Color stratification encodes fine-grained social status within colonized societies.

Evidence

In addition, the growth of creole communities, mainly in the Americas, but also in parts of Asia and Africa, led inevitably to the appearance of Eurasians, Eurafricans, as well as Euramericans, not as occasional curiosities but as visible social groups. Their emergence permitted a style of thinking to flourish which foreshadows modern racism. Portugal, earliest of Europe’s planetary conquerors, provides an apt illustration of this point. In the last decade of the fifteenth century Dom Manuel I could still ‘solve’ his ‘Jewish question’ by mass, forcible conversion – possibly the last European ruler to find this solution both satisfactory and ‘natural’. Less than a century later, however, one finds Alexandre Valignano, the great reorganizer of the Jesuit mission in Asia between 1574 and 1606, vehemently opposing the admission of Indians and Eurindians to the priesthood — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 229 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Color gradation within colonized families encodes a hierarchy of social worth.; Colonial color-class hierarchies enforced within families can destroy colonized subjects; Civil society institutions reproduce racially structured societies through non-coercive means — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 140 (+4 more)

Related

• Mixed-race populations’ visibility enabled early modern racism (similarity 0.88)
• Colonial color hierarchies assigned privilege by proximity to European whiteness (similarity 0.81)
• Trinidad’s color hierarchy measured privilege in gradations finer than race (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial censuses turned diverse Europeans into a white race by 1911. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial color-class hierarchies enforced within families can destroy colonized subjects (similarity 0.79)
• A color-based white-black polarity replaced the Europe-Africa poles in Caribbean racial mapping. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Mixed-light complexions gain economic and social status in colonial societies #corroborates (0.95)
• Skin color trumped wealth and education as the criterion of Trinidadian social prestige #exemplifies (0.90)
• Mixed-race populations’ visibility enabled early modern racism #expands (0.82) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 229
• Inconsistencies in colonial racial categories reveal latent distinctions rather than errors #complicates (0.78)