Latin American race scholars have repeatedly predicted imminent black uprisings that never materialized.

Evidence

Another way in which nonwhite resistance has been overstated within critical race studies is the emphasis placed on the future - on an emerging antiracist movement. Such a belief has been predominant in race studies in Latin America for several decades. For example, the UNESCO researchers of the 1950s predicted an upsurge in subaltern contestation. Hutchinson wrote that “in the town [Vila Reconcavo] and among the mill workers, ‘people of colour’ are beginning to show independence, and unwillingness always to occupy a subservient and lowly position” (1952:45). And Marvin Harris advised, “Serious attention should be devoted to the possibility that the future may bring more militant and widespread racial tension to Minas Velhas” (1952:80). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3641

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on millenarian and revolutionary expectations regularly deferred by scholars — apocalyptic prediction patterns.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘the deferred uprising’ — a recurring pattern in social-movement scholarship where researchers keep pushing promised mobilization into the future that never arrives.