Mexican academics denied racism existed without a Black population

Evidence

[This colleague] was from an elite family in Mexico and he looked white according to somatic constructions of whiteness in the United States. Apparently he had one grandmother who had been Indian. When he was ten or eleven years old his peers somehow discovered this and they subsequently began to ostracize and harass him. As an outgrowth of these experiences, he decided to study issues of race and racism when he was ready to attend college. However, upon inquiring with several Mexican universities as to where and with whom he could best pursue his interests, the common response was that “We [Mexicans] don’t have that problem here because we have no blacks. You will have to go to the United States if you want to study race and racism. They have blacks there.” — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3657

Categorization

• SHARE: A concrete anecdote that vividly illustrates how ‘race means black’ — good for discussions with anyone studying racial categorization in Latin America.
• XREF: Echoes the earlier premise that antiracist scholars avoid subaltern racism; this anecdote is the field-level version of that denial.