Cristiana Bastos and white slavery

There are statements and positions that only come to our attention with great delay, but that are still worth dismantling and confronting because what they represent is still very present and active in our society and in our academic environment. This is in connection with an article I published in Observador (August 26, 2022) entitled “White Slavery”. In that article, I lamented that woke people only had accusatory eyes for the slavery that was carried out by Europeans and Americans, in the context of colonial history, ignoring or undervaluing the slavery that black people suffered at the hands of other peoples and in other contexts, as well as other brutal forms of transportation and exploitation of people of all skin colors.

I acknowledged, however, that there were fortunately exceptions to this general trend and mentioned, as an example, the anthropologist Cristiana Bastos, a researcher at the prestigious ICS, who had written an article in Público about the harmful effects of the plantation economy in which she suggested a parallel between the current conditions of immigrants in Odemira and other parts of the country and those faced by thousands of Portuguese people in the mid-19th century in Guyana and the British Caribbean. I also wrote that the anthropologist’s explanations were adequate and that her article had “the merit of drawing attention to poorly understood aspects of the history of labour exploitation”. I then went on to explain the transport conditions and forms of “almost slave-like” labour of poor Portuguese people in mid-19th century Brazil, conditions and forms that were then known as “white slavery”. In fact, this was how they were mentioned in Portuguese and Brazilian periodicals and how they were addressed and debated in parliaments, even though, as I pointed out, “technically and legally it was not trafficking or slavery”.

For reasons that seem paradoxical and incomprehensible at first glance, this article of mine bothered anthropologist Cristiana Bastos, who immediately wrote the following on her Facebook page: “a former historian turned novelist and opinion columnist uses my work to bring water to his mill — in this case a kind of memory-washing of the slave trade. He enters the discussion of ‘white slavery’, so often used perniciously for purposes of memory-laundering. Neither did I enter the discussion, nor do I use the term, nor will I fuel the debate.”

The angry statement received a lot of applause, although it caused perplexity to fellow anthropologist José Teixeira, who confessed that he did not understand who his colleague was challenging. Cristiana Bastos replied that she did not want to challenge me, because I was quoting her “correctly and with due protocol”, and was not imputing to her an argument that was mine. However, there was a “slip of reasoning” in my article that she completely distanced herself from. The fact that “there are Portuguese and Asians working in conditions analogous to slavery (…) does not in any way relativize the brutality of the slave trade of Africans to the Americas and the Antilles”. This would be a step that, according to the anthropologist, I would have taken. In fact, Cristiana Bastos also rejected the expression “white slavery”, which she only used when citing politicians who sought to whitewash the horror of the slave trade and slavery of black people.

Having reached this point, my readers may begin by asking the following: if I quoted Cristiana Bastos correctly and according to the due protocols, if I did not attribute ideas that are my own to her, why is she so exalted and throwing stones and hiding her hand? The answer is obvious and she herself gives it: the need to distance herself. The woke left is terrified of being associated with ideas or people that their peers might consider politically incorrect. This is especially visible in academia, particularly in the area of ​​Social Sciences, where, with notable and praiseworthy exceptions, on every corner you find not exactly a friend, but rather a lack of clarity, cronyism (with many cronies quoting and applauding each other) and a lot of people always distancing themselves from A or B, lest someone from the respective academic sect think that they could dare to think this or that. The motto is “don’t compromise me”. So, what bothered Cristiana Bastos the most was being mentioned in an article whose content she does not subscribe to. But… for what mysterious and narcissistic reason did the anthropologist think she had to subscribe to it? The person who wrote and signed it was me, a person who does not go in groups and who does not need a chorus or a crutch.

The motivation behind Cristiana Bastos’ writing was, therefore, the need for demarcation. Let us now move on to the content of what she wrote. The anthropologist must not have realized that she is trying to teach the priest the Lord’s Prayer. As incredible as it may seem, this lady who, as far as I know, has never published a specific study on the slave trade, considers that I, who have been doing so since the 1980s, am using the issue of “white slavery” to — believe it or not — “minimize the discussion on the Atlantic slave trade” (sic). Apparently Cristiana Bastos also ignores the fact that I have already written several historiographical texts on “white slavery”, the last of which was in 2007, and I have always managed to distinguish it from the trafficking and slavery of black people. And what did I say in those writings on the subject? That the emigration of Portuguese people to Brazil and Guyana in the mid-19th century was called “white slavery” because it was carried out under conditions that were considered similar to those of the slave trade. I think it is clear that in her obvious lack of knowledge of the documentation and history of that period, Cristiana Bastos does not know that the word “slavery” in the 19th century did not mean slavery — as she assumes — but rather slave trafficking, and usually referred primarily to the buying, selling and transportation of people and not to the exploitation of their labor.

It was mainly in this sense that I used it in the Observador article, explaining the conditions on board ships and the process of acquiring the services of these people. I also spoke, of course, about the exploitation of their labor, taking care to emphasize, however, that “unlike what happened with slavery, these individuals (Portuguese) were not, strictly speaking, the property of a master”. That article of mine, contrary to what Cristiana Bastos stated, was not intended to whitewash or whitewash anything. It was, as they say there, to criticize the woke for being generally indifferent or not paying enough attention to certain forms of labor or transportation violence, such as what was then called “white slavery”. Although this greatly displeases the anthropologist, who makes a point of honor in not using the expression, it was used and, when I speak of the past, I respect the terms that were used then and I do not feel the need to censor, beautify or purify them. Because, contrary to what Cristiana Bastos claims, it was not just certain politicians who wanted to whitewash things who used the expression “white slavery”. Many people did so, including journalists, naval officers, parliamentarians and even unsuspected abolitionists like Sá da Bandeira who, obviously, did not want to whitewash anything related to the slave trade, quite the opposite, and yet he used the expression “white slaves” with regard to the emigration of Portuguese people to Brazil and Guyana.

Does Cristiana Bastos suppose that Sá da Bandeira was doing, as she says, “memory laundry”? Does she distrust what I am saying here? Does she want to see to believe? I will give her a helping hand: please consult, as an example, the Diário da Câmara dos Pares , session of August 16, 1842, page 164. Perhaps this consultation and reading of Sá da Bandeira’s speech will help her to understand that after all she did not know what she thought she knew, and that talking about “white slavery” does not mean that one wants to “wash away the memory of the slave trade” — an intention that the anthropologist venomously attributed to me — or to devalue the horror that was the transatlantic slave trade. It simply means that we can and should talk about both things, identifying their similarities and differences without taboos, blinders or servitude and genuflections to political and ideological agendas because, as I wrote in my article in Observador , “it was not only Africans who were subjected to extremely harsh and degrading working conditions”. I hope that Cristiana Bastos can recognize this and that her eventual awareness of these elementary truths can contribute to de-stressing her mind a little and, by extension, an academy that is in such need of it.