For Enrique Dussel: “Modernity dawned in 1492 and with it the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European.” For Walter Mignolo, 1492 is the moment at which “there is a bifurcation of history”. For Sylvia Wynter: “(T)he 1492 event would set in motion the bringing together of separated branches of our human species within the framework of a single history that we all now live, and while it led to incredible techno-scientific and other such dazzling achievements, as well as to the material well-being of one restricted portion of humanity, it also led to the systemic large-scale degradation and devalorization, even the extinction, of a large majority of the peoples of the earth.” Taking this idea further, Wynter argues that the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. Because of this overrepresentation, which is defined in the first part of the title as the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, any attempt to unsettle the coloniality of power will call for the unsettling of this overrepresentation as the second and now purely secular form of what Aníbal Quijano identifies as the “Racism/Ethnicism complex,” on whose basis the world of modernity was brought into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards (Quijano 1999, 2000). And of what Walter Mignolo identifies as the foundational “colonial difference” on which the world of modernity was to institute itself, thus institutionalizing the the human vs. man dialectic. The historical legacy and violent structures that are a vestige of racial mixing (albeit out of clear survival and necessity from the perspective of the Portuguese settler colonialist) and a lack of explicit apartheid laws, have allowed Brazilian elites to advance the myth of Brazil’s racial democracy. Conversely, these same elites lament that the affirmative action and anti-discrimination policies, despite being held up by the Brazilian Supreme Court, are US imports bent on inciting racial distrust and violence. Brazilian and US police have much in common. Both are waging an intensified militarized war on black, brown, and the poor that results in a reinscripton the power relations that are in a large part based on 14th century ideas of race; 18th-19th century colonialism/chattel slavery…but all are frankly rooted in the false notion of white supremacy. What we will hear next is Africa World Now Project’s collective associate producer, Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry and myself in conversation with Dr. Christen Smith. Dr. Christen Smith is a Black feminist anthropologist, social justice advocate and Associate Professor of Anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where work focuses on the gendered dimensions of anti-Black state violence and resistance in the Americas, particularly Brazil. Based on her long-term collaborations with black organizers in Brazil, Christen Smith’s, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Today’s program was executive produced by Keisha-Khan Perry. And as always in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program.