A world without mediations: african decolonization as a political theory of the peripheral modernization

Abstract

We will use the Fanon’s concept of society without mediations, based on structural racism, to explain the regressive tendency proper to societies of peripheric modernization, especially Brazil. From a criticism to Gilberto Freyre and Florestan Fernandes, who both assume a notion of ne-cessitarian sociological objectivism with an apolitical-depoliticized character in order to under-stand the development and the contradictions of current Brazilian society (Freyre’s sadism-masochism; Fernandes’ idea of Black incapability to protestant ethics due to slavery), both re-fusing structural racism and racial whitening, we will point exactly to (a) the systemic evolution as a White’s or colonizer’s intentioned and planified political project over the Black/colonized, which is, according us, the effective practical core and role of the formation and development of the colonial society; (b) the inexistence or the fragility of juridical, institutional and normative mediations between these divided and ossified realities of race (Whites over/against Blacks); (c) the direct violence and the permanent regression as the structural tendencies of the constitution and development of a society of peripheric and racialized modernization, including here the eras-ing and falsification of colonial history; and, finally, (d) the intrinsic correlation, once denied by Freyre and Fernandes, and on the contrary affirmed by Fanon, of race and class, race as class, class as race.