Never Meant to Survive

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. -- Faye V. Harrison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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. -- George Lipsitz, author of Footsteps in the Dark and Professor of Black Studies and Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara