Democratizing memory and the question of Black difference in Brazil (ca. 1980–1988): The transformation of the Serra da Barriga (Alagoas), from haunted “Black territory” to national memorial in the transition between dictatorship and democracy

By voiding the previous social pact, including the predominant conception of racial integration, the Brazilian military regime (1964–1985) created the conditions for a radical understanding of Black difference, which found its leading motif in the memory of the Quilombo of Palmares, a historical community of rebel slaves. A new Black movement understood its cultural and historical experience as containing a utopian legacy, an alternative for a Brazil marked by racism and inequality. To overcome its problems of legitimation, the regime set into motion a process of gradual democratization. The need to symbolically and culturally accomplish this transition created an institutional breach for the memory politics of the Black movement. In this context, the inclusion of the Serra da Barriga, a site of the war against Palmares, into national cultural heritage became the testing grounds for novel politics of culture that changed both the understanding of Brazilian nationhood and Black difference, as represented in the memory of Palmares.

Through the Ivory Curtain: African Americans in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, before the Fair Housing Movement

This article examines the largely neglected history of African American struggles to obtain housing in Cleveland Heights, a first-ring suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, between 1900 and 1960, prior to the fair housing and managed integration campaigns that emerged thereafter. The article explores the experiences of black live-in servants, resident apartment building janitors, independent renters, and homeowners. It offers a rare look at the ways that domestic and custodial arrangements opened opportunities in housing and education, as well as the methods, calculations, risks, and rewards of working through white intermediaries to secure homeownership. It argues that the continued black presence laid a foundation for later advances beginning in the 1960s that made Cleveland Heights, like better-known Shaker Heights, a national model for suburban racial integration.

Racial Integration and the Problem of Relational Devaluation

This article argues that blacks should reject integration on self-protective and solidarity grounds. It distinguishes two aspects of black devaluation: a ‘stigmatization’ aspect that has to do with the fact that blacks are subject to various forms of discrimination, and an aesthetic aspect (‘phenotypic devaluation’) that concerns the aesthetic devaluation of characteristically black phenotypic traits. It identifies four self-worth harms that integration may inflict, and suggests that these may outweigh the benefits of integration. Further, it argues that, while the integrating process may reduce stigmatization, there is less reason to think that it can do the same for phenotypic devaluation.

Embracing Colorblindness

Chapter 4 traces the transformation of segregationist theology into the blossoming ideas of colorblind individualism in the early 1970s. This chapter narrates the integration of the United Methodist denomination to demonstrate how some white evangelicals adopted a language of colorblindness in an attempt to subvert racial integration. The story of South Carolina’s Methodists illuminates ways that religious ideas can adapt to the imperatives of the culture in which they reside. Accordingly, this chapter demonstrates that while many evangelicals were still influenced by traditional notions of segregationist theology, the growing acceptance of racial equality in American society dictated the need for new rhetoric to keep segregationist Christianity in line with cultural benchmarks of acceptability. Colorblind individualism proved to be such rhetoric.