Whitening operates through Christianization, urbanization, and displacement of indigenes

Evidence

Whitening makes the national and by extension regional Latin American population phenotypically lighter. But it likewise increasingly Christianizes and urbanizes them. The whitening processes of Christianizing and urbanizing are seen to draw the uncivilized into civilization, the uneducated into the virtues (if not viruses) of capitalist accumulation, the unsettled into the potential labor force, if only as a reserve army of labor (or just a reserve army). It transforms those hitherto committed to the natural instrumentalities of use value into exchange, of desiring subjects into the force of consumers. In depopulating rural areas and forests, by extension, the process likewise opens them up to the plunder of natural resources, further fueling industrial growth, stripping indigenes of land and resources, displacing them. In doing so, it tears from the land the resources, human and natural, that might otherwise resist environmental degradation and ecological devastation. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1146

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to land dispossession and extractive-colonial logic in Things Fall Apart and environmental themes from the trees-as-infrastructure article.