Violence Saturation in the Lives of Black People in Latin America: The Pathology of Coloniality and What We Can Do About It

Based on myriad investigations conducted over the decades, the United Nations (2014, 2015) United Nations. (2014). Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its Fourteenth Session. Geneva, Switzerland: UN Human Rights Council; United Nations. (2015). Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its Fifteenth and Sixteenth Sessions. Geneva, Switzerland: UN Human Rights Council) concluded that the experiences of African-descended people throughout the world are rife with violences—physical, structural, and institutional—that has had adverse effects on Black well-being, not merely within the regions where Black people reside, but also when they travel from one region to the next (see Thompson & Wells, How do peace psychologists address the assaults on Black people’s lives? A review of studies published in the Peace and Conflict journal. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 27 (4), 120–135, 2021). Latin American countries are not exceptions to the precarity of racialized violence on Black lives. These are the regions where White/European-owned slave ship crews anchored their vessels to unload the majority of the millions of people they abducted from Africa from over three centuries and, where the beneficiaries of these slave systems boast of “racial democracy” and “multiracial harmony” amidst the violence disproportionately targeted on Black relative to non-Black Latin Americans (Silva, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 45(4), 319–336, 2014; Thompson, A psychology of peace and liberation: For the greater good. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). The purpose of this chapter is first to bring clarity to the phenomena of race, racism, and colorism as “enlivened” in four Latin American countries—Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, and Peru. The second purpose is to review the literature that centers on the impacts of these forces in contributing to the pathology of Black people in these countries. A third and final purpose is to highlight practical applications to addressing these racism-related obstructions to mental health when working with and treating Afro-Brazilians, Columbians, Mexicans, and Peruvians. The third purpose of presenting practical applications is an important one. One essential means to ceasing anti-Black violence for mental health professionals is to recognize and end their use of conventional language that denigrates or dismisses Blackness and simultaneously upholds ideologies about White supremacy and normativity. As psychologists begiin en masse to identify and make changes to their this language use, we also can constructively modify our actions not only over the course of our personal lives, but also in the context of our work as researchers, educators, and practitioners (see also American Psychological Association, Apology to people of color to APA’s Role in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism, Racial discrimination, and human hierarchy in the US. Resolution Adopted by the APA Council of Representatives, 2021a; Role of psychology and the American Psychological Association in Dismantling systemic racism against people of color in the United States. Adopted by the APA Council of Representatives, 2021b).