Latin American nation-building absorbed racial difference into a whitened core.

Evidence

So, the making of a new nation, of new nations across Latin America, of alchemical combi-nation, involved drawing those marked as distinct and so threatening to national coherence into fusion, flavoring the national recipe. If to a bowl of white rice you add up to 25 percent black beans and 25 percent red chili peppers, you end up with an inflected, flavored meal – of white rice. Demographic and cultural heterogeneity are filtered into the homogeneous national body, more or less self-consciously. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1143 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In the Caribbean, purity has emerged as a boundary defining and maintaining principles separating Creole society from the external world. It was fashioned historically out of the discourse of difference that authenticated colonial society. Eventually, notions of purity became the basis for separating the “local” Creole white grouping from the foreign presence of the “pure” European. This distinction became quite important in assertions of cultural paramountcy made by the national elite. It allowed the accommodation of the white local elite in the nationalist construct. More importantly, it catapulted blacks and coloreds with cultural capital into a position of social ascendance over the local white descendents of the merchant plantocracy. This was symbolically important for nationalist and postcolonial contestation of white supremacy. Having demonstrated the supremacy of culture, the nationalist elite could make claims to inclusion in a new global order of North Atlantic universalism based pre-eminently on cultural grounds. By such a demonstration, they were able to reject claims to racial supremacy that historically privileged whites. Manifest demonstration of acquired European cultural forms as both symbolic capital and cultural capital (acquired knowledge, skill, and capabilities) has become the sole basis of claims to power and privilege in nationalist formation. These cultural acquisitions are at the root of the European aspirations of the contemporary nationalist elite. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3229 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Latin American nation-building consciously alchemized Africans and Indians into a new race; Latin America replaced killing the Indian with assimilating the Indian into whiteness; Non-white Latin Americans could become white through education and lighter offspring (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Latin American nation-building assimilated diversity into a white-dominant body #corroborates (0.98) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1143
• Caribbean nationalism inverted racial hierarchy by making cultural capital outrank whiteness. #complicates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3229