From the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Contemporary Ethnoracial Law in Multicultural Ecuador The "Changing Same" of Anti-Black Racism as Revealed by Two Lawsuits Filed by Afrodescendants

In this article I examine the unfolding-within and beyond a court of law-of two relatively recent litigations initiated by Afrodescendants, in which two different antidiscrimination legal instruments provided the grounding for the cases' "resolutions." The argument suggests that contemporary ethnoracial legal instruments have failed to interrupt the reproduction of structural racism, or of what Tanya Hernandez has called "race regulation customary law." One of the lessons of this essay is certainly to point to anti-Black racism's resilience, as it transforms itself as needed to better survive in also changing sociopolitical configurations. The essay uncovers the continuing operations of the Ecuadorian racial order in the very spaces and situations-the courtrooms of the justice system and beyond-where it is supposed to be combated, frontally. It reveals the inadequacy of contemporary antidiscrimination legal instruments to deal more holistically with the many facets of the situation and impacts of anti-Black racism and race regulation customary law on Afrodescendants' affects and emotions, and the making and remaking of their precarity.