Mestizaje shifted from degeneracy to national identity across colonial and postcolonial eras

Evidence

More or less until abolition, mixed offspring were taken by Europeans largely as the source of degeneracy, in keeping with prevailing racial views. This view gave way slowly and awkwardly as mixed sexual intercourse and the resultant offspring multiplied, as social intercourse to some degree ameliorated fixed ideas of inferiority, and as mestizaje was increasingly elevated as acceptable, then appealing, and at last as a form – even the prevailing form – of national identity. While whites, blacks, and Indians were conceived as non-mixed, as not mestizo in the more generic meaning of the term, members of the latter two groups could be mobilized as materials for mestizaje, for mixing. Ultimately, blacks – like Indians – were projected to disappear into the general population. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1086 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

These historical examples are not irrelevant to how multiculturalism has surfaced in the postwar world. They provide some of the latter’s conditions of emergence. But there is no linear connection between the colonial and the postcolonial. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 313 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mestizaje shifted from degeneracy stigma into an idealized national identity — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1086; Colonial rule manufactured political identities that it then naturalized as culture — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 45; Mestizaje ideology ultimately stabilized white power across Latin America (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Mestizaje shifted from degeneracy stigma into an idealized national identity #corroborates (0.98) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1086
• Mestizaje ideology ultimately stabilized white power across Latin America #complicates (0.82)
• Postcolonial multiculturalism has no linear causal link to its colonial past #complicates (0.74) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 313