That’s an interesting perspective, Joana, thanks. Rochelle
Le lundi 20 novembre 2023 à 18:49:31 UTC+5:30, Joana Filipa Passos
<[email protected]> a écrit :
Hello!I am sorry, but while it is true Portugal does has not acknowledged it
is own inherent racism, which is actually on the rise because of immigrants
-(being Indian, Bengladeshi and Nepali, as well as Africans and Eastern
Europeans regarded with suspicion), my point is that in order to understand
current day Portugal you have to get a sense of proportion. You are making
misplaced generalizations.
To be honest, Chega, our very own xenophobic party, may well reach 20% in the
next elections I fear.In spite of that fact:Was the Goan community o topic in
political discussion after the fall of our Prime Minister António Costa? It was
not. Is the memory of empire and of the Portuguese colonial past relevant for
people below 40 years old in Portugal? It is not. What is the youth focused on?
They are Europeans, and they look up to Northern Europe.You have a racist
discourse on the rise in Rural, interior areas, well there are many immigrants
working in agriculture. Local population does not like to live with them.
Does this rural population and their opinions get a lot of media attention in
Portugal? They do not. The last time this situation really became visible was
during the pandemic, because of the need to vaccinate everyone.So, I am not
sure current racist discourses are related to the colonial past. I think they
have to do with the present, with immigration, and the great majority of the
population (the 80% who do not vote "Chega", do not really care. They are
concerned with other challenges and agendas (like the cost of living).
The article on Portugal although relevant and true to a certain extent really
strikes me as "old-fashined", and slightly out of touch. I completely respect
everyone's opinion, I am just offering mine because what I am reading seems
wrong, and I feel I have to contribute.
Joana
V M <[email protected]> escreveu no dia sábado, 18/11/2023 à(s) 05:53:
https://www.heraldgoa.in/Cafe/PORTUGUESE-RACISM-THROUGH-THE-LOOKING-GLASS/213769
It’s not something to take very seriously as yet, but the distinct uptick in
racism in Portugal has begun to target Goans in that country, as seen in the
poster alongside this column, which began circulating widely on social media
after the shock resignation of António Costa last week. This cartoonishly
bigoted meme evidently originated before the political upheaval, from an
ethno-nationalist Telegram network advertising itself as “identity channel for
Portuguese by blood (“para Portugueses de sangue”), and interestingly
illustrates what is usually strenuously denied. It is an unusual paradox which
needs to be understood in detail: on the one hand, 21st century Portugal is
certifiably less racist than most European countries – and especially so with
regards to Indians – but at the same time, the country and its citizens both
stubbornly resist any feedback or commentary that suggests racism is any kind
of problem at all, as well as the suggestion there is more work to be done in
order to become more accepting of its own citizens of different ethnicities.
There are many factors in play here, including the dramatic surge of support
for the far-right political party Chega (the name means “Enough” in
Portuguese), which started its political innings in the 2019 polls with just
one seat in parliament, but then catapulted into third-place overall in last
year’s snap elections (when Costa led his Socialists to an extraordinary
outright majority) with 7.2 percent of overall votes and 12 members of
parliament. Its worrisome rise also neatly encapsulates the Portuguese
conundrum: this overtly xenophobic party is continually racist in its messaging
– for just one example, its president André Ventura called for a fellow MP to
“be returned to her own country” – but even its most fervent opponents bend
over backwards to parse the hate as “populist” instead of admitting the
obvious. In 2020, entirely ludicrously, Chega even led a parade through Lisbon,
in which the avowed racists kept chanting that “Portugal is not racist.”
Such surreal politics are patently absurd to any outside observer, and derive
directly from Portugal’s schizophrenic relationship to its colonial past. In
this regard, I appreciate the analysis of Cláudia Castelo, historian from the
University of Coimbra, in her paper ‘Portuguese Non-Racism: On the historicity
of an invented tradition’, which delineates how the myth of “better
colonialism” was foisted on the Portuguese people. This patently silly notion
was born in the 18th and 19th centuries, she writes, and then became the
official position of the government when “the Estado Novo – the Portuguese
authoritarian and colonialist regime that ruled in Portugal between 1933 and
1974 – appropriated the ideas of the Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre
about a supposedly special relation of the Portuguese with the tropics.
Luso-Tropicalism argued that the Portuguese, in contrast with other colonisers,
possessed a special ability for adapting to life in the tropics, through
miscegenation and cultural interpenetration. This tropical vocation was not the
product of political or economic self-interest, but rather resulted from an
absence of colour prejudice and a creative empathy that, for Freyre, was innate
to the Portuguese people.”
Under the myopic, out-of-touch Salazar – his own secretary of state Jorge
Jardim reports the dictator called his Mozambican subjects “little black folk”
– Castelo says “the Estado Novo produced and disseminated a nationalistic
version of Freyre’s luso-tropicalism to negate that Portugal had
non-self-governing territories under the Article 73 of the United Nations
Charter. The Portuguese “overseas provinces” (the new designation for the
colonies in the 1951 revision of the Portuguese Constitution) and the provinces
in Europe formed a multicontinental and multiracial nation where everyone lived
in harmony.”
In a distinct echo of the farce we see being enacted today, “in 1955, Adriano
Moreira, at the time professor of the High Institute of Overseas Studies and
Portuguese delegate to the Inter-African Conference on Social Sciences,
considered that there was no need to teach racial tolerance at Portuguese
schools as UNESCO had suggested, since there was no racial discrimination among
the Portuguese people; instead, it could be of great interest to highlight
“Portuguese antiracist tradition” in primary and secondary education in
Portugal.”
These are the roots of Portugal’s bizarre denial of what everyone else can
easily see: “notwithstanding the internal logic of the colonial system, based
on racial inequality and exploitation, the state political and ideological
apparatus, through the education system, media, propaganda and censorship
conveyed a Luso-tropicalist message out of step with the political and social
reality in the colonies and instilled in the Portuguese the idea that they were
not nor had ever been racists. Everything that constituted prejudice or racial
discrimination was referred as ‘deviation’ from the fraternal, plastic,
tolerant and ecumenical ‘Portuguese tradition’.”
This is very much “through the looking glass” – as in Lewis Carroll’s fantasy
wonderland – where we are enjoined to believe the opposite of the evidence of
our own eyes, because it challenges someone else’s cherished falsehoods. Here,
it is absolutely fascinating to note the presence of Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho
– chief strategist of the Carnation Revolution that finally liberated Portugal
in 1974 from the dictatorship which Nehru’s troops expelled from Goa over a
decade earlier – at the heart of the racist poster decrying an imagined Goan
“assault on [Portuguese] mental life”. Over the past 50 years, this great
hero’s ancestral roots were never widely acknowledged, but here they have been
made central to his identity, with an Indian flag attached to his name. It is
an excellent indication of where the racist surge in Portugal is coming from:
precisely the fascists who yearn for “the good old days” of the Estado Novo.
Those seeking to combat them must realize it is inherently pointless to cling
to identically Salazarist tropes claiming an entirely unfounded Portuguese
exceptionalism about race. To do so is to lose the battle before it even begins,
Here is Castelo’s conclusion, which has my hearty endorsement from Goa, for
whatever that is worth: “The illusion of Portuguese non-racism has prevented
structural racism from being faced and combated in Portuguese society, and
perpetuates racism and the fake imaginary that denies its existence. It is a
vicious cycle that needs to be broken. How to put an end to it? Knowing the
historical process of racism is a first step, but in parallel, implementing
anti-racist policies in all areas of collective life, in the political,
justice, police, and education systems. It is up to the state and the civil
society to take up the challenge of breaking that self-assuring and immobile
image and promoting racial equality in Portugal. It is also up to all citizens
to embrace this task of radical social transformation in their daily lives.”
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