The Subtle Racism of Latin America
Carlos Moore sees a disguised racism permeating Latin
American society, invented by Arabs in the Iberian
Peninsula.

Anson Musselman

While many believe that Arab and Latin American
societies have a better track record in regard to race
than the United States, Dr. Carlos Moore, resident
scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia,
contends that this impression is wrong. Moore, a black
man raised in pre-Castro Cuba, believes that while
these societies may look color blind on the surface,
race actually dominates every aspect of social and
political life. Moore is best known for his book
Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (CAAS, 1989), and
African Presence in the Americas, co-edited with
Shawna Moore and Tanya R. Sanders (Africa World Press,
1996).

This lecture took place in UCLA's Haynes Hall May 19
and was sponsored by the African Studies Center, the
Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies, and
the UCLA Department of Political Science.

The Arab Model

Moore in his youth set out to find what historical
events led to the establishment of a racial hierarchy
in Latin America, where race mixing is the norm, yet
lightness and darkness of skin still matters. His
findings led him to believe that the paradigms of race
in Latin America are directly descended from the time
when Arabs controlled the Iberian Peninsula, the
homeland of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the
Americas.

Arabs successfully invaded the Iberian Peninsula
(today Spain and Portugal) in 711 CE. The Moorish
culture that was established was known as Andalusia.
By the late 1200s Christian armies had expelled the
majority of Muslims from Iberia.

"I have had the privilege to have lived in Arab
countries," Moore said, "and to be shocked by the
extraordinary similarities to Latin America of
structures of race in countries like Egypt. It was
familiar ground. I was twenty-one, had just left Cuba.
I lived in Egypt for a year. I was surprised to see
how it was as though I had not left Cuba except for
the fact that they spoke Arabic and adhered to the
Muslim religion. From then on I began to study the
structures of race relations in the Arab countries in
a comparative way with relations in the Iberian
Peninsula and Latin America. That became my focus."

Arab Slavery on the Iberian Peninsula

"Through the Sahara alone," Moore said, "four million
blacks were brought over to the Arab Iberian
Peninsula. The Arab world was a world in which slavery
was essential." Some scholars are skeptical of the
size of the numbers Moore cites.

Moore sees the export of Arab-model slavery and race
relations to the New World by the Spanish and
Portuguese, who had absorbed it during the Muslim
occupation of Iberia. "The conquest of America begins
when the Arabs are expelled from this part of the
world by Europeans." Moore added that the Reconquista
was accomplished by south Europeans who had already
had long experience of intermarriage or less formal
sexual relations with Arab and African peoples and who
"are perfectly accustomed to a situation of
familiarity of race relations between black and white
in a situation of superiority and inferiority."

Moore sees two alternate models of racial rule. The
one more familiar in the Northern Hemisphere is the
Anglo-American one, where power relations and
socio-political structures were based on two distinct
groups: the Northern European and African prototypes.
"We have a stable racial social order achieved and
perpetuated through enforcement of an inflexible
two-track system whereby extreme racial polarization
is involved between two opposing somatic prototypes:
The proto-Nordic types with blonde hair, pale white
skin, and sharp facial features, and the proto-African
type, with crispy hair, very black skin, voluptuous
facial features."

Interracial Sex and Commingling

The Arab-Spanish-Latin American pattern was far more
permissive of interracial sex and incorporating racial
differences, but, Moore adds, not without its own
light-skinned hierarchy. Moore asserts that racial
mixing was a very normal occurrence in the Arab world;
socially acceptable racial mixing, however, only goes
in one direction. Moore postulates the existence in
Latin America of a "racial philosophy of eugenics"
that encourages a "unilateral . sexual commingling
between white [or light skinned] males and the females
of the physically conquered and socially inferior
race."

Like the classification of "colored" in the former
Apartheid South Africa, which was ranked as a higher
class than the pure African, Moore sees the mixed race
"mulatto" in Arab and Latin American society as a
higher class than the purebred African or Indian. "The
mulatto has a particular rank in society. In Arab
societies there are all sorts of ranks. There are
infidels, those who are believers, and the mulatto
category which is viewed as a ladder for ascension."

The racial mixing that took place in Latin America
that was socially acceptable, Moore said, was only
between white males and the black or American Indian
females.

According to Moore, the possibility of a black or
American Indian man having sex with a white woman
would have been destabilizing to the state because the
black or American Indian penetrating the female would
have been viewed as flipping the established racial
hierarchy on its head.

Mixed race children from white fathers and dark
mothers were totally accepted into society, according
to Moore. In each generation males are expected or
permitted to marry females of their own skin color or
darker. "The production of a stable intermediary
swarthy white type is very important to the Latin-Arab
model of race relations. It is so important that the
state encourages it." Moore views this as "the sexual
enslavement of black women by the conquering white
males."

The First Slaves in the Americas Were Imported from
Spain

The system developed in Iberia under Arab rule was
exported to the Americas as part of the Spanish and
Portuguese conquest in the sixteenth century. Moore
says that the Portuguese and Spanish added American
Indians to their already-enslaved black populations
brought from Iberia. "The first black slaves that came
to the Americas were not slaves from Africa, but black
slaves that came from the Iberian Peninsula, who spoke
Portuguese and Spanish."

Moore told the audience that the Northern Europeans,
"inventors of Apartheid," have traditionally feared
the black person, while Europeans from the Iberian
Peninsula, as well as their descendants in Latin
America, have no such fear. As he put it, "in the U.S.
one drop of black blood makes someone black. In Latin
America one drop of white blood makes you white."

When Spain and Portugal conquered vast parts of Latin
America, Moore said, they established a black slave
trade, continued the mixing of the races with white
Europeans at the top of the social ladder and American
Indian and African descendants at the bottom. Whites
lived in close physical proximity to black and
American Indian populations, however those of a white
European ancestry (Spanish and Portuguese) had the
political and economic power. The lightness or
darkness of one's skin strongly affected one's social
rank.

The Rules of the Subtle Race Game

Moore recalled that Hollywood wanted to make a film
about Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. They had cast an
African American in the role, only to have to pull the
plug on the project when Sadat objected to a black man
portraying him. Sadat, being the leader of Egypt,
considered himself white, according to Moore. Moore
said there are black-looking Arabs and Latin Americans
who consider themselves white because they have some
distant white ancestry. "The only problem is when they
go to New York."

Moore expressed some concern about the implications
for race relations in the United States posed by the
increasing immigration from Mexico and Latin America.
While he clearly regarded the often overt racism of
the North as perhaps even more objectionable than the
Arab-Spanish form in the South, he saw a particular
problem in the general Latin American denial of race
as an issue. This has made it socially disreputable to
raise demands for reform in Latin America around race
issues.

Moore concluded by expressing the hope that these new
Latin American immigrants will not import their
Arab-Latin American model of race relations, as with
it comes a false color blindness. To Moore, the U.S.
model of dealing with race, while far from ideal,
enables groups to make demands on society, and to be
able to work for change.

African Studies Center

_________________________________________________________________
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