The overwhelming majority of Portuguese people do not perceive racism as an issue, because it isn't. Of the many thousands African and Asian people - or with African and Asian ancestry - who live in Portugal, only a few may have ever been confronted with racist attitudes. Because obviously there still are some racist people in Portugal. But it isn't fair to use those very few incidents as typical of our country and people. Should we ignore those few incidents? Of course not, but they should mostly be seen as just another form of rude or asocial behaviour, the victims of which are as likely to be European Portuguese as African or Asian. But for some strange reason some people prefer to identify such bad behaviour as racist, when the victims are African or Asian. This reminds me of an anecdote told a few years ago by our Goan Prime minister. When he was in school, as a boy, one of his colleagues called him "negro" because of his darker skin. When his mother - who is white - complained about it, her son António turned to her and said: "Mum, you must agree that I am indeed a bit darker!"... A typical intelligent reaction of someone who refused to see evil racism in everything which was said to him... Unfortunately not everyone is a smart as António Costa...
Nuno Cardoso da Silva
Sent: Monday, November 20, 2023 at 1:38 PM
From: "'rochelle pinto' via Goa-Research-Net" <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [GRN] Portuguese Racism through the Looking Glass (O Heraldo, 18/11/2023)
From: "'rochelle pinto' via Goa-Research-Net" <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [GRN] Portuguese Racism through the Looking Glass (O Heraldo, 18/11/2023)
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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