Whitening norms frame impoverishment as black and wealth as white

Evidence

Blanqueamiento/branqueamento thus represents the processes of “normalization,” processes that Arlene Torres and Norman Whitten insightfully characterize as “becoming increasingly acceptable” to those already made, perceived, having standing as “white.” As Wade reiterates, this reinforces the already prevailing sense that impoverishment is black and Indian, wealth and social standing white. In Costa Rica in 1926, for example, Noam Chomsky points out that local economists complained of fruit-exporting enterprises importing too many black workers who were “darkening the racial composition of the country,” introducing disease, criminality, and “mesticiz[ing] our race, which is already darkening,” while sending their savings back to Jamaica at the cost to Costa Rica. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1150

Categorization

• QUESTION: The Costa Rica economists treat imported black labor as diluting national stock — worth chasing whether this maps onto a threatened-privilege lexicon parallel to US immigration-restrictionist rhetoric.
• XREF: connects to: Wealth shifts how people are perceived racially, literally whitening them — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1149; Whiteness consolidated as repression of preindustrial freedom; Whitening ideology generates envy on both sides of the black class divide — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1208 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Wealth shifts how people are perceived racially, literally whitening them #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1149
• Whitening ideology generates envy on both sides of the black class divide #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1208
• Whiteness consolidated as repression of preindustrial freedom #expands (0.72)
• Whiteness itself functioned as inheritable wealth for white Americans #complicates (0.72) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 566