Latin American neo-racism pioneered shifting race from biology to culture

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

If the Spanish origin of the term is true, then the problem with “race” goes back to its beginnings. It was used to expel from Spain people “tainted” by Jewish and Moorish blood - hence “race” in the “physical” and “visible” sense, we might think. Yet the list of people to which the doctrine of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) was applied went on and included descendants of heretics and of “penitenciados (those condemned by the Inquisition)” (Stolcke, 1994:276-7). Thus at this terrible beginning, “race” was hardly based on the perception of phenotypal difference but on a religiously and politically, hence “culturally,” defined distinction that was legislated to be hereditary, innate, and immutable. It was what we would now call an “ethnic” distinction, as defined by Nathan Glazer as well as by Pierre van den Berghe. Stuart Hall (1994) said memorably that race and ethnicity play hide-and-seek with each other. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 724 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Latin American racial exceptionalism unites figures from Bolivar to Freyre across two centuries; Latinamericanization exemplifies racisms that deny race while structuring exclusions; Latin America replaced killing the Indian with assimilating the Indian into whiteness (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Latin America pioneered cultural racism as social control before Europe formalized it #expands (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1134
• Biological racism and cultural differentialism are racism’s two registers, not separate systems #complicates (0.80)
• Race originated as a cultural-religious distinction legislated into biological heredity #complicates (0.76) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 724
• Racial hierarchy in Latin America produced no separate subaltern cultures or critical consciousness #complicates (0.74) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3607