Mestizaje ideology ultimately stabilized white power across Latin America

Evidence

This instability, stabilized only in the mixed product, makes almost any organization ordered around the terms of input difficult, though not impossible. For one, the input categories themselves are kept unstable, people dropping in and out of them depending on personal circumstance and prospect, relationships and social relations more broadly. For another, such organizing is largely reactive, and requires considerable conscientizing and consciousness-raising simply to enable the conditions of conceptual possibility for the organization to emerge. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1200 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Racial alterity has, in general, not produced hidden transcripts or critical consciousness vis-a-vis race and racism. Separate subcultures, cultural frames of reference, or ethnicities have not tended to form around racial categories in Latin America (Alarcon, 1994:310; Safa, 1998:5; Warren, 1997:109). As a result, whites and people of color often share a similar set of white supremacist aesthetics, prejudices, expectations, and memories, as well as the same limited understandings of racism. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3607 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Brazil’s racial democracy celebrated mixture while keeping whiteness as the standard of value; Mestizaje shifted from degeneracy to national identity across colonial and postcolonial eras; Latin America replaced killing the Indian with assimilating the Indian into whiteness (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• The instability of racial categories undermines organizing around race in Latin America #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1200
• Latin American mestizaje made US-style racial passing largely unnecessary and moot #complicates (0.74)
• Racial hierarchy in Latin America produced no separate subaltern cultures or critical consciousness #complicates (0.73) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3607