Mixed-race privilege in Caribbean society tracked closeness to a European past.

Evidence

Coloreds or “mulattos” serve as an intermediary racial and cultural bridge between the European and African poles in Caribbean Creole social construction. They are historical products of an imposed rationality of difference in colonial racial representation and practice. White males institutionalized this rationality through the exercise of gender and racial privilege over black female slaves. In turn, the offspring of these miscegenous unions were assigned positions of privilege over the black Creoles in the color/class hierarchy of colonial society. The allocation of Creole privilege was directly related to racial and cultural manifestations of the degree of separation from an African past. It was related, also, to the extent of demonstrated cultural and phenotypical similarity with the European. Creole privilege came with considerable access to cultural and economic capital. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3223 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In the Caribbean, purity has emerged as a boundary defining and maintaining principles separating Creole society from the external world. It was fashioned historically out of the discourse of difference that authenticated colonial society. Eventually, notions of purity became the basis for separating the “local” Creole white grouping from the foreign presence of the “pure” European. This distinction became quite important in assertions of cultural paramountcy made by the national elite. It allowed the accommodation of the white local elite in the nationalist construct. More importantly, it catapulted blacks and coloreds with cultural capital into a position of social ascendance over the local white descendents of the merchant plantocracy. This was symbolically important for nationalist and postcolonial contestation of white supremacy. Having demonstrated the supremacy of culture, the nationalist elite could make claims to inclusion in a new global order of North Atlantic universalism based pre-eminently on cultural grounds. By such a demonstration, they were able to reject claims to racial supremacy that historically privileged whites. Manifest demonstration of acquired European cultural forms as both symbolic capital and cultural capital (acquired knowledge, skill, and capabilities) has become the sole basis of claims to power and privilege in nationalist formation. These cultural acquisitions are at the root of the European aspirations of the contemporary nationalist elite. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3229 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Bipolar racial caste was uniquely American, unlike Caribbean slavery — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 361; Caribbean identity is defined by creolization across difference; Caribbean identity is a hierarchical hybrid between European and African racial poles — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3204 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial color hierarchies assigned privilege by proximity to European whiteness #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3223
• Caribbean nationalism inverted racial hierarchy by making cultural capital outrank whiteness. #complicates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3229