The "White" Crisis

A few days ago the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said at a news conference during a visit by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, that white, blue-eye people are responsible for the financial and economic crisis at this moment (2009). This type of thinking has a long history in America (as in the Western Hemisphere) with is clearest manifestation in the Manifest Destiny that racialized the actions of white people as superior to black/brown people. Lula, I think, is making a comment about that way of thinking. Somehow the Manifest Destiny still operates at some level in the US international relations as well as in the way, perhaps I am mistaken, we (here in the US) think about the people of the countries south of the Rio Grande. In profound, subtle, and hidden (but not so hidden) ways the economic and social model of the US and Europe is racialized and has become the standard to measure the advances of Latin American peoples (who are considered non-white). Lula’s comment goes to the center of this problem. He is mistaken, of course, in making the cause of the economic crisis white, blue-eye people but he has inverted the terms of a (common and mistaken) way of thinking that still operates today.