Mestizaje preserves Euro cultural dominance while aestheticizing mixed color

Evidence

Mestizaje has preserved Euro-cultural determination, artifices of gentility and decency, fixing in place the horizons of possibility, securing the marks of modernity, morality, and progress while inflecting them with the aesthetic appeal of honey-tinged color. Creole kissed by color, as the projected imaginary of the public sphere would have it. Less café con leche than caramel-colored and -tasting chocolate milk, sun-splashed rather than sun-seared. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1178

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The formulation ‘mestizaje as euro-mimesis’ — hybridity as the very mechanism of white domination rather than its opposite — is a paradigm-shifting inversion of the usual multiculturalist celebration of mixture.