant racial group, who feel the pain of deep-
ening inequality, and often channel their anger in racialized ways. Here
again, however, there are limits to this unholy alliance, imposed partly by the
inconvenient visibility of deepening class inequality, and partly by discom-
fort with neo-Nazi extremism. For many in this sector, the fearful and violent
cry: “You will not replace us” (chanted by white nationalist protesters in
Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017) runs contrary to much they have been
taught, even amid their intense economic pain and bewilderment about who
to blame. This last point goes to the crux of our argument regarding the
ideological justification of the new project of racial retrenchment. Its key
features lie not in the discourses of its prominent spokespeople, but rather, in
those who oppose it by shearing off the extremism, and trying to find a
middle ground, by building bridges and seeking compromise. The result is an
incoherent brew in racial terms, but deeply impactful in the equivalencies
that it establishes: neo-Nazi extremism becomes as equally repugnant as
militant opposition to racial retrenchment, which in turn tends to normalize
the ostensibly non- (or post?) racial premises of neoliberal capitalism. In
other words, the most effective ideological justification for the emerging
racial project is not extremist racial venom, but rather, a retooled ethos of
race-blindness, energized with great urgency by the extremism that it osten-
sibly opposes.
There are distinctive “left” and “right” currents of this ideological justifi-
cation, which should be neither equated nor completely disassociated from
one another. On the left we find a position—especially common in Latin
America, and reemergent in the United States—that bemoans the multicultu-
ral turn and “identity politics” as having introduced (or heightened) spurious
societal divisions, and thereby weakened popular movements against neolib-
eral capitalism. Although this position advances substantial anti-capitalist
opposition, it does so at the risk of blunting or even dismantling the race-
based militancy that gives this opposition its critical edge and moral author-
ity. On the right, racial retrenchment also allows the less explicitly extremist
elite faction to seize the high ground of anti-racism, clothed in a discourse of
even-handed decency, which rises above racial divisiveness. This produces a
strong impetus to join in, to bolster opposition to racial extremism, setting

aside serious scrutiny of the rationale for unity to a later moment. The result
is a dialectically produced non- or post-racialism, with a much more robust
and persuasive rationale than in the preceding multicultural era. Positioned
against racial retrenchment, it provides crucial ballast for racial capitalism by
championing its alleged non-racial premises, and brushing aside its deeply
racialized economic consequences with the insistence that racialized ill inten-
tions played no role. While left variants of this ideology do oppose neoliberal
capitalism, they ultimately contribute to the same outcome by placing the
critique of institutionalized racism on the sidelines, and reinforcing the repre-
sentation of race-based militancy as perhaps understandable, but ultimately
misguided.
In sum, while we agree with Dawson’s observation of the legitimation
crisis of racial capitalism, we posit that this crisis has already produced,
dialectically, a successor ideology, well-positioned to emerge as a powerful
legitimating force of the new era. Its hallmark elements are, paradoxically
enough, a strong opposition to the most virulent and explicit expressions of
racism, and a call for return to humanist decency, predicated on the need to
compromise, by scaling back the racial militancy, which emerged in opposi-

tion to neoliberal multiculturalism. This middle ground, though shorn of
racial venom, otherwise leaves the structural underpinnings of racial capital-
ism intact, and largely unexamined, shrouded in race-neutral discourses of
entrepreneurial drive, market principles, and adaptation to the rules of global
competition—perhaps enlivened by a dash of diversity, which these very
conditions produce. The constrained multicultural rights of the previous era
fall to the wayside, not necessarily because they threaten to go too far (al-
though some always thought this was the case) but because they have lost
relevance for the new mode of governance, and evoke the divisive politics of
the so-called extremists that the majority now opposes. A danger of the
coming era, then, is a post-racial ideology with more potential for hegemony
than its predecessor ever could muster, a hegemony that grows more right-
eous and urgent each time explicit expressions of racial retrenchment reach
new extremes.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
To a large extent, this question is best answered by the chapters that follow,
whose specificity eludes broad generalizations. While our central claim does
center on an emergent phase of racial capitalism—characterized by deepen-
ing structural inequality along racial lines, heightened levels of racial animus
in discourse and action, and a newly vitalized justifying ideology of post-
racialism—we are clear that this racial project is not uniformly expressed
across the hemisphere. In all these settings, the emergent fuses with previous
forms, making for an unstable mix of features rather than sharply defined
distinctions between one and the other. By the same token, one generalized
description captures neither the specificities in each site of struggle, nor the
particular routes of arrival. To cite just one example, this new racial project
came about in Bolivia after a series of popular uprisings, through which the
majority Indigenous poor and middle classes brought down a government of
classically neoliberal multicultural leanings, and brought to power an Indige-
nous-identified coalition of quasi-socialist leanings. In Mexico, by contrast,
we find a similar configuration of racial capitalism, which congealed through
a series of center-right governments that aggressively consolidated the three
pillars (financialization, securitization, accumulation by dispossession), with
only a weak endorsement of multiculturalism. 8 Still, amid great variation (of
which this contrast is just one example), at a broad level of generalization we
contend that in each of the seven sites examined here, the “route” to the
current moment passed through a phase of significant expansion of state-
recognized rights for Black and Indigenous peoples, and a general corre-
sponding affirmation of “cultural diversity” as an organizing principle of
society and government alike. This basic commonality, in turn, sets the stage
for identifying four key elements of an answer to the question that of how we
got here.
The first explanatory element (and most weighty, given its global charac-
ter) is the overriding contradiction between the deepening racialized structu-
ral inequality brought on by neoliberal capitalism, and the invigorated prom-
ise of rights, equality, cultural citizenship to the same people who bear the
greatest burden of that inequality. Even if the overarching trend toward deep-
ened racialized structural inequality is not subject to question, the particular
details are far from uniform or linear. For example, the extraordinary surplus
produced by the economic recovery and extractivist boom of the post-2008
years did lead to substantial income redistribution, especially under left-
leaning governments (e.g., Lula in Brazil), mainly in the form of conditional
cash transfers and favorable terms of consumer credit. These countervailing
processes had remarkable racial repercussions: in Brazil, some thirty million
Afro-Brazilians were lifted out of extreme poverty during the Lula-Dilma
years. This accomplishment has enormous consequences, even beyond the
direct impact on the beneficiaries, making it possible for large numbers of
Afro-Brazilians to participate more fully in all realms of Brazilian society. 9
Yet even giving credence to more positive readings, we cannot ignore the
ephemeral (i.e., decidedly nonstructural) character of conditional cash trans-
fers, nor the underlying fact that wealth disparities and even income inequal-
ity (quite apart from “poverty reduction”) remained stubbornly constant.
Here the contradiction comes centrally into play. Deepening inequality
causes especially intense discontentment and anger, when juxtaposed to the
promise of rights, recognition, even empowerment. Whether or not the mo-

bilizations that follow result in greater concessions (less likely as time goes
on) or vigorous defense of rights already gained, they place the regimes in
question on notice. One unintended consequence of resistance in the era of
neoliberal multiculturalism, then, has been to convince political-economic
elites that their reforms—however cautious and halting—have gone too far.
Although rooted in “progressive” neoliberal policies, these consequences
would create an opening for the architects of racial retrenchment to take the
helm.
The second factor is racial fissures, and their formative contribution to the
current moment. Our particular focus here is the political subjectivities of
aggrieved sectors of the dominant cultural-racial group—whites or mesti-
zos—who sought outlets for their frustration over the inadequacies of global
neoliberal capitalism. These outlets congealed around salutary critiques of
the arrogance of governmental power—electoral fraud, corruption, political
violence, anti-democratic practices—which at times yielded dramatic
achievements (such as massive opposition that forced the resignation and
jailing of the president and vice president in Guatemala). Yet rarely did this
outpouring of popular anger take direct aim at the structural underpinnings of

neoliberal capitalism; instead, it often ended up fixated on more ostensibly
proximate and experiential sources of aggravation: lapses in moral rectitude
remedied by a return to traditional religious groundings; threats to family
values remedied by a reaffirmation of patriarchy; excessive pandering to
previously subordinated racial groups leading to “reverse racism,” remedied
by the reassertion of unitary (and often nationalistic) models of citizenship.
Each of these patterns of reaction—at times clearly separate, at times com-
bined—generated evident political opportunities, which elites lost no time in
seizing. Following the remarkable anti-corruption mobilization in Guatema-
la, a little-known comedian turned politician, with close ties to the military,
won the presidency with a campaign slogan that highlighted the shockingly
low level of contemporary political expectations, ni ladron, ni corrupto [nei-
ther a thief, nor corrupt]. In similar fashion, massive anti-corruption demon-
strations in Brazil ultimately fused with right-wing strategies to depose Presi-
dent Dilma Rousseff and destroy the Workers Party. In societies where im-
migration has been demographically important—especially the United
States, but also, Mexico, Chile, and Colombia—these racialized anxieties
have found a ready target, portrayed as interlopers who take jobs, consume
scarce resources, and foment societal insecurity. In the United States, this
anti-immigrant venom has been central to the rise of racial recalcitrance, as
illustrated by its most emblematic slogan, “you will not replace us”; but even
this slogan is best understood as a general assertion of white supremacy,
rather than a specific attack on immigrants. In this sense, we view the racial-
ized anxieties of dominant sectors as a globally generative force, with addi-
tional virulence when anti-immigrant animus forms part of the mix. Most
important for our argument here, these movements of aggrieved majorities
have generally worked against the modest gains that Black and Indigenous
people had garnered in the previous era—at times simply by negating racial
difference in hasty calls for unity (Mexico, Colombia), and at times, more
seriously still, by portraying racialized peoples as a source of the problem:
whether as violentistas that shatter the social peace (Chile) or as undeserving
recipients of scarce governmental resources (United States, Guatemala, Bra-
zil).
A third element of our answer to the question “how did we get here?”
brings us back to the effects of neoliberal capitalism, and more specifically,
the racial repercussions of its three hallmark features in the current era:
securitization, financialization, and extractivist dispossession. Each of these
processes deserves a dedicated chapter; and on many fine points (e.g., wheth-
er or not financialization is the defining feature of late capitalism) there is
still considerable debate among scholars. Another level of complexity comes
with the mandate to understand the interactions among these three: for exam-
ple, the way surpluses generated by financialization become powerful drivers
of extractivist dispossession, producing a new round of lucrative investments

that can only prosper under highly securitized conditions, in which popular
protest is criminalized and suppressed. Even before plumbing these and other
complexities, however, the overarching pattern most relevant to our central
research question can be forcefully identified. As neoliberal capitalism
evolves into substantially new configurations, driven by the convergence of
these three forces, the modest advances of Black and Indigenous rights in the
previous period are bound to suffer retrenchment. Extractivist dispossession
in essence is the drive for exploitable natural resources, which places Black
and Indigenous territories—whether newly validated with legal titles, or tra-
ditionally occupied, in the crosshairs. To the extent that financialization gen-
erates ever greater sources of profit and enrichment that depend on financial
transactions rather than conventional relations of production, long-standing
racial hierarchies in the economy are bound to be accentuated: as casualties
of deepening inequality, and because people at the bottom of the economic
hierarchy are most vulnerable to an unstable economy and to exploitative
marketing instruments. Throughout the Americas, the securitization of pro-
ductive relations and spatial politics is bound to fall disproportionately on the
backs of racialized peoples, especially given their rising expectations from
the previous era of modestly expanding rights, and their tenacious resistance
as these spaces gradually close.
The fourth and final factor that helps explain the onset of racial retrench-
ment requires difficult and potentially painful introspection focused on inad-
equacies and contradictions internal to the various “left” parties, coalitions,
and movements that defend alternative paths. We already have referenced the
long-term tendency—which we fear has amplified since 2016—to downplay

racism and racial inequality with the spurious rationale that success in com-
batting class inequality will automatically lead to the dissolution of racism
and gender subordination. Apart from this problem—though somehow con-
nected to it—the productivist and state-centered bias of both the traditional
and “new” left makes for a poor fit with most Indigenous and Afro-descen-
dant political horizons, not because racially marginalized peoples have es-
chewed the concept of material well-being (a disparaging riposte commonly
leveled against Indigenous people), but rather, because historically the state
has been so consistently anti-Black and anti-Indigenous. 10 Throughout Latin
America, the most common guise for this racial animus has been ideologies
of mestizaje, which have both left- and right-wing variants. For decades
many intellectuals on the left have given these ideologies and associated
Mestizo identities an unquestioned “pass,” justified by the ostensible celebra-
tion of Indigenous roots, the adamant resistance to northern versions of sci-
entific racism, and the illusory association of racial indeterminacy with racial
equality. Our project seeks to cancel that “pass,” replacing it with context-
specific critical scrutiny of each site of struggle, and endorsement of alterna-
tive, race-sensitive narratives of societal transformation throughout the hemi-

sphere. The resurgent power of white supremacy in the United States and
throughout the global north shows how urgent the task is and how much
deeper this probe of left-inflected projects in the global north needs to be. 11
The same goes for Latin America. While there is little doubt that in general
left-oriented governments (from Fidel’s Cuba to Allende’s Chile, Lula’s Bra-
zil, and Evo’s Bolivia) have afforded Black and Indigenous peoples addition-
al room for maneuver, the internal limits and contradictions of these affinities
have been equally evident, such that these experiments, however inspiring in
their particulars, do not provide convincing blueprints for future political
horizons.
Although we found these four factors to be present in all seven societies
analyzed in this volume, a full explanation of “how we got here” must take
into account particularity and variation as well. Not only have the four fac-
tors—contradictions of neoliberal multiculturalism, racial anxieties of domi-
nant culture “losers” in the global economy, racialized repercussions of neo-
liberal capitalism, and the left’s failure of vision—unfolded unevenly across
the region, but in addition, the more powerful countries (especially the Unit-
ed States) exerted enormous influence on the other cases. It will require
careful historical work in the years to come to develop a full understanding
of how Trump’s election in 2016, the epitomizing elements of his campaign
and government, shaped the hemisphere-wide political, economic, and racial
dynamics we summarize here. While we have very consciously pushed back
against two common analytical flaws in hemispheric analyses of racial for-
mation—US exceptionalism (i.e., the United States as the only site of “real”
racism), and US imperialism as the cause of all ills in Latin America—we

also are careful not to let the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direc-
tion. Although we view the project of racial recalcitrance as truly global, we
also affirm the powerful enabling role of the United States, especially in the
production of its legitimating ideology. The eerie parallel of Bolsonaro’s
campaign slogan of 2018—”Brazil before everything, and God above all”—
with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is only the most obvious case in
point. Slightly more subtle, and ultimately more powerful, examples include
interventionist rumblings against Venezuela, the complete dismantling of
human rights policies (except in relation to geopolitical enemies), aggressive
support for extractivist economies, and of course, a xenophobic and racist
stance toward immigration that has poisoned the well of immigration policies
across the hemisphere, most prominently in Mexico. The four factors are
decidedly global, and the United States has played a centrally powerful role
in making them so.
COMMONALITIES AND AXES OF

VARIATION ACROSS THE AMERICAS
Our seven-country study emerged directly from the prior practical work and
dialogue required to forge the network of member organizations of RAIAR,
each devoted to anti-racist action, and to processes of Black or Indigenous
struggle for rights and empowerment. Discussions about this research project
began in 2009, a moment that, from our current vantage point in 2018, was
squarely situated in the preceding epoch, when Black and Indigenous move-
ments were grappling with the racial project that we characterize as “neolib-
eral multiculturalism.” 12 It is helpful to pause briefly to remember that mo-
ment, as a means both to situate our analysis historically, and to highlight the
commonalities and variations that have since emerged with the epochal shift.
The Bolivian Observatory on Racism provides an apt point of departure,
owing to the particularities of that country’s recent political history, and also
because that Observatory played a key role in founding RAIAR. Elected
president in December 2005, Evo Morales rose to power on a wave of peas-
ant, Indigenous and popular organizing with deep roots, the most recent
manifestation of anticolonial resistance that began with the Spanish invasion
(see Rivera Cusicanqui [1983], Thomson [2002], Gutierrez Aguilar [2009]).
The proximate catalyst for the uprising, however, was popular ire focused
squarely on the contradictions of neoliberal multiculturalism: deepening in-
equities, with privatization of water and other vital resources as salt in the
wound, alongside a series of reforms that recognized expansive rights
grounded in cultural difference, and ostensibly encouraged organizing along
these lines (see Postero [2007], Lazar [2008], Gustafson [2009]). Although
Morales won by a large margin (25 percent), and his Movimiento al Socialis-
mo emphasized national-popular themes more than Indigenous empower-
ment in its rhetoric, the racist backlash was swift, violent, and vicious: from
the perspective of entrenched elites, an Indigenous president threatened the
very foundations of the modern Bolivian nation. The Bolivian Observatory
was founded in repudiation of this widespread and virulently racist back-
lash. 13
Leaving aside the particulars, this sequence of actions and counter-actions
serves well to encapsulate the central features of the previous racial project
which, in this generalized portrayal, had striking similarities across the seven
sites of struggle, and indeed, throughout the hemisphere. The wave of neolib-
eral reforms that began in the 1980s, although an omnipresent target of
critique by progressives, had ceased to be a focus of contention among estab-
lished political parties that vied for power through electoral mobilization. To
the contrary, the reforms became routinized as the more or less normal rules
of the economic game, portrayed as dictated by forces of globalized capital-
ism, guided by abstract principles of market-driven costs and prices, with the
risk of losing “global competitiveness” as leverage. In contrast, these same

establishment elites debated continuously, beginning in the 1990s and into
the first decade of the new century, the advisability of opening their societies
to Black and Indigenous collective rights. One sector essentially feared this
multicultural turn and opposed these rights, as a threatening affront to en-
trenched economic interests and classic liberal principles of government;
while another sector viewed them as a necessary step toward “moderniza-
tion,” a means to establish a more ethically and politically sound foundation
for a largely unchanged set of neoliberal capitalist principles. This second
sector gradually won the day, with impetus and urging from multilateral
development institutions and other entities of “global civil society,” thereby
forging the hegemony of what we now recognize as the racial project of
neoliberal multiculturalism. This project had two basic characteristics: a ra-
cialized structural inequality that grew deeper over time; and an endorsement
of the collective rights of the very peoples who most bore the brunt of the
first. Quite a contradictory brew!
This same contradiction has come to the fore in the United States, al-
though following a different path, both in terms of timing and the character
of rights achieved. The transformation began two to three decades earlier,
and in the first instance focused almost completely on the struggle for equal
citizenship rights, against a noxious system of de jure racism. Although
cultural difference (e.g., expressed in various strands of Afro-centrism, Black
nationalism and the Black radical tradition—all of which, in different ways,
highlighted connections between the diaspora and African homelands) did
assume increasing importance in these struggles, collective rights grounded
in cultural difference did not achieve much support from political economic
elites, in part because the “equal rights” frame had gained such prominence
in the movement, and also, because Black collective rights provoked fear and
repudiation. The dominant “multicultural turn” in the United States, then,
was generally manifested in corporate or liberal and largely depoliticized
discourse, framing Black (along with Latinx and Asian American) culture as
market niches and heritage to be celebrated, rather than as justification for
collective rights to redress historic inequalities. 14 While some dimensions of
the equal rights wave did produce material benefits, these (such as affirma-
tive action) would become the focus of the most vigorous backlash, and with
deindustrialization were increasingly limited to a small sector, leaving the
rest with “equal rights” on a terrain of rapidly deepening inequality. In this
sense the United States converges with Latin America: proclamations of
equality, and celebration of multiculturalism, but with few remaining robust
rights to draw on to combat institutionalized racism.
We argue that this central contradiction—rights that promised much more
than they could deliver in confronting inequity problems that grew worse by
the year—played a key role in causing the previous racial project to unravel,
although according to patterns and paths that varied widely from one society
and site of struggle to another. To trace this variation, in turn, is to lay the
groundwork for understanding the emergent racial project, which took shape
precisely as our research has been under-way. The sequence of events noted
earlier in Bolivia frames one such path, punctuated by a popular uprising that
forced a sitting president to resign and leave the country in disgrace, and
more important, which left the existing racial project in tatters. In Bolivia, the
central contradiction of neoliberal multiculturalism became impossible to
sustain, not only because ongoing racialized inequalities and insults re-
mained so stark during the regime of Sanchez de Lozada (1993–1997,
2002–2006), but also, because his government’s multicultural reforms
opened political opportunities that Indigenous-popular movements seized
with great collective energy and militancy. This last point is a theme that runs
through all seven sites of struggle, though with varying degrees of intensity.
As Lisa Duggan (2003) pointed out in early debates about neoliberal multi-
culturalism, the stark distinction between “recognition” and “redistribution”
was predicated on the flawed premise that “recognition” or “cultural rights”
have no material consequences. To the contrary, while insisting that the
multicultural rights conceded during this period were constrained by design,
we also affirm that conferral of these rights often had transformative effects,
as people appropriated and redefined them, often well beyond their intended
constraints.
In Guatemala, Colombia, and Brazil during the decade of the 1990s,
Black and Indigenous movements seized these multicultural openings as op-
portunities to organize and mobilize, producing demands for—and in some
cases achievements of—prerogatives and benefits well beyond the originally

intended boundaries of the rights in question. Some examples include: Maya-
led occupations of ailing coffee plantations in the Polochic region of Alta
Vera Paz, Guatemala; an autonomous derecho propio Indigenous law school
conceived and controlled by the Asociación de Cabildos Indígenas del Norte
del Cauca (ACIN) in Colombia; Afro-Colombian achievements of titles to
vast traditionally occupied territories (Escobar 2008); and in Brazil, the
movement for recognition of Quilombo lands, which soon utterly outstripped
the ability of the Brazilian state—even under the best of conditions—to
respond. The contradiction, in these cases, revolved not only around the
contrast between rights gained and deepening racialized inequalities, but
also, the preemptive responses by political-economic elites, who sought to
re-impose limits, and close down mobilizations that had “gone too far.” In all
three sites, our research has documented “backlash” of this type, perhaps
most distinctly in the 1999 campaign against Constitutional reforms in Gua-
temala, which closed the door on a major thrust of the multicultural turn even
before it had fully congealed. The quintessential telltale sign of this backlash
is the discourse of reverse racism, present in all seven sites of struggle, but
especially pronounced in these three. 15
In another variation—best exemplified in Mexico and Chile —this basic
contradiction gained less prominence, because the reach of the new rights
was so limited from the start. For example, Mapuche researchers in this
volume argue that multicultural reforms of the Chilean state were so anemic
and ambivalent, so overshadowed by countervailing political-economic
forces—especially corporate interests and state repression—that they played
at most a minor role in the ongoing conflict. The Mapuche movement’s
central objectives—recuperation of territory and political autonomy—fell so
far outside the bounds of what the post-dictatorship multicultural turn al-
lowed, that it left these demands defined as “extremist” from the start, a
threat to state security frequently equated with terrorism. 16 Consequently, the
Mapuche movement has turned increasingly to extra-legal, unrecognized
means to recuperate ancestral lands, and to implement local forms of autono-
my. In Mexico, where state-endorsed recognition of Indigenous peoples’
rights predates the multicultural turn by more than a half century, the anemic
character of these reforms became a twenty-first-century problem for differ-
ent reasons. Precisely because the Mexican revolution’s early twentieth-cen-
tury institutional transformations in this realm were so deep—especially
agrarian reform, and the constitutional recognition of Indigenous commu-
nities—the nation-building project grounded in an ideology of mestizaje be-
came especially deeply entrenched and difficult to contest. Despite a vibrant
counter-discourse of indianismo, which posited substantial rights of autono-
my for “México profundo” (Bonfil Batalla 1987), state-driven indigenismo
remained dominant through the twentieth century, and exerted a deep forma-
tive influence on the multicultural turn that eventually took hold. Surprising-
ly, given these very different twentieth-century paths, Chile and Mexico in
the late twentieth century had converged in key respects: a state-endorsed
multiculturalism that resembled in many respects its mid-century indigenista
predecessor; elites who had great difficulty in acknowledging racism and
engaging in the national dialogue that follows from such an acknowledg-
ment; Indigenous movements that had broken dramatically away from the
rights framework, toward versions of “autonomia sin permiso.” 17 The
contradiction in these two cases is not so much focused on the inadequacy of
multicultural reforms in relation to ongoing racialized structural inequality,
but rather, in these reforms’ limited relevance: despite the many persisting
practical and ideological reasons for engaging the state, when movements
pause to articulate their political horizons, demands for state-recognized
rights do not figure prominently beyond tactical or defensive objectives. 18
The United States experienced versions of both the initial wave of great
promise, and the disillusionment, somewhat sequentially, which makes sense
since the Civil Rights movement reached its apex a good two decades before
the multicultural turn in Latin America. Indeed, given the dominance of

equality and inclusion as opposed to collective rights grounded in cultural
difference, one might argue that the Civil Rights movement had little to do
with multiculturalism. Although some currents of Black mobilization did
advance claims to self-determination based on cultural-racial difference,
these were rarely framed as rights that the state would conceivably recognize.
Claims to human rights, recognized by international organizations, had more
appeal. Furthermore, as Black movements moved to expand the equal rights
model to include basic structural changes such as the right to employment,
shelter and health for all—essentially adding up to a fulsome critique of
capitalism—the state intensified its efforts to destroy them by infiltration,
disruption, and when necessary, assassination. 19 In this sense, the telltale
feature of the Americas-wide pattern—elite backlash predicated on the asser-
tion that the movement had gone too far and was now practicing “reverse
racism”—were prominently on display in the United States by the end of the
1970s. Given the Reagan administration’s pioneering embrace of neoliberal
economic reforms in the 1980s, and the fusion of neoliberalism with multi-
cultural sensibilities during the Clinton era (1992–2000)—further alignment
with Latin American patterns comes into view. Despite the substantial
achievements of the Civil Rights era, and institutional spaces subsequently
opened by a US-style neoliberal multiculturalism, by the beginning of the
Obama presidency, the central contradiction operated in substantially parallel
ways as in Latin America: formal rights and institutionalized multicultural
sensibilities, which fade into insignificance in the face of massive structural
racial inequality, epitomized by the carceral state (Gilmore 2007), widening
disparities between Black and white wealth (Oliver and Shapiro 2006), and
the many other factors that contribute to pervasive structured racial inequal-
ity. Regardless of the great symbolic and institutional importance of Oba-
ma’s presidency, by the time the Movement for Black Lives burst onto the
scene in 2014, the existing framework of state-endorsed rights for Black
people offered limited space from which to wage a struggle from within
against mounting violence and intensified inequality. The M4BL began, and
at the outset derived its immense power, as a movement of indignation,
protest, and radical refusal.
Although following different paths, with myriad complexities and partic-
ularities that can be appreciated in the individual chapters that follow, by the
end of the 2010s, these seven processes had all come to encompass one
overarching feature: an implosion—whether manifested in dramatic crisis or
steady corrosion from within—of the existing racial project, in place for the
past three decades, or longer. A version of this observation served as the
leading hypothesis of our research proposal, developed through internal dis-
cussions in RAIAR between 2010 and 2014, framed specifically as a pur-
ported end of the previous Americas-wide era, when rights grounded in
cultural difference had expanded steadily, first focused on culture and iden-
tity (e.g., bilingual education), then on autonomous control over resources
and territory. Reflecting now on our research results, and on the ugly post-
2016 lurch toward racial retrenchment throughout the region (most promi-
nent in the United States and Brazil), we have developed a more comprehen-
sive analytical frame. Following Omi and Winant (1987), and many others
who have worked in this vein, we deploy the notion of “racial project” to
understand this shift, keeping three principal axes of analysis in dialogue. 20
First, new racial projects propose and enact a substantive redistribution of
material resources (means of production, political and institutional power)
along racial lines. Second, they come with well-developed discourses that
justify and rationalize this redistribution, discourses that achieve substantial
societal support. Third, resistance to these new racial projects, on the part of
racialized peoples and their allies, plays a key role in limiting the extent of
the redistribution, and the reach of its hegemony. Of course, these three
elements are not neat and sequential, but simultaneous and messy, such that,
for example, the “redistribution of resources along racial lines” is a result of
the dialectic between elite assertion and racialized peoples’ resistance. More-
over, the transition is never seamless: residual elements from the existing
project mix and vie with the emergent, making for heterogeneity, incoher-
ence and internal tensions, rather than distinct, discrete projects.
With these provisos in mind, and with more than three decades of hind-
sight, we can characterize the previous racial project as “neoliberal multicul-
turalism” (Hale 2002). Neoliberal reforms brought deepened structural in-
equality across the region, which had disproportionate impacts on Black and
Indigenous peoples: in this sense, the rise of neoliberalism did entail a redis-
tribution of resources in racial terms, albeit framed in the race-neutral lan-
guage of global competition, market forces. Multiculturalism, and related
top-down principles of racial equality, emerged as the ideological justifica-
tion for this redistribution, which operated in two distinct registers: dominant
actors proffered rights and recognition for racialized peoples as antidotes to
structured racial inequity; in the context of neoliberal capitalism, this meant
that a minority sector of the racialized group did indeed experience signifi-
cant upward mobility. 21 The hegemonic “kicker” came from the fusion of
these two: the generally visible and highly coveted upward mobility of the
few offered alleged proof that the multicultural rights and the limited gains in
citizenship rights, far from being superficial window-dressing, had in fact
leveled the playing field; those who did not wake up, smell the coffee, and
achieve the promised upward mobility must be mired in the pathologies of
their cultures, with no one but themselves to blame. The third dimension of
the previous racial project—resistance against both parts of this fusion—is
crucial to understanding the varied paths noted above. Whether this resis-
tance laid the contradictions bare early on (Bolivia), moved gradually, pain-
fully toward a space of radical refusal (the Mapuche), or continued pursuing

rights as a platform for waging a counterhegemonic struggle with diminish-
ing returns (Afro-Brazil and Afro-Colombia), by the twenty-first century’s
second decade, the existing racial project had grown threadbare most every-
where. On the one hand, the rise of extractivism following the global eco-
nomic recovery of 2008 acutely accelerated the redistribution of resources
along racial lines. On the other hand, Black and Indigenous movements
themselves began to defect from the basic neoliberal rights formula, which
contributed starkly to its erosion. They grew fed up with the limited efficacy
of both multicultural rights and legalistic equal rights, and increasingly found
themselves on the defensive against efforts from above to withdraw or limit
what little had already been achieved. Moreover, dominant actors began to
focus on the dangers of racialized peoples mobilizing around the promise (if
not the reality) of these rights; narratives emerged of Black and Indigenous
peoples receiving undeserved or excessive benefits from the multicultural
turn, culminating in grievances directed at “reverse racism.” At the same
time a notable decline of third-party support for the multicultural turn
(NGOs, foundations, international aid) in Latin America, and for anti-dis-
crimination measures in the United States, debilitated efforts to defend and
expand rights gained. 22 Although we observed all these telltale signs when
we formulated our central research hypotheses in 2014, we could not have
imagined the ugly, violent, all-encompassing depths of the rupture.
FROM HOLLOW RIGHTS TO

“AUTONOMIA SIN PERMISO”?
The eerily synchronized convergence of the two largest countries of the

hemisphere does not tell the whole story, but it does serve as an apt point of
departure. In regard to the first dimension—redistribution of resources along
racial lines—political elites have owned the initiative so brashly and unapol-
ogetically that this transparency may be deceptive. A powerful and highly
retrograde sector of the transnational capitalist class based in Brazil and the
United States has made it clear that they need an even larger piece of the pie,
that they will reward politicians who implement policies toward this end, and
relentlessly punish those who resist. One of the complexities in framing their
collective agency only as an initiative of “resource redistribution along racial
lines” is that the effects of deepening inequality are so widespread across
highly varied racial terrain. Indeed, this dimension of the new project is an
accelerated continuation of the long-term pattern of deepening inequality,
which has been in place since architects of the neoliberal turn gained ascen-
dancy in relation to the preceding Keynesian orthodoxy three decades ago.
At the same time, retrospective analyses make it clear that the consequences
have been especially acute for Black and Indigenous peoples. These widen-
ing economic disparities have been exacerbated by the rapid dismantling of
specific programs designed to mitigate the harm: conditional cash transfers
(in Brazil), welfare and unemployment insurance (United States), and vari-
ous forms of affirmative action (both). This first dimension also has come
into view in Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia, although in a form that is,
fortunately, more incipient and open-ended. Global patterns of neoliberal
capitalism drive this redistribution, which opposition political forces in the
three countries have been unwilling or unable to challenge. 23 Aggregate data
in all three countries confirm that this deepening inequality continues to be
highly racialized, especially when the analysis takes racial interpellation,
rather than self-identification, as point of departure. 24
If the first dimension of the racial project is defined by underlying conti-
nuities, the second—explicit repudiation of the previous regime—marks a
striking contrast. In different but parallel ways, the political coalitions that
propelled Trump and Bolsonaro forward unleashed populist sentiments and
policy initiatives diametrically opposed to the ethics and politics of multicul-
turalism. That is, in the previous racial project, neoliberal multiculturalism,
anti-discrimination measures grounded in the equal rights paradigm served as
compensatory justification for a system designed to deepen racialized struc-
tural inequalities. In the emerging era, that logic is dramatically reversed,
with an explicit message to lower-class members of the dominant racial
group: the root cause of your pain from deepening social inequality is the
benefit and privilege that racial and cultural “others” have reaped in the
previous period. In this sense, the key shift in the justificatory discourse is
not only the abandonment of—indeed direct attack on—the ideals of equality
and multiculturalism, but more fundamentally, a shift in the principal audi-
ence of the discourse: from racialized peoples, their active allies and passive
sympathizers, to the collective subjects of white (and white-mestizo) grie-
vance (Hooker 2017). 25
A third feature of this emergent racial project, especially prominent in
Brazil and the United States, tracks closely with those already mentioned, but
defies easy explanation: the reassertion of racialized patriarchy. From one
perspective, this feature is no surprise: since uber-privileged white males
drive these processes of accelerated resource redistribution, it stands to rea-
son that their gender politics would be deeply embedded in the new project.
It is more difficult to explain how this reassertion has achieved such reso-
nance among lower-class sectors of the dominant racial group, especially
women. The politics of articulation—whereby forces aligned with Trump
and Bolsonaro explain working-class pain and dislocation as a consequence
of multicultural pampering, and offer a remedy of economic nationalist fun-
damentals—acquires a more contorted logic in relation to patriarchy. One
line of explanation suggests that the gender implications of racial retrench-
ment are simply not as important as the “traditional” values and priorities
(strongly influenced by Christian fundamentalism, e.g., an end to abortion
rights, eradication of sexual diversity, etc.) that a lurch to the right purports to
uphold. 26 A second explanation emphasizes the crisis of working-class
households and communities, arguing that the values of patriarchy come
embedded in the spurious populist remedy (“we have to support our men,
bolster our community”). This analysis also posits that women, as primary
caregivers in the family, have placed the well-being of the collective over
internal relations of gender equality. A third approach, perhaps most promi-
nent in the United States, incorporates the observation that at various histori-
cal junctures, the majority of white women have chosen the benefits of class
and race (“private patriarchy”) over gender solidarity. 27 However convinc-
ing, these explanations require a deeper exploration of the collective sensibil-
ities or “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977) of this patriarchal reasser-
tion—perhaps along the lines of what Bauman (2017) has termed “retroto-
pia.” In the face of deep dissatisfaction with the present, and fear about the
future, the political discourses that resonate most invoke an unspecified past
when things were better and the future was hopeful. The abstract power of
this “retrotopia,” presumably, overshadows concrete considerations of gen-
dered repercussions, either “then” or in the purported solution. The next step
of the argument is to tether these lines of explanation, either separately or
together, to our central notion of the new racial project in the making. That is,
the reassertion of patriarchy among white and mestizo popular sectors has an
inherent racial dimension: to make America great again, as many have
pointed out, is to make America white again. Patriarchal “retrotopias” around
family and community hark back to a time when Black, Indigenous and other
racialized peoples knew their place, and stayed there or paid the price, which
bolstered white and mestizo people’s subjective feelings of and actual experi-
ences of well-being.
The fourth component of the emergent racial project—resistance strong
enough to oblige substantive renegotiation of its terms (if not outright de-
feat)—is by far the most difficult to gauge at this early moment in the shift.
Overheated narratives of resistance abound, often with objectives focused
mainly on encouraging others to join, rather than to offer a rigorous assess-
ment of the extent to which this renegotiation is actually taking place. More-
over, this assessment has to take into account the highly punitive rules of the
game that the new racial project has ushered in: criminalization and direct
repression of previously “legal” protest; intervention to truncate judicial mo-
bilization; enabling of “spontaneous” mob violence against resistance move-
ments. 28 These contradictory currents follow directly from the correlation of
forces outlined previously. In the United States, for example, many establish-
ment opponents of Trumpism consider the M4BL to be too radical, while the
purveyors of racial retrenchment have responded with unbridled criminaliza-
tion, branding it “terrorist” and authorizing FBI surveillance parallel to the

persecution of Black activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet it is also true that
the M4BL was able to bring international attention to the ubiquitous police
murders of Black men, women, and children, and is in no small part respon-
sible for the election of progressive Democrats and stimulating the discussion
around racism now taking place within the Democratic Party and in the
public arena more generally. Both tendencies are also evident in Brazil. The
Temer/Bolsonaro governments shuttered the SEPPIR (Ministry of Racial
Equality), and closed the door to negotiations with even the more moderate
sectors of the Black movement. Yet public discussion and contestation of
racism with an intersectional thrust is on the rise: the favela-based resistance
that forced the Temer government to recalibrate the PT-era program of “pac-
ification,” and the enormous mobilized outrage in response to the brutal
assassination of black feminist and favela leader Marielle Franco, are both
indicative. A more complicated question is whether these two resistance
movements, and others like them, exert indirect influence on the emergent
racial project, through differentiation from, rather than articulation with, es-
tablishment opposition. Stated differently: is the currency of “progressive
neoliberalism” gaining strength, precisely because it implicitly promises to
head off the more radical contestation that these resistance movements em-
body? Such a scenario would bring some immediate relief, but likely at the
cost of ruling out radical alternatives that undermine support for a “good
enough” status quo ante. Frontline activists and their leaders will decide how
to confront this dilemma and whether—as we suggest in the conclusion—it
is possible to struggle for immediate relief, combined with a strategy that
keeps the radical alternatives in play.

The M4BL has engaged this precise strategic question very explicitly.
After the 2016 presidential elections, M4BL dedicated eighteen months to
internal analysis and assessment, and emerged with a five-year plan (M4BL
Project 2024: Black Power Rising (Five Year) Strategy, they describe as “a
popular strategy rooted in transformative goals” (2019: 1), based on the
understanding that “Black people will never achieve liberation under the
current global racialized capitalist system” (2019: 3). Unveiled at their 5th
Anniversary Convergence in Atlanta, Georgia, in February 2019, this plan
presents an explicit articulation of the multifaceted strategy referenced earlier
in this chapter. A first flow of commitments focuses on positioning Black
people to “fight white nationalism, white supremacy and neoliberalism . . . to
mitigate harm to our people and other frontline communities by both state
and non-state actors . . . [and] create viable alternatives to harmful institu-
tions” (2019: 2). Perhaps best described by one presenter as “organize every-
where—in the streets, in elected positions, in our communities,” the plan is
based on five pillars: mass engagement and political education of black peo-
ple; building local power by establishing self-determining communities; an
anti-racist electoral strategy; leadership development; and efforts to “align

the left across issue, sector, and identity with a particular desire to maintain
an intersectional analysis that elevates and centers anti-Black racism” (2019:
3). At the same time, a second current throughout the two-and-a-half-day
convergence focused on the challenges of “creating a better world that serves
us rather than fitting into this one.” They were particularly cognizant of the
tensions inherent in combining state-based strategies while building power
outside the current system; they discussed the importance of remembering
that “power is not only derived from the state, rejecting any reform that
increases the power of the state” and affirmed their “commitment to building
alternatives while struggling with the state.” This two-pronged strategy reso-
nates among all seven sites of struggle, providing a clear-headed diagnosis of
the emergent racial project, while offering blueprints for race-centered social
change and intersectional justice. The fact that these blueprints stand with
one foot squarely planted in the quest to bolster Black political and economic
power—through self-determined rather than state-granted means—is a sign
of the times. The question of where the other foot stands, and of how the two
prongs of this strategy relate to one another, is the topic of the final section of
this chapter.
With regard to the fourth dimension, resistance, the predominant pattern
in Guatemala, Mexico, and Colombia is successive waves of uprising and
repudiation of the emergent racial project, with relatively few contexts where
substantive renegotiation of that project follows. In Guatemala, the surge of
national-level Maya organization, which over two decades (1988–2008) re-
ceived such attention in the academic literature, and generated great hopes
for societal transformation, has largely collapsed and dissipated. The epicen-
ter of Maya politics has turned (returned?) to rural territories, to countering
fatal threats by political-economic forces associated with extractivism, and to
struggle for locally defined principles of buen vivir. State-recognized rights,
once a momentous focus of Maya demands, and a source of soaring expecta-
tions for state and societal transformation have lost importance, not just as
political horizon, but even as a source of defense against the rising wave of
repression and criminalization. Massive national-level protests against cor-
ruption, arrogance, and a putrefied political system have forced the resigna-
tion of one government, and sent shock waves through another, but with
“Maya rights” and Indigenous participation strikingly downplayed.
Similarly, although the recent waves of large-scale mobilizations against
chronic violence, corruption, and inequality in Mexico—from “yo soy 132”
to “yo soy Ayotzinapa”—have inspired hope for political rejuvenation, they
rarely have taken direct aim at the emergent racial project or even the prob-
lem of racism, beyond folding them into general critiques of social inequal-
ity. 29 Although in part the explanation for this disconnect lies in the continu-
ing influence of mestizaje ideology and the politics of indigenismo, a less
obvious complementary explanation is the resounding global impact of Zapa-

tismo. Given that a good part of the most creative and critical political ener-
gies of Indigenous mobilization since 1994 have been channeled (emulating
Zapatismo) toward various forms of de facto autonomy (autonomia sin per-
miso), this means that substantive renegotiation of any facet of the dominant
mode of governance—including the new racial project—is simply not a pri-
ority objective of Indigenous movements. Perhaps the Zapatista initiative to
promote an Indigenous woman candidate in the 2018 presidential elections
was aimed in part as a means to re-engage these national-level ideological
and material dimensions.
The accounts of Afro-Colombian mobilization and resistance in this book
(and elsewhere) offer a partial contrast with Mexico and Guatemala. Organ-
izations such as the PCN (Proceso de Comunidades Negras) are powerful
national-level interlocutors, which work simultaneously in the judicial, exec-
utive, and legislative branches of the government to demand compliance with
existing state-endorsed rights, and to push for more. Yet even in Colombia,
the limits to this rights-focused strategy are daunting. It was in the offices of
the PCN where we conceived the central hypothesis of our collective re-
search project, precisely in response to PCN leaders’ exasperation over the
“hollowing out” of certain rights (in this case “Free, Previous, Informed
Consent”), and the blatant rollback of others (especially in the realm of
territory). 30 Moreover, one academy-based trusted ally of the PCN portrays
their struggles as guided by an “alternative ontology,” in which state-recog-
nized rights have at best an ancillary role (Escobar, n.d.). In Colombia, it
does seem that substantive “renegotiation” has taken place, and that Indige-
nous and Afro struggles have been successful in embedding the multicultural
ethos in national political culture. But even if political, and especially judi-
cial, openings continue to have significant efficacy in Colombia, evidence
abounds that this “rights-centered” resistance, as a primary political strategy,
is losing ground.
Finally, for the emergent racial project to be consolidated and defended, it
requires an ideological justification. Today, the abandonment of what was
once a relatively vibrant state-centered discourse of multiculturalism is most
evident in Guatemala. While remnants persist—for example, in the political
parties’ obligatory recruitment of a “rostro Maya”—the previous general
consensus that electoral success and stable governance depends on a robust
endorsement of Maya rights regimes has diminished enormously. While it
could be argued that some principles of this agenda—for example, judicial
pluralism—have been institutionalized such that they no longer need reitera-
tion, our research suggests otherwise: a notable decline in both the political
exigencies of, and external support for, the multicultural turn. In Mexico this
shift is less marked in large part because, as noted earlier, the multicultural
rights agenda was never as robust to begin with. In the heavily Indigenous
“montaña” region of Guerrero, where our Mexican research team concentrat-

ed their work, the notion that people could make recourse to “Indigenous
rights” to counter the endemic coupling of state, capitalist, and narco vio-
lence hardly enters people’s minds, and even less so as the “securitization” of
politics has proceeded apace. 31 While some Indigenous prerogatives
achieved in the last century—for example, rights to municipio-level autono-
my in Oaxaca—will be extremely difficult to dislodge, they bear little rela-
tionship to the more recently minted rights, and have daunting built-in limits
of their own. In large part because the ideology of mestizaje remains so
pervasive, establishment political discourse continues to highlight national-
popular themes rather than specifically Indigenous ones, with very little ob-
jection or protest. To the extent that a distinct multicultural turn ever took
place in Mexico, it was always fused with an indigenismo-inflected deploy-
ment of state power, which rarely came to terms with the persisting racism
that this fusion enabled (Saldivar 2018). In any case, especially when conten-
tion over resources figures prominently, Mexico follows precisely the broad-
er pattern of declining efficacy of multicultural rights and criminalization of
resistance in which Indigenous identity plays a central role. 32
In Colombia, withdrawal of establishment support for multiculturalism is
evident in the right-wing campaign against the peace plebiscite of 2016, led
by white-mestizo sectors who refused to cede ground to the “Castro-ite”
FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and by extension, who
opposed a new round of “special privileges” for Black and Indigenous Co-
lombians. 33 In direct contrast to Mexico, our Colombia research team por-
trays conditions in which the discourse and principles of multiculturalism
have become so deeply embedded in the national political culture that they
have been diluted through overgeneralization. Whereas the Indigenous rights
affirmed in the new Constitution of 1991 and the rights of Afro-Colombians
affirmed by Law 70 a few years later made history, twenty-five years later
the multicultural turn is not so much invoked, contested, and debated, as
ignored as an unremarkable, ineffectual feature of the political landscape.
The emergent racial project in Chile, its key ideological expression, and
the predominant patterns of Mapuche resistance, all have features so distinc-
tive that they are best placed in a separate category. The basic global patterns
and consequences of neoliberal capitalism—increasing concentration of
wealth and economic power at the top, deepening inequality, ever-greater
dependence on large-scale agriculture, forestry and primary goods extraction
as source of economic dynamism—are strongly present here as well. Howev-
er, relative to the other Latin American countries in the study, Chile’s per
capita GDP is significantly higher, such that the racialized dimensions of the
economic development model, while present, are less prominent than in, say,
Bolivia and Guatemala. To continue the contrast, since the very beginning of
the return to democratic rule in 1990, the central focus of the redistribution of
resources with racial consequences has been political sovereignty and territo-
ry: ancestral lands massively expropriated in the late nineteenth century, and
further diminished throughout the twentieth, with the partial exception of the
tragically brief agrarian reform policies of the Allende regime (1970–1973).
Most Mapuche scholars, including the authors of the chapter in this volume,
portray this dispossession as a “long century” of ongoing colonialism, with
distinctive forms and phases emerging from a foundation of colonial condi-
tions that have persisted since the nineteenth century. This “decolonial” anal-
ysis, in turn, challenges the overall framework developed here, which iden-
tifies three distinct “racial projects”: one associated with racial inequalities
embedded in an ideology of racial assimilation (mestizaje, homogeneous
citizenship rights, etc.); one in which accentuated racial inequities come with
recognition and rights grounded in cultural difference (neoliberal multicultu-
ralism); and a third emergent one, in which explicit ideologies of racism and
racialization, thought to be defeated or at least suppressed, take the offensive
in a contradictory fusion with post-racialism. From a decolonial perspective,
in contrast, the racialized terms of redistribution, set in place through coloni-
al conquest and dispossession, have remained substantively unchanged, and
by extension, these ostensible shifts in justifying ideologies become relative-
ly unimportant.
While the focus on territorial dispossession—in an argument that tracks
closely with settler colonialism theory—makes this perspective powerfully
persuasive, two additional factors complicate the picture. First, the very pat-
terns of dispossession, combined with the multiple forces that produced
twentieth-century urban primacy, have pushed large numbers of Mapuche
people—at least 50 percent of the total population of one million—to urban

areas, especially the capital city of Santiago. While one could downplay
these Mapuche urban dwellers, portraying them as spatially distant accesso-
ries of the anticolonial struggle for territory, this would flatten out a hetero-
geneous terrain, and downplay precisely the areas where the race-based ex-
periences of inequality are likely to follow the Latin America-wide pattern
more closely. Second, like the other societies under study here, policies of
neoliberal multiculturalism in Chile have opened spaces of upward mobility
for limited but significant groups of mainly urban Mapuche. 34 The produc-
tion of these spaces—even if the Mapuche who occupy them represent a
small percentage of the population—became a key characteristic of neoliber-
al multiculturalism elsewhere; it directly serves the interests of establishment
politicians who situate colonial relations in the past, and portray Chile as
having entered an “intercultural” era.
The distinctive patterns of Mapuche experiences of racism and resistance,
in relation to others analyzed in this book, may well spring from this unusual-
ly sharp juxtaposition between ongoing colonial oppression, on the one hand,
and the conundrum of political elites’ efforts to confront Mapuche resistance,
on the other. Chilean state-building never developed a vigorous ideology of

mestizaje, which would have declared an end to colonial oppression and
offered formal equality of rights to Mapuche in return for abandonment of
anticolonial identities and politics. This did not take place: dominant-culture
Chileans never developed an identity except as Chileans (and in an elegant
gesture of reciprocity, to this day Mapuche militants refer to them as such:
“we are Mapuche, they are Chileans”). Between the bookends of a class
reductionist left and a neo-fascist right, Chilean “liberals” that came to the
fore with the return to democracy of 1989 struggled to find discursive footing
in the new multicultural political milieu, and generally failed. Social demo-
crats made recourse to Pinochet-era anti-terrorist laws when Mapuche protest
grew intense; right wing politicians referred to the “Mapuche problem” in
ways that explicitly echoed that phrase’s colonial underpinnings. 35 Still, if
we focus on state discourse and state-endorsed programs—for “development
with culture,” affirmative-action scholarships, land distribution, research mo-
nies, and the like—we see clear evidence of the multicultural turn, as an
attempted counterpoint to the demands of the Mapuche movement, and to the
negative effects of racialized/colonial inequality. Private sector actors—espe-
cially the mammoth forestry companies—became active proponents of this
shift, spurred on by the Mapuche resistance movement, which portrays these
companies as operating on ancestral lands, prime for “recuperation.” 36
The thrust of this resistance movement, and its utter disconnect from any
facet of Chile’s anemic multicultural turn, is the principal feature that distin-
guishes the Mapuche from the other six sites of struggles in this study. In the
other cases, albeit to varying degrees, the rising wave of rights for Indige-
nous and Afro-descendant peoples during the multicultural era, at least in

principle, embodied a significant part of these movement’s demands. For the
Mapuche movement, at least in its post-1989 expression, that convergence
never congealed even in principle. The anticolonial ideological frame, with
recuperation of Wallmapu (the vast pre-conquest ancestral territory) as politi-
cal horizon, had no point of significant contact with “rights” that the State
could even gesture toward, not to mention promulgate. As a result, the bridge
between the rights regime and the Mapuche movement lay mainly in the
breach: defending Mapuche political prisoners, opposing state violence, mo-
bilizing international instruments to contest human rights violations, etc.
These anticolonial roots of Mapuche resistance, therefore, makes it decidedly
“rupturist” from the start: seeking autonomous bases of self-governance,
placing little stock in state-recognized rights, and even less confidence in the
state as arbiter of their demands.
While in some respects leaving the Mapuche as an outlier among the
seven sites of struggle analyzed in this volume, we might also read the
Mapuche experience as a somber portent of the emerging era of racial re-
trenchment. Now in its third decade since the return to democracy, the con-
flict between the Mapuche movement and the dominant society (both the
private sector and the state) has taken on a self-reinforcing character: feeding
on itself, becoming more polarized and intractable with each successive act
and reaction. Even calls for peace, dialogue, and mutual understanding ring
hollow, not to mention invocations of “rights”: over the course of six govern-
ments, mostly center-left and one adamantly right-wing, the history of Ma-
puche relations with the state includes few instances of substantive rights on
the table for dialogue, even fewer than the Mapuche movement actively
seeks. Community relations with the forest companies in many cases have
turned “transactional” (“pay us or we’ll burn your plantations down before
you can harvest”), and state-sponsored land redistribution is a last-ditch ef-
fort to diffuse conflict, rather than a program that encourages dialogue about
territorial rights.
However somber this scenario—especially when relations turn violent—
these terms of engagement do afford a certain clarity as to the stakes, and to a
possible path forward. Intellectuals of the Mapuche movement frame the
conflict in civilizational terms—their way of life versus the modern neoliber-
al capitalist onslaught—and they seek radical autonomy, starting with control
of their own territorial base, as the only route to survival. This stark juxtapo-
sition could conceivably lead to fruitful dialogue, predicated on the shared
premise that neither side trusts the other, neither accepts the other’s world-
view, but both desire an end to the corrosive and painful violent conflict.
Unfortunately, this theoretical possibility is diminished considerably by the
revival of the right in Chilean electoral politics, another trend shared across
the hemisphere. The right’s victory in the 2017 presidential election spells
the end of any attempt to revive the stillborn multicultural turn in Chile, and
marks the full onset of racial retrenchment, with grave consequences for the
Mapuche. Yet the story does not end here. The unexpected surge of support
for the left in these same elections suggests that left leaders may have gone
further than their predecessors in comprehending the highly racialized di-
mensions of the conflict. 37 This raises two crucial questions—as relevant for
Chile as for the other six sites of struggle analyzed here: (1) in response to
the ugly extremes of racial retrenchment, are dominant culture “race-progres-
sives” finally replacing their recourse to “racial innocence” with an active
understanding of how they form part of, and benefit from, the structures of
white supremacy, even while discursively renouncing them? (2) If so, might
this finally be creating conditions for these “race-progressives” to affirm
racialized peoples’ demands for their own political-economic base of power
(“autonomy” in some contexts, “self-determination” in others) first, relegat-
ing discussions of rights, coalitions, and inclusion to a secondary plane?
These questions bring us full circle, back to Bolivia, where the previous
section began. As suggested there, the uprising that brought Evo Morales to
power fed on the contradictions of neoliberal multiculturalism, brought to a
head so quickly and vigorously that the regime lost the ability to adapt, fight
back, or negotiate. Paradoxically, although Morales claimed that both neolib-
eralism and multiculturalism (and certainly their infelicitous fusion) were
ignominies of the previous regime that would be buried by his “Movement
Toward Socialism,” he did not manage to dispense with either. Despite invo-
cations of “Andean capitalism” and “solidarity economies,” it soon became
clear that Bolivia’s centuries-long dependence on the export of primary ma-
terials could not be waved away this easily, and moreover, that the material
well-being demanded by so many of his core constituents required precisely
such “productivist” commitments. Regarding multiculturalism, though the
political discourse certainly changed (epitomized by a vice ministry of “de-
colonization”), and the Indigenous rights emblazoned in the new Constitu-
tion started out being more expansive than their liberal counterparts, the
basic political structure—state-recognized rights, adjudicated to assure they
did not contravene overriding state interests—remained substantively un-
changed (Gutierrez Aguilar 2009). But even if the Morales government did
resemble the neoliberal multicultural regime that it had dramatically dis-
placed, two characteristics—which stand in contradiction with one another—
continued to distinguish it sharply from its predecessors, yielding an interpre-
tive dilemma that animated long internal debates in our project. First, in
order to stay in power and consolidate its increasingly dubious “socialist”
program, the regime turned to authoritarian measures that negatively affect
not only the “bourgeois” opposition, but also large sectors of the Indigenous
and popular majority. Second, a large swath of Indigenous and popular sec-
tors continue to choose modest material benefits—with the added symbolic
currency of being proffered by a president “who looks like us”—over demo-

cratic principles. 38 To accent the first characteristic is to support the interpre-
tation that the Morales regime of 2017 has fallen into line with the hemi-
sphere-wide pattern of racial retrenchment; to accent the second is to cling to
the possibility that Bolivia has followed its own idiosyncratic path, offering a
state-backed counterpoint to the backlash.
CONCLUSION: ACTIONABLE ANALYSIS OF RACISM

AND ANTI-RACIST STRATEGIES FOR THE PRESENT ERA
The most important lines of actionable analysis that emerge from this re-
search project will remain closely hewn to each of the seven sites of struggle
that animated our work from the start. It is not our place here to articulate
broadly applicable strategic principles, and certainly not to second-guess
strategic decisions that the movements themselves have taken. It may be
useful, however, to revisit the principal strategies, expressed as a range of
possibilities (whether followed solely, or in sequential, alternating, or simul-
taneous fashion), and to note some of the consequences of these choices that
are coming into view. Our larger purpose here, and in the entire project, is to
encourage supportive and critical transnational dialogue among the protago-
nists and their academy-based fellow-travelers, which might contribute mod-
estly to their ability to achieve their own goals, as well as enhance possibil-
ities for collaboration.
In broad strokes, we have documented one cluster of political strategies
that revolve around continued efforts to wrest greater concessions from the
state, through deployment of a discourse of rights, whether grounded in
liberal principles of equality, cultural difference, or some combination of the
two. Arguments focused on enhancing “diversity”—whether in the work-
place, the classroom, the private sector, and the state itself—fit neatly within
this cluster. Though associated directly with the previous era, these strategies
have by no means disappeared with the rise of the new racial project. In some
contexts, they have intensified, though nearly everywhere focused increas-
ingly on defending rights gained, in danger of erosion, rather than outright
expansion. Another important axis of further variation in this cluster of strat-
egies is the character of the state, but the differentiation is far from linear or
predictable. Left-leaning governments in general offer greater room for ma-
neuver for rights-based strategies (e.g., Lula’s Brazil), with the striking ex-
ception in self-declared “revolutions” (Evo’s Bolivia) where representatives
of the state purport to embody the interests of racially marginalized groups
such that the “rights” paradigm has been superseded. On the other extreme,
while the lurch to the right (Trump, Bolsonaro, Piñera, and most recently,
Duque in Colombia) sends a generally discouraging message regarding the
possibilities for any rights-based strategy, if the assault on established gains

appear too rapid or encompassing, impressive openings for such strategies
emerge. However, such openings tend to remain largely defensive, and run
the risk of celebrating as “victories” the endorsement of principles that in
previous times would have passed as commonsense decency. The notion that
lurches to the right “deepen the contradictions” and thereby hasten systemic
demise is a well-worn, recurring leftist trope that has little historical evidence
in its favor.
A distinct cluster of political strategies, at the opposite pole of the spec-
trum, revolves around what we have called radical refusal. Resistance move-
ments animated by these sensibilities and analysis have been present since
the onset of colonial invasion and the transatlantic slave trade, as Indigenous
and Afro-descendant communities have acted to destroy local manifestations
of systemic oppression, and withdrawn to establish their own forms of social
organization and reproduction. In some of the most inspiring historical exam-
ples of this resistance, the two peoples have worked together, whether
through cultural fusion or collaboration, using this exchange to strengthen
their struggles. In contemporary times, strategies of radical refusal have con-
gealed in a “post-rights” critique and reformulation of the political, seeking

political-economic autonomy or self-determination, not as rights conferred
by a colonial or racial state, but as a material base for the exercise of counter-
vailing power. While the Zapatistas represent the most iconic expression of
this political sensibility, we situate it more broadly, in various strands of
Black militancy based in the United States and Latin America, in Indigenous
projects of autonomy dating back decades, in mobilizations based on rights
that are immanent rather than conferred by a state or transnational entity.
Among the seven sites of struggle highlighted in our study, the Mapuche of
southern Chile most fully and explicitly embody this position.
Our first point of actionable analysis follows from this characterization of
the range or spectrum of resistance strategies that the seven sites of struggle
encompass. Strategies that fall closer to the “defend or expand rights” pole of
the spectrum are more familiar. Although, as we have argued throughout this
chapter, these rights-based strategies face a crisis of declining efficacy nearly
everywhere, familiarity still confers certain advantages. Most important,
their broad legibility makes them easier to invoke in processes of mobiliza-
tion, and a relatively unthreatening basis for recruiting allies and forging
coalitions. At the other pole, strategies of radical refusal are less legible, in
part by design, but also because until recently they have been widely discred-
ited, even by other Black and Indigenous intellectuals, as self-limiting, im-
possible to defend, difficult to scale. Emerging conditions of racial retrench-
ment, we have argued, have obliged a reconsideration of that skepticism. By
extension, we urgently need to devote greater descriptive and analytical ener-
gies to strategies of radical refusal. While historically these movements have
generally preferred anonymity as a defense against surveillance and repres-

sion, this may be changing as their number grows, and participants place
greater value on countervailing advantages of disseminating their own strug-
gles, and learning from others. As the movements themselves endorse this
inclination for greater documentation and dissemination of their efforts, we
argue for taking up that call, to generate solidarity and inspire others, on the
one hand, and to contribute critical analysis to their endeavors, on the other
hand.
Our central observation from a first round of this analysis is that strategies
of radical refusal seem most often to come in combination with rights-based
approaches. That is, while ideas of radical refusal inform a rising current of
reflection in all seven sites, and inspire some degree of dedicated action in
most, they nearly always coexist and comingle with currents of rights-based
strategies. To some extent, these two poles of praxis stand in tension, leading
to intense internal debates, at times descending into conflict and fragmenta-
tion. Yet in other contexts, this tension can turn creative, challenging the
implicit dichotomy of these poles, finding ways that each can help to enable
the other. For example, the M4BL has consciously embraced the tension of
these two poles and as such may perhaps be described as pursuing a multifac-
eted strategy. Their five-year plan commits them to building alternatives
while struggling for concessions from the state. Affiliated organizations
range from those dedicated to electoral or prison abolition struggles to those
seeking to build alternative institutions, such as the National Black Food and
Justice Alliance (NBFJA), a coalition of Black-led organizations directed
toward “building Black self-determination, Black institution building and
organizing for food sovereignty, land and justice.” 39 Similarly, “the Jackson
experiment,” the struggle for “economic democracy and Black self-determi-
nation” in Jackson, Mississippi, (Akuno and Nangwaya 2017) makes full use
of local electoral politics and other mainstream civic-political tactics, but
with the deeper objectives of forging sufficient economic and political power
to challenge the structural conditions that have kept the majority African-
American inhabitants of Jackson impoverished and disenfranchised. These
movements are profoundly anti-racist in precisely the sense that we argue
contemporary conditions increasingly require: refusing to trust the laws, poli-
cies, and public discourse that profess a commitment to equality and building
the de facto material bases for that equality, assuming that the “rights” will
eventually follow. 40
In each of the seven sites of struggle we found distinct expressions of this
third way, partly obscured by the fact that the combination is so novel,
especially when the primary goal is not to achieve a more effective rights
regime, but rather, to hold at arm’s length a system that never worked to
begin with. We need successor projects of activist research devoted to ex-
ploring the challenges and complexities of this combined strategy: probing
the practical possibilities for political-economic autonomy in the face of an

aggressively hostile broader environment, asking hard questions, propelled
by intersectional theory, about persisting internal hierarchies in these com-
munities of struggle. Alongside these, we also need a much fuller under-
standing of the collective political sensibilities associated with this combined
strategy: sensibilities that allow people to make effective tactical use of re-
sources embedded in a system they abhor; to credibly endorse what’s left of
rights-based approaches, in order to pursue an alternative political horizon
that cannot be early contained in a rights-focused frame. Whether we are
immersed solely in social movements, or with one foot in mainstream aca-
demic institutions, these political sensibilities are going to become indispens-
able for us all as we work to combat the project of racial retrenchment in all
its dimensions.
NOTES
1. The framework of rights grounded in the recognition of cultural difference is much

stronger in Latin America than in the United States. To greatly simplify, in the United States,
the dominant stream of the civil rights movement and its antecedents was predicated on deny-
ing cultural difference, a position articulated in E. Franklin Frazier’s early critique of Melville
Herskovits. This stance was based on the fear that emphasizing Black cultural difference would
reinforce prevailing notions of inherent Black inferiority, and thereby undermine the demand
for rights based on equal citizenship. Black power and Afrocentrism, and eventually multicul-
turalism, were significant reactions against this civil rights orthodoxy, but to date cultural
difference has not been the main arena of struggle. Currents of this equal rights (as opposed to
cultural difference) position also emerged in Latin America, especially among Afro-descendant
movements (see Paschel 2016; Hooker 2005). We engage these complexities—which run in
part, but not completely, along Black-Indigenous lines—later on in this chapter.
2. In the best of economic times, at least in countries such as Brazil with powerful and
relatively stable left-leaning governments, poverty rates declined significantly; and with these
changes came modest improvements in living conditions for racialized peoples. However, these
advances quickly dissipated with economic downturns; and advances driven by conditional
cash transfers rather than structural or institutional change showed very little resilience.
3. Broad generalizations of this sort, encompassing a wide range of sites each with their
own specificities, inevitably come with simplifications and glossing of complexities. We note
three here which, though important, do not undermine the overall argument. First, the Gram-
scian strategy of counter-hegemonic struggle from within—in his terms the “war of position”—
acquires coherence and potency through the protagonists’ simultaneous commitment to radical-
ly distinct political horizons, which would be pursued more directly (through a “war of maneu-
ver”) when conditions permit. Indeed, in Gramscian terms, the “war of position” helps to build
these very conditions. Second, throughout the Americas, across both space and time, powerful
currents of Black and Indigenous movements eschewed the “war of position” strategy, favoring
approaches that emphasized self-determination and refusal from the start. Third, even though
this range of positions had clear differences with major strategic implications, they often
unfolded in contexts of intense dialogue and deep mutual influence. By extension, anti-racist
resistance movements have often taken approaches that combine “refusal” and “struggle from
within” political strategies in unexpected ways. Indeed, we conclude arguing that the most
promising processes of resistance to racial recalcitrance illustrate such combinations, reaping
advantage from systemic openings to the extent possible, while keeping adversaries off-balance
by eluding easy legibility and categorization.
4. See (Jung 2015) and HoSang et al. (2012) for discussion of this issue.
5. See, for example: (Coulthard 2014), (Clarno 2017), (Gomez-Barris 2017), (Jung 2015),
(Kelley 2017), (Mbembe 2017).
6. Ideally, this US-based analysis would encompass the range of racialized peoples who
form part of US society. While we do strive for this broader analysis in some parts of this
chapter, our focus is on US African-Americans, since they are the central protagonists in the
Movement for Black Lives, our US site of struggle.
7. This might have occurred in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and especially Colombia;
it would have been less likely in the other three countries (Guatemala, Bolivia, and Chile),
where Afro-descendant political organization and rights claims are much less present.
8. Growing popular frustration with the deepening contradictions of this configuration
gave a distinct advantage to Lopez Obrador, the left-popular winner of the 2018 presidential
elections. Consistent with the argument developed here, a central internal tension within his
base of support revolves around race. The most pointed evidence for this tension came with the
presidential candidacy of María de Jesús (“Marichuy”) Patricio Martínez, an Indigenous wom-
an who ran on a platform of Indigenous empowerment that contrasted markedly with Lopez
Obrador’s state-centered populism. The counterpoint has persisted, and perhaps deepened,
since Lopez Obrador’s election in 2018. See, for example, “Marichuy pide a López Obra-
dor . . .” https://josecardenas.com/2019/03/marichuy-pide-a-lopez-obrador-que-en-vez-de-
exigir-perdon-a-espana-deje-de-despojar-a-los-pueblos-originarios/
9. One consequence of these modest advances, predictably, has been backlash by a wide
range of dominant culture actors, which later played a role in the election of Bolsonaro. One
especially pointed illustration of this new space of contention is the “rolezinhos” (little strolls)
in the malls by Afro-Brazilians, in response to exclusionary and criminalizing practices by mall

security agents. See, for example: Sullivan (2014).
10. In the United States, there have been historical moments when naked oppression of
African Americans did not serve the interests of some sectors of the elite. For example, in the
post–World War II period, in the context of competition with the socialist world for the “hearts
and minds” of the “third world,” US interests were not well-served by its open oppression of
African-Americans. This was one factor in the decision to deploy federal troops to enforce
integration measures opposed by Southern states.
11. While “whiteness” has been subjected to a certain amount of critical scrutiny in scholar-
ly circles, it is not clear that this is the same as a critique of white supremacy.
12. The literature that substantiates and elaborates on this assertion is vast. A brief selection
would include, on Mexico: Speed and Collier (2000); Speed (2005); Larson (2017); on Guate-
mala: Hale (2006); on Bolivia: Postero (2007); on Chile: Hale and Millaman (2006); Boccara
(2007).
13. See, for example, the 2008 documentary production, “Humillados y Ofendidos” [Humil-
iated and Insulted], which caught on film an emblematic series of racist events in Sucre.
14. Liberal multiculturalism was most strongly expressed in universities where Black, eth-
nic, labor, and gender studies had some initial successes in challenging the traditional canon
and hegemonic triumphalist history (Hu-Dehart 1993).
15. For analysis of this discourse in Guatemala, see Hale (1999).
16. Indeed, a major bone of contention in Mapuche relations with the Chilean state since
1990 has been the latter’s application of Pinochet-era anti-terrorist laws as the framework for
responding to and adjudicating Mapuche demands.
17. The Zapatista movement in Mexico, of course, is paradigmatic in this regard (Mora
2017). Other less internationally well-known struggles that fit in this category have emerged
throughout Indigenous Mexico, for example, the policias comunitarias in Guerrero (Sierra et
al. 2013), comunalidad praxis in Oaxaca (Aquino 2013), and the movement for municipal
autonomy in Cherán, Michoacán (Aragón Andrade 2013).
18. An especially telling example of engaging the state for practical reasons, while harbor-
ing political horizons that bear little relationship to that engagement, is Mapuche relations with
CONADI, the state entity charged with market-based agrarian reform. Mapuche activists gen-
erally accept these lands—some four hundred thousand hectares already have been devolved—
while firmly rejecting the premises on which the program is based. Mexico is so vast and varied
that a generalization like this may be imprudent. Interestingly, given the very distinct historical
sequence as well as differential racial formations from Indigenous peoples, Afro-Mexican
articulations with the state may be greater.
19. Three of the best-known examples are Malcolm X, as he was rapidly moving in an
internationalist direction; Dr. Martin Luther King of the SCLC in the process of organizing a
“Poor People’s March; and Fred Hampton, leader of the Chicago branch of the Black Panthers
for Self-Defense who was effectively organizing working-class people across race.
20. See also: Mullings (2005), Jung (2015), Winant (2001).
21. In the case of Brazil, conditional cash transfers during the PT administrations increased
the size of this sector substantially: fifty million Afro-Brazilians entered the realm of consumer
capitalism. Yet as the reversal of these policies by subsequent right-wing administrations has
shown, this upward mobility rested on exceedingly weak foundations. Moreover, inequality
along racial lines persisted even in the best of times (Alves and Vargas 2018)
22. This is definitely the case in Guatemala, after the decade-long flush in the aftermath of
the 1997 peace accords.
23. A serious challenge along these lines was articulated by Manuel Lopez Obrador, the left-
leaning winner of the Mexican presidential elections of 2018; however, as the chapter in this
volume suggests, once in power this challenge has been attenuated to the point that Mexico no
longer departs fundamentally from the broader pattern. A parallel challenge is not on the
horizon in either Guatemala or Colombia, though it could emerge.
24. For more on this distinction, and how it helps to track racial inequality, see Telles
(2014).
25. Although there is no direct parallel to “white grievance” in Brazil, the rough analogue is
resentment by middle- and working-class “near whites” or white-identified Brazilians. In both
countries this focus on white grievance has been a long time in the making, but perhaps more
explicitly and effectively in the United States (consider, for example, the Willie Horton cam-
paign ad run by George H. W. Bush in the late 1980s). Our argument is not that the discourse is
new, but rather, that in the era of racial retrenchment, it has become the articulating principle.
26. For an emblematic, if contradictory in the extreme, expression of these sensibilities, see
Roy Moore’s speech refusing to concede his loss to Doug Jones in the 2017 Alabama Senate
race: “We are indeed in a struggle to preserve our republic, our civilization and our religion and
to set free a suffering humanity,” Moore said. “Today, we no longer recognize the universal
truth that God is the author of our life and liberty. Abortion, sodomy and materialism have
taken the place of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (Swenson 2017).
27. In the United States, tensions between anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles have a long
and often bitter history. In addition to the historically prevalent trope of Black men lusting after
and raping white women as a rationale for the post-reconstruction violence and the wave of
post-WWI lynching, some pioneers of the women’s movement not only prioritized gender at
the expense of racial equality, they made common cause with racism. For example, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, opposing abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the 15th amendment which enfran-
chised Black men but not women of any race, referred to Black men as members of the “lower
orders,” “unlettered and unwashed . . . fresh from the plantations,” and “Sambos” (Davis 1981:
44–46).
28. See the discussion of a contemporary FBI program to track “black extremists” in the
United States in the chapter by Mullings in this volume, and the analysis of the effects of
“securitization” and “criminalization” on Indigenous and citizen protest in the chapter on
Mexico by Mora and Leyva, also in this volume.
29. For a nuanced analysis of this issue, see Mora (2017b).
30. For further details of this catalyzing moment, see Hale, Calla, and Mullings (2017).
31. For instance, the new internal security law passed in 2017 (“Ley de Seguridad Interior”)
made protest illegal, and army intervention/repression more easily achieved; see the chapter by
Mora and Leyva in this volume.
32. One telling manifestation of this trend, in recent years, was the defeat of attempts to
reform Oaxaca’s state law of Indigenous rights, first promulgated in 1996. Although some of
the most prominent Indigenous activist intellectuals in the state gave this initiative top priority
during the administration of Governor Gabino Cue (2010–2016), they failed to overcome
opposition from establishment politicians.
33. For a critical race analysis of the accords, see Courtheyn (2017).
34. See, for example, the activities and general outlook of ENAMA (“Association of Ma-
puche Professionals”). A description of the organization, for example, explains that: “ENAMA
considers that through the effective exercise of our collective rights it is possible to forge
respectful inter-ethnic relations at the regional and national levels, which are fundamental
pillars of social peace and healthy intercultural coexistence in a democratic society.” See http://
enama.cl/enama/.
35. See the chapter by Antimil, Nahuelpá n, and Curaqueo in this volume for further refer-
ences and analysis on this point.
36. See Hale and Millaman (2017), for an extensive analysis of the relation between the
forestry industry and Mapuche territorial claims.
37. In a personal communication with the authors, Jaime Antimil identified the following as
the prominent features of the left’s program with respect to Mapuche demands: a rejuvenation
of ILO Convention 169’s original purpose; an end to the extractivist model; a new Constitution;
a recognition that state policy in the past has been “colonial,” an end to criminalization, etc.
38. This framing of the conundrum in Bolivia relies heavily on the analysis of Ravindran
(2015).
39. From the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, https://www.blackfoodjustice.org
40. The M4BL is also a founding member of a broad-based coalition, “The Majority,”
composed of Black, Indigenous, people of color and multiracial groups, under the banner of
anti-capitalism. The Majority and M4BL organizations continue to mount major local and
national struggles around “democratic control over institutions, land and resources that affect
our communities, guarantee full healthcare for all, shift resources from mass policing, deporta-
tions, and war,” which may involve direct actions, electoral politics and a struggle for rights.
But they do so with a view toward addressing structural racism and transforming society, in
order to “advance beyond short-term reform and toward meeting our people’s and planet’s
needs” (The Majority 2017).
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Chapter One

Charles R. Hale and Leith Mullings

phase, which we characterize as an Americas-wide project of racial retrench-

focusing on the rise of white supremacist ideologies is essential in ethical

post-racialism) enables a rising tide of white supremacy, without drawing

Third, and finally, the need to recalibrate comes from a race-centered

features have remained in place, while its ideological manifestations have

• Is it helpful to think of the present era as an emerging racial project?

This last question is of course the most crucial. Racial retrenchment is a

sive neoliberalism, will be especially reluctant to abandon that harbor in the

A NEW RACIAL PROJECT?

Admittedly, our choice of terminology in framing this first question partly

enough, in this sense, to position Black and Indigenous peoples as battered

global level, is characterized by deepening racialized inequality, and that the

of security operations, such that individuals, corporations and even govern-

phase of racial capitalism: how the deepening inequality is racialized; how

strong impetus to join in, to bolster opposition to racial extremism, setting

compromise, by scaling back the racial militancy, which emerged in opposi-

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

promise of rights, recognition, even empowerment. Whether or not the mo-

outpouring of popular anger take direct aim at the structural underpinnings of

of extractivist dispossession, producing a new round of lucrative investments

long-term tendency—which we fear has amplified since 2016—to downplay

tive, race-sensitive narratives of societal transformation throughout the hemi-

racism), and US imperialism as the cause of all ills in Latin America—we

COMMONALITIES AND AXES OF

risk of losing “global competitiveness” as leverage. In contrast, these same

cases achievements of—prerogatives and benefits well beyond the originally

the multicultural turn in Latin America. Indeed, given the dominance of

fully toward a space of radical refusal (the Mapuche), or continued pursuing

FROM HOLLOW RIGHTS TO

“AUTONOMIA SIN PERMISO”?

The eerily synchronized convergence of the two largest countries of the

tion, branding it “terrorist” and authorizing FBI surveillance parallel to the

keeps the radical alternatives in play.

anti-racist electoral strategy; leadership development; and efforts to “align

obvious complementary explanation is the resounding global impact of Zapa-

“montaña” region of Guerrero, where our Mexican research team concentrat-

people—at least 50 percent of the total population of one million—to urban

on the other. Chilean state-building never developed a vigorous ideology of

nous and Afro-descendant peoples during the multicultural era, at least in

currency of being proffered by a president “who looks like us”—over demo-

CONCLUSION: ACTIONABLE ANALYSIS OF RACISM

possibilities for any rights-based strategy, if the assault on established gains

gealed in a “post-rights” critique and reformulation of the political, seeking

generally preferred anonymity as a defense against surveillance and repres-

the practical possibilities for political-economic autonomy in the face of an

1. The framework of rights grounded in the recognition of cultural difference is much

in the malls by Afro-Brazilians, in response to exclusionary and criminalizing practices by mall

Hill: UNC Press.

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