Never Meant to Survive

Never Meant to Survive presents a historical, political, and social assessment of anti-black genocide and liberatory struggles that arose to resist it. Based on fine-grained accounts of community life at the street level, Costa Vargas's work presents crucial examples of political resistance and community activism. By examining two cities linked by common experiences of Blackness, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, this book identifies a prevailing genocidal force that organizes individuals and groups across society. The 1965 and 1992 riots in Los Angeles, the work of the Black Panther Party and favela activists in Brazil, and police brutality in struggles between black communities and the state in both L.A. and Rio de Janeiro all figure importantly in Costa Vargas's compelling account. What emerges from this analysis is a call for the destruction of the conditions that foster the marginalization of black communities and a halt to the internal conflicts between black social groups themselves.

Never Meant to Survive is one of the most provocative and compelling pieces of analysis and criticism that I've ever read in anthropology. The book rises to the intellectual and political challenge being articulated in transnational arenas such as the 2001 World Conference against Racism, which represented only a brief moment in the ongoing struggles of oppressed peoples-with African descendants conspicuous among them-to mobilize against crimes against their humanity. The common yet, at the same time, differentiated ground that African Americans and Afro-Brazilians occupy is not an abstraction or cerebral game in this work. Vargas shows how transnational approaches to research and social analysis as well as to community organizing are imperative for both deeper understanding and more effective forms of anti-racist agency., In this bold and beautiful book, João Costa Vargas proves that the relentless marginalization and premature death of large numbers of Black people in modern societies are not aberrant injustices, but rather central principles of a social system that oppresses us all. Brilliantly mapping the full moral and cognitive dimensions of anti-Black racism, Vargas also demonstrates the importance and liberating potential of grass roots activist anti-racist mobilizations emerging within aggrieved Black communities in Brazil and the United States. His deft blend of careful ethnographic observation and independent ideological critique offers a way out of our collective racial nightmare, while at the same time demonstrating that the scholarship of tomorrow is already here today.

Joao H. Costa Vargas is associate professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Catching Hell in the City of Angels: Life and Meanings of Blackness in South Central Los Angeles.