Latin America pioneered cultural racism as social control before Europe formalized it

Evidence

Latin American neo-racism makes explicit at the opening of the nineteenth century what Europe was simply beginning to gesture towards. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, thinking about race was driven formatively by the restriction of cultural traits racially defined to a supposedly unalterable biology. With the new century European intellectuals first and social policy considerably later began to shift from this hegemonic racial naturalism to a culturally inscribed historicism, ascribing race to potentially alterable and educable cultural traits and habits. The relative but constrained openness of the “new” world - “open” land for the taking, open horizons for self-making, open possibilities for cultural experimentation and invention - meant cultural malleability could be mobilized for purposes of ongoing social control and especially maintenance of racial elevation and existing relations of power. Cultural elevation through euro-mimesis, educability into civilizing mores of European design and definition, if with local accent, promoted the supposed ascent from indigeneity into whiteness. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1134

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does this dating hold up against history-of-ideas scholarship on when cultural racism as a formal doctrine emerged?
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — where a more allegedly ‘open’ racial order is actually a subtler mechanism of control — inverts the standard narrative that biological racism is worse and cultural racism more benign.
• XREF: connects to: Both modernism and postmodernism were coined in Hispanic America before Europe. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 10