In this special episode of the Charla de Merienda Podcast, Margarita and Isabelle sit down with the Vasquez family to discuss their multigenerational experience of Dia de Los Muertos. In the end, it becomes clear that the holiday is more than a day about costumes and spectacle, but more about the community, family, and memory.

In this discussion we want to focus on police militarization, and in particular the aggressive, sometimes brutal, response to peaceful protests for change. We will dive into how the phenomenon of police militarization ignores Black and indigenous pain, how it is inherently anti-black, and a mere tool of the state to perpetuate poverty, racism, homophobia, patriarchy and etc. but to silence the issues at bay. The militarization of police is not only something we see here in the United States but is evident all over Latin America.

This episode of Charla de Merienda:The Podcast addresses how deep-rooted Anti-Black rhetoric has affected American and other societies around globe. Anti-blackness is not just racism, colorism or prejudice against Black people–it is the denial of Black humanity. African-American Studies professor Frank B. Wilderson, who has coined the term “Afro-pessimism” states,“Anti-Blackness is the [rationale of classifying] Black people as sub-human” (@darkest.hue). 

Critical race theorists argue that western society was founded (stronger claim) or at least heavily dependent upon Anti-Blackness since the advent of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Despite the abolishment of slavery and much progress toward equality, Anti-blackness still remains in the minds, logics, and structures of many societies that have shaped the way the world views Black people globally. We see this with the countless deaths of Black people in the United States due to systemic and institutionalized  structures of racism. Also in the Caribbean when a Haitian man was lynched in the Dominican Republic (February 2015)  in the midst of the changing of Dominican citizenship laws, denying citizenship to Haitians retroactively up to 1929. These instances are ways that we can see how the negation of Black humanity occurs around the globe, how it perpetuates anti-blackness in media representations, cultural productions, historical narratives, and more.

In light of current restrictions on gatherings, Charla de Merienda has been made available as a podcast. For those who are new to new to the platform, CdM is a joint production of Lawerence Talks, Inc and The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at KU. For our first podcast production, we explore the topic of marginalized bodies in relation to COVID-19 and the policies passed in response to it. Not all bodies are affected the same in terms of health, politics, and economics. While much of the narrative so far has been concerned with discussions of “going back to normal”, there is another conversation being had about whether going back to normal is not the preferred outcome for everyone.

To help us navigate these issues, we sit down with three KU Scholars:

Araceli Masterson-Algar | Associate Professor | Portuguese and Spanish | University of Kansas

Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, Ph.D. | Public and Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Research Fellow | Hall Center for the Humanities | University of Kansas

Hannah Soyer | MFA in Creative Writing | University of Kansas

In the era of #MeToo and #YoTambien, Charla de Merienda asks: as gender relations are redefined across the Americas, should machismo survive?