Understanding Latin American Beliefs about racial inequality

Introduction As a region, Latin America has a diverse racial and ethnic composition and, like the
United States, a history of European colonization of indigenous peoples and the
subsequent importation of millions of Africans as slaves. Of Latin America’s roughly
500 million people today (…)Afrodescendants are at least 120 million
(…)Afrodescendant peoples are concentrated at the bottom of the region’s highly
uneven class structure and racial and ethnic discrimination continue to significantly
structure the life chances of Latin Americans
Comment: Latin American is a region of contrasts. The regional is marked by a rich
racial and ethnic diverse composition. However, the diversity is not – it has been not –
translated to equality. Afro descendants, for example, compose at least 120 million of
the region’s 500 million population, but are mostly concentrated at the bottom of the
class structure. Racial discrimination and structural racism are ultimately mixed with
the region’s features.

Latin American national projects of mestizaje, or racial and cultural mixing (…)
Historically, these ideas of mestizaje often began as elite-led projects to unite the
frequently divided and scattered black, indigenous, white, and mixed-race populations
during the nation-making periods throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries. In
many contexts, especially in Mexico and Brazil, the mixed-race individual was
heralded as the symbol of the nation and the hope of its future (…)Higher rates of
intermarriage and residential proximity, and the integration of African and indigenous
cultural elements into national folklore and culture, also offer evidence of greater racial
tolerance in Latin America as compared with the United States.
mestizaje has also been roundly criticized. Scholars point to its role in encouraging
mixture to further whitenin, in denying black and indigenous identities and cultures by
homogenizing the nation, in weakening racial and ethnic distinctions necessary for
antiracist mobilization, in masking persistent racial discrimination and underlying
racial hierarchies (…)From this perspective, state- and elite-promoted ideologies of
mestizaje, far from being progressive, may serve to further the advantage of white and
mestizo elites, thus preserving the racial and ethnic status quo.
Comment: As racial hierarchies in Latin America are blatantly different from their
shapes in the United States and Europe, many author have denied their existence.
Following the European colonization and widespread enforcement of slave African,
many countries in the region adopted national projects of mestizaje (cultural mixing).
These projects sold the idea of erasing racial distinctions by promoting mixed-race
individual as the symbol of the nation. The project was effectively implemented:
scholars noted high rates of intermarriage and residential proximity and use of elements
derived from African and indigenous culture within the national folklore. Based on the
misguidance that the numbers provided, some author claimed that the idea of mestizaje
indicated evidence of higher racial tolerance in Latin America compared with the
United States.
[intermediate with Quijano]
Following this rational, a great share of scholarship warned that the mestizaje ideology
was not far off from colonialism and racism: it meant to promote whitening, wiping out
black and indigenous identities, denying the pre-existent racial tensions and weakening
antiracist mobilization. In this sense, mestizaje is yet another layer of structural racism,
aimed at maintaining racial and ethnic status quo.
[continue to explain mestizaje]

Latin American nations have undergone a shift in terms of state approaches to racial
and ethnic diversity, which may have further altered the racial common sense. Nearly
all Latin American countries have at least basic democratization, often accompanied by
domestic black and indigenous social movements and an expanding international
human rights regime (…)This shift to multiculturalism includes constitutional
recognitions of indigenous and, sometimes, Afrodescendant peoples and indigenous
forms of organization, data collection on indigenous people and Afrodescendants in
national censuses, and stated intentions of racial reform. However, this
multiculturalism has not yet lead to significant public policies to redress minority
disadvantage, except perhaps in Brazil and Bolivia.
In Latin America, public opinion survey research on racial ideologies has been scant,
with few exceptions Thus, ironically, we do not know if the changes associated with
recent democratization in the region, such as declarations of multiculturalism, really
reflect or resonate with public opinion. In particular, we know very little about how
official and elite-led race ideologies filter down to the general population.
Comment: It is important to point out, however, that the concept of structural racism
encompass the acceptance of racial struggles and divergence as focal points of change
in the system. This means that racial hierarchies may change forms, and even retract
 somewhat overtime. In Latin America, the change was notable through the shift to
multiculturalism. Many States recognized afro descendant peoples’ forms of
organization and claims of racial tensions. This has sometimes translated into a
statement of intentions of racial reform. It did not, however, lead to significant
improvements in racial stratification in the region.
Mestizaje in Latin In the early 20th century, mestizaje ideologies were successfully used to promote
America national unification in several Latin American nations (…)While also understanding
blacks, indigenous, and mulattos as inferior or degenerative (…)also allowed these
largely nonwhite countries to promote whitening through mixture (…)Hence, although
seemingly progressive in reversing the “thesis of racial degeneration”, mestizaje
ideologies in reality constituted a “racial project” that forced the assimilation of
indigenous populations, and the marginalization of all those who refused, and that
ignored formerly enslaved Afrodescendants.
Mestizaje as central to nation building generally took the following form:“Latin
American states developed a mode of governance based on a unitary package of
citizenship rights and a tendentious premise that people could enjoy these rights only
by conforming to a homogenous mestizo cultural ideal. This ideal appropriated
important aspects of Indian culture—and of black culture in Brazil and the Caribbean
—to give it ‘authenticity’ and roots, but European stock provided the guarantee that it
would be modern and forward-looking”.
It is important, however, to recognize differences in the development and outcome of
these projects across Latin America. Elites in countries like Argentina, for example,
largely rejected mestizaje and explicitly pursued whiteness, longer than others in the
region through massive European immigration, although recently they have declared
themselves multicultural (…) Perhaps the strongest mestizaje ideologies emerged in
1920s and 1930s postrevolutionary Mexico and Vargas-era Brazil, where progressive
elites designed and promoted “the cosmic race” and “racial democracy.” (…)In
Brazil’s adaptation, Gilberto Freyre claimed that Brazilians of all colors and races were
birthing a new people, a meta-race of moreno or mixed populations that would
constitute the nation’s strength and ensure its future place as a modern nation.
Vasconcelos and Freyre’s homogenizing racial visions were later incorporated into
ideologies of national identity, although they are inconsistent with persistent racial
inequality and discrimination in their countries.
Comment: The mestizaje ideology is arguably the strongest turning point to Latin
 America’s racial hierarchies. It was not a deviation of racism or the race theory at that
time, by which blacks, indigenous and mullatos were regarded as inferior. However, as
it promised to promote national unification, it was easily sold out as a mode of
governance. This model took the form of a unitary package of citizenship rights that
could only be enjoyed by the conformation to the homogenous mestizo cultural idea. In
this sense, the mestizaje ideology was ultimately the wolf in sheep’s clothing: it
promised progressiveness, but in reality was a racial project based on forced
assimilation of indigenous and afro descendants populations.
The outcome of the ideology varied significantly. In Argentina, the project was rejected
in the name of another based on the pursue of whiteness through European migration.
On the other hand, in Brazil, the project was incorporated into ideologies of national
identity through cultural and educational campaigns. As a results, the ideas of mestizaje
covered, at least formally, the racial tensions and marginalization of nonwhite
populations.
A turn to both contexts began to shift dramatically in the second half of the 20th century (…)In
multiculturalism Latin America meanwhile, ethnoracial mobilization, as such, was more sporadic even
though racial inequality and black and indigenous marginalization were pervasive
(…)Afro Latin American social movements also emerged in countries like Brazil and
Colombia.
Today, the idea of ethnoracial group-based identities and rights are part of official
discourse throughout most of Latin America. As noted, the Latin American shift from
official ideologies of mestizaje to multiculturalism and ethnoracial group rights likely
emerged from a combination of sources linked to the recent formal democratization
throughout the region (…)In Brazil and Colombia, small but very effective black
organizations working as political interest groups were essential to the recognition of
ethnoracial rights (…)In all of these national contexts, international organizations such
as the World Bank and international funding agencies, as well as a growing
international human rights infrastructure supported by the United Nations, were
important for promoting indigenous and black rights and recognition (…). In any case,
the multicultural reforms, for which many civil society organizations and minority
social movements struggled, are arguably more popular and democratic in contrast to
the earlier elite-led mestizaje projects.
Comment: [from the other part – continuation] It is important to point out,
however, that the concept of structural racism encompass the acceptance of racial
 struggles and divergence as focal points of change in the system. This means that racial
hierarchies may change forms, and even retract somewhat overtime. In Latin America,
the change was notable through the shift to multiculturalism. Many States recognized
afro descendant peoples’ forms of organization and claims of racial tensions. This has
sometimes translated into a statement of intentions of racial reform. It did not,
however, lead to significant improvements in racial stratification in the region.
Regardless of the institutional responses to the claims, their existence and form must be
noted. In Latin America, racial mobilization followed the formal democratization of the
States and combined efforts with international organizations, international funding
agencies, and the international human rights infrastructure. In this sense, historically,
the racial common sense in the region was altered through the rearrangement of
institutions (strengthening of democratic values and mechanisms) and the expansion of
international human rights regime. It is an evidence of the importance of human rights
– as a language and as a structure – to tackle structural racism racism.
Effects of the myth some scholars have suggested that the hegemony of the mestizaje myth has been
of mestizaje central to retarding ethnoracial mobilization and challenges to the racial status quo,
both in the past and today. As illustration, Wade (2003, p. 275) writes: “So long as
mestizaje discourse is prevalent, it will be hard to link racial identity to citizenship and
rights”in Latin America (…)The fact that many Afrodescendants and indigenous
peoples were gradually absorbed into amorphous national mestizo populations, and that
blackness and indigeneity were systematically ignored, provides a partial explanation
for Latin America’s scant record of multiculturalism.
The widespread denial of systematic disadvantage suffered by racial and ethnic
minorities is another important mechanism through which, scholars argue, mestizaje
retarded ethnoracial mobilization and antiracism policy. Latin American mestizaje
racial ideologies obfuscated the structural causes of ethnoracial inequality, leading to
“color blindness” or “false consciousness” that “denies the existence of any racism”.
Perhaps clearest in connecting myths of mestizaje with a claim that nonwhite Latin
Americans are colorblind, Warren and Sue (2011, p. 50) write that, across Latin
America, “nonwhites” have “scant understanding of how race, both its contemporary
and historical forms, is directly linked to the particular configurations of the labor
market, social welfare, taxation policies, housing, educational opportunities, and so
forth.” Using ethnographic research, these authors conclude: “In short, like U.S. whites,
they ½Latin American nonwhites do not link race to economic and social
 marginalization”
Comment: [continuation]
The mestizaje ideology is arguably the strongest turning point to Latin America’s racial
hierarchies. It was not a deviation of racism or the race theory at that time, by which
blacks, indigenous and mullatos were regarded as inferior. However, as it promised to
promote national unification, it was easily sold out as a mode of governance. This
model took the form of a unitary package of citizenship rights that could only be
enjoyed by the conformation to the homogenous mestizo cultural idea. In this sense, the
mestizaje ideology was ultimately the wolf in sheep’s clothing: it promised
progressiveness, but in reality was a racial project based on forced assimilation of
indigenous and afro descendants populations.
The outcome of the ideology varied significantly. In Argentina, the project was rejected
in the name of another based on the pursue of whiteness through European migration.
On the other hand, in Brazil, the project was incorporated into ideologies of national
identity through cultural and educational campaigns.
Ultimately, the mestizaje ideology retarded racial mobilization in the region, insofar as
masked the structural causes of racial stratification, and therefore promoted color
blindness and denied the existence of racism. Practically, the ideology prompted a
avoidance to link economic and social marginalization to race, while maintained
unscathed the same structures that maintained those marginalization. As a
consequence, the region generally denies the systematic disadvantaged based on race
and only slowly and sparsely further multiculturalism;
Theoretical framings Sociocultural approaches hold that racial attitudes develop through a gradual
of stratification socialization process that can result in negative affect toward out-groups (…)These
beliefs perspectives posit that children develop racial prejudice that is normative in their social
environment, later carrying a solid core of prejudice into adulthood as negative affect
(…)Hence, this framing posits that childhood-nurtured prejudice and a perception of
cultural gaps between dominant and minority populations lead dominants to
individualist explanations for racial inequality (…)Gilens (1999), for example, asserts
that white opposition to “welfare” programs is rooted in negative racial stereotypes,
specifically, the perception of blacks as lazy and unmotivated.
Variants on group conflict theory comprise the second approach to racial attitudes (…)
These framings posit broadly that material interests, not prejudice, structure racial
attitudes. In the United States, this frame suggests that whites perceive blacks as
 competitive threats for valued social resources and defend their privileged position by
blaming blacks for racial inequality (…)this asymmetry between the attitudes of
dominants and minorities forms the basis for conflict-based attitudes, which may favor
challenges to the status quo. Thus, conflict theories generally posit dominant/minority
divergences on explanations, which some scholars term the “ideological asymmetry
hypothesis”.
Nonetheless, in situations of ideological hegemony, subordinates may agree with
dominant interpretations of inequality, victims of a type of “false consciousness”. the
consensus of scholarship on the United States is that “racial attitudes are structured
across racial groups”.
Scholars of Latin American ethnoracial dynamics maintain that the mestizaje myths
have had a decisive influence on the region’s stratification beliefs. More specifically,
many scholars judge that these myths have led the minority populations to deny the
structural causes of their own inequality. This attitudinal symmetry (both dominants
and minorities reject structural explanations) goes against much of the general literature
on stratification beliefs, which, as previously noted, holds that dominants and
minorities disagree on the causes of racial inequality.
Stratification beliefs may differ, for example, depending on whether the target
population is indigenous or Afrodescendant and on the prevalence of national antiracist
mobilization and discourse.
Comment: [probably won’t need to include in the thesis] While sociocultural
theories hold that racial attitudes stem from socialization process developed since
childhood and anchored in prejudice/stereotypes, the group conflict theories affirm that
material interests are at the bottom of racial attitudes. Based on the latter, divergences
between the dominant and the minority translates into positions to defend the
privileged position (carried out by the dominant) and challenge the status quo (carried
out by the minorities). In any case, racial attitudes are explained based on the
relationship between racial groups, particularly their disagreements or different
perceptions.
However, Latin America poses a challenge to this thinking. As mestizaje ideology
spread out, it influenced minorities to deny the structural cases of their inequality. In
this sense, both the dominant and minority group enforced color blindness.
Hypothesis In Latin America, cultural differences may be seen as more characteristic of indigenous
populations than Afrodescendants (…)recent research suggests that many indigenous
 populations, struggling for collective rights under new “multiculturalist” citizenship
regimes, have been helped in their struggle precisely by this perception of their cultural
distinctiveness (…)At the same time, scholars argue that Afrodescendants have been
hampered in their inclusionary struggles by their general inability to claim cultural
distinctiveness (…)In sum, perceptions of culture gaps between indigenous and
dominants compared to between Afrodescendants and dominants may condition
stratification beliefs.
in countries like the Dominican Republic and Mexico where racism remains relatively
uncontested and is rarely discussed (Sidanius et al. 2001; Sue 2010). In these two
countries, for example, the national census is marked by the absence of data on racial
composition, suggesting some indifference to racial dynamics in general.
Comment: [Continuation of mestizaje] The effects of the mestizaje ideology in the
present are a general indifference to racial dynamics and denial of racial struggles,
which translates to absence of institutional addressing of race-related disadvantages.
Moreover, the ideology impacted afrodescendants in a singular way. Under the realm
of a new multiculturalist citizenship regimes, indigenous populations have been
recognized more in comparison to afrodescendants, as the former are more likely to be
perceived as having cultural distinctiveness. Consequently, inclusionary efforts by
Afrodescendants have been restrained systematically.
Another particular variance pertains to the identification process. Who is part of the
dominant group, or rather, who is nonwhite differs across states. In some of them,
mestizos are considered part of the dominant population.

Findings fully 89.1% of Brazilians offered structuralist interpretations for Afrodescendant

poverty, followed by Peru, where 81.3% adopted the structuralist account for
indigenous poverty (…)Totals for the survey item that focused narrowly on the
recognition of unfair treatment, or discrimination, show that the highest percentages
recognizing discrimination were in Peru and Mexico at 81.6% and 80.7%, respectively,
followed by Brazil at 72.1% (…)these first bivariate results show that, despite some
variation, robust majorities of Latin Americans across all eight countries preferred
structural explanations, including both discrimination and education, for minority
disadvantage.
Moreover, in seven out of eight countries (except Bolivia), robust majorities
specifically recognized discrimination toward racial or ethnic minorities. As shown in
columns 2 and 3, minority group members showed a small preference for structural
explanations compared to dominant group members, but this difference was not
statistically significant in over half of the countries.20 In Brazil, fully 90.9% of
Afrodescendants (pretos and pardos) preferred structural explanations for
Afrodescendant poverty compared to 85.6% of whites.
Hence, there was near symmetry between minorities and dominants in all eight
countries on the “explanations” outcome (…) However, the symmetry we found ran
counter to our predictions, by embracing structural explanations and belief in
discrimination, not by denying them.
(…) ethnoracial divergence on stratification beliefs are exceptional, not common, in
Latin America. That is, attitudes about the existence and causes of ethnoracial
inequality are not robustly contoured by ethnoracial group status (…)Hence, group
conflict and sociocultural theories predicting robust, dominant versus minority
cleavages on stratification beliefs are clearly inadequate framings in these Latin
American contexts.
There are a few exceptional outcomes, however. Regarding the first dependent
variable, table 5 results reveal that targeted minorities in Brazil and Guatemala were
more likely to hold structuralist explanations at statistically significant levels than
dominants. In comparison, table 6 shows that only in Brazil was the targeted minority
more likely than the dominant population to recognize the unequal treatment of the
minority population.
We believe this key difference may be explained in part by the country’s recent
widespread embrace of targeted policies for Afrodescendants and public discussion of
racism. Those policies may be highlighting Afrodescendants’ and whites’ conflicting
racial interests and thereby stimulating conflict-based attitudes by way of racial
attitudinal cleavages (…)Hence, Brazil may be uniquely situated in reconfiguring
attitudinal stances reflecting divergent racial group interests, although the acceptance of
structural explanations and the explicit recognition of unequal treatment are relatively
high for both the dominant and minority populations.
The finding on Mexico indicating that dominants are significantly more likely than the
minority population to recognize discrimination is anomalous in terms of existing
theoretical framings; no scholar, to our knowledge, has posited that minorities would
be less likely than dominants to endorse structuralist accounts (…)Overall, our findings
suggest that ethnoracial divides regarding stratification beliefs are exceptional in Latin
 America.
Comment: [evaluate if you need to develop more this] The existence of those
consequences does not mean that the discussions lack nuances. For example, research
conducted by Telles and Bailey (2013) in eight Latin American countries showed
overall high percentages of preference for structural explanations 1 concerning minority
disadvantage, as well as equivalence between minorities and dominant group responses
on the explanation for socioeconomic discrepancies across races. The data unveiled
that in many countries, the recognition of discrimination toward racial minorities is the
norm, even across minorities and dominant groups. Paradoxically and very telling, the
authors found contradictions to this norm in Brazil, where minorities were more likely
to claim structuralist explanations than dominants. Telles and Bailey (2013) argued that
targeted policies adopted by the countries for afro descendants heightened racial groups
conflicting interests. They also found an anomaly in Mexico, where dominants
recognized discrimination more than the minority population.
The research conducted by Telles and Bailey (2013) demonstrated the pertinence of
three conclusions. First, and the most obvious, that the region is marked by abrupt
variances across countries in the racial stratification and understanding of the relation
between socioeconomic disadvantage and race. Therefore, it is virtually impossible to
draw only one antiracist guideline applicable to Latin America as a whole. This
conclusion is relevant both for the justification of this research and the conclusion
herein. I will develop this relation in the third chapter. For now, it suffices to say that
different countries demand different analysis regarding the choice of policies and
changes necessary to tackle structural racism.
The justification because I purposefully chose to analyze countries that hold different
stages of racial stratification and understanding of race inequality, to evaluate the
impacts of these fluctuations for the structures of the international human rights law.
The conclusion because I will analyze the variances in the interpretation of the Inter-
American Court of Human Rights in three countries of the region taking into account
that the variances of contexts may demand variances of interpretation and reparations.
The second conclusion is that the recognition of the existence of discrimination does
not translate – at least not in Latin America – to an acceptance of the policies and
changes necessary to reverse racial stratification. Translating that to institutional levels
1
Structural explanations attributes unfair treatment and low education as the reasons for minority
poverty. Coversely, individualist attributions deems insufficient work effort, less intelligence or cultural
complacency as the main reason for the socioeconomic gap across races. See [reference]
– relevant for human rights – means that progress in the national discourse cannot be
immediately associated with effective remedies for the dismantle of structural racism.
This should shape the definition of redress measures and the analysis of eventual
breach of the American Convention of Human Rights.
The third conclusion is associated with the second. The Brazilian experience suggest a
possibility of backlash in the implementation of antiracist policies. To put it simply:
measures of redress that properly address structure racism, if implemented (which is
desired) may enhance, rather than ease, racial tensions, and divisions. It is possible that
racial interests may be evidenced as divergent in that scenario.

In hypothesis 3 we predicted that respondents would be more likely to explain

indigenous disadvantage by culture, an individualist stance, than structure, based on
perceptions that indigenous peoples are more culturally specific in comparison to
Afrodescendants (…). Results did not support our hypothesis: the percentages choosing
culture as the primary cause for minority disadvantage did not vary by type of minority
population, that is, whether in reference to Afrodescendant or indigenous people. The
lowest percentage choosing culture was in Brazil (…)These percentages suggest that
the perception of cultural differences does affect the views of significant segments of
these countries’ populations; however, blaming culture is not a majority stance in any
country.
On the other end of the spectrum, Brazilians were least likely to view culture as
explaining Afrodescendant poverty, which seems consistent with the view that Afro-
Brazilians are integrated into a national-level culture.
Table 3 also shows the variation among countries between the two structural
explanations, discrimination versus poor schooling. Although the preferred explanation
in most countries was discrimination, more than three-quarters of Brazilians (76.9%)
preferred that explanation in contrast to roughly a third of Bolivians (31.3%) (…)
These results suggest that structural explanations are sensitive to
Afrodescendant/indigenous target group distinctions. Explanations based on poor
schooling seem to be especially strong in reference to indigenous people, who may
more obviously lack access to quality schools, while discrimination was invoked more
often to account for the poverty of blacks.
A second important finding from these models on both outcomes suggest that, in most
countries, class (as indexed by education) is more strongly associated with attitudes
toward racial and ethnic disadvantage than race/ ethnicity (…)The Dominican Republic
and Colombia, for example, present some of the clearest evidence of the importance of
class over ethnicity/race for understanding stratification beliefs.
In four countries, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Mexico, the most
educated persons were more likely than the least educated to prefer structuralist
explanations, and in three of those four countries (excepting Ecuador), the same was
true regarding the recognition of discrimination (…) A class threat felt by the Bolivian
elite, then, may help to explain the negative correlation between education and
recognition of discrimination in that context.
In Brazil, the lack of significance for the educational level variable alongside the
significance of the ethnicity variable is particularly interesting (…)We now find the
opposite, and thus it seems that race has become a salient cleavage marking racial
attitudes, while class has receded. Our divergent results may provide further insight
into the changing racial climate during the past decade in Brazil.
Younger persons in Ecuador strongly preferred structural explanations for minority
group disadvantage and were more likely to recognize unequal treatment (…) These
results may suggest a trend toward increasing recognition of discrimination in that
context. Ecuador has gone through a significant shift toward multiculturalism, as
reflected in both its 1998 and especially 2008 constitutions. Whether an age or a cohort
effect, a negative association between age and both endorsing structural explanations
and recognizing discrimination in Ecuador suggests a gradually changing attitudinal
context for antiracism.
views on the value of racial mixing as “good for one’s country” (indexed by our
variable on mestizaje beliefs) were positively associated with accepting structuralist
beliefs in five of the eight cases, but were not positively associated with recognizing
discrimination in any of the models. One could argue that, while this measure captures
the positive and most obvious idea of mestizaje, mestizaje is a more complex belief
structure that includes, and hides, the idea of black and indigenous assimilation or
disappearance. Apart from this specific measure, the general acceptance of structural
explanations and the specific recognition of discrimination despite the overarching
 mestizaje ideology are notable.
In Bolivia, however, the mestizaje attitudinal variable was negatively associated with
recognizing discrimination (…) Only in Bolivia, then, are those who endorse a view of
mestizaje as positive for the nation more likely to deny indigenous disadvantage. The
scholarly view on the negativity of mestizaje for stratification beliefs, then, finds some
echo in the Bolivian context.
Discussion In the later decades of the 20th century, the United States saw African-American
mobilization that created a public demand for countering white racial oppression,
setting a progressive agenda for race relations. Meanwhile, beginning in some Latin
American countries in the 1980s, the progressive character of mestizaje came under
scrutiny. Many social movement actors and academics began questioning its
progressive value, viewing it instead as a common-sense ideology that furthered white
racial interests in large part through masking the role of race in structuring
disadvantage (…), we found that robust majorities of Latin Americans across these
eight countries, and both dominant and minority populations, supported structuralist
explanations for racial inequality. In addition, numerical majorities in seven of eight
countries explicitly recognize the unequal treatment of ethnoracial minorities.
Comment: It is unclear as to why those numbers showed an acceptance, rather than a
denial, of the existence of discrimination against racial minorities. I believe that it is
connected with the strengthening of the democratic institutions, the change in the
international discourse towards race equality, and the improvements pushed by the
ethnoracial social movements. [This connects with the trend found in the United States
and the changes in the responses].

The Brazilian and Bolivian results are notable in that they reveal heterogeneity among
Latin American countries’ stratification beliefs (…), their populations’ attitudes toward
racial discrimination diverge significantly. These Bolivia-Brazil differences may have
much to do with their divergent processes of transition to multicultural citizenship
regimes and the recognition of minority grievances. In Brazil, the process was largely
consensual and gradual, following decades of official denial of racism; however, the
end result of that process, although significant, has had relatively little impact on
Brazil’s racial hierarchy. In contrast, the Bolivian transition was considered
revolutionary, leading to the election of an indigenous president in a mostly indigenous
country, who, despite his popularity in reducing inequality and on other fronts, quickly
challenged entrenched interests. The more dramatic social reorganization in Bolivia as
a plurinational democracy has so deeply threatened racial and class hierarchies to the
point that his administration has been accused of discrimination against the
nonindigenous population.
What explains these counterintuitive findings in Latin America? We posit two related
lines of inquiry; both consider the relative absence of conditions amenable to stark
attitudinal divides among dominant and ethnoracial minority populations in Latin
America. First, a key factor identified in the literature as promoting attitudinal divides
is the perception of conflicting racial group-based interests (…)U.S. society, white
supremacy encoded in law proscribed the most basic dignities and rights of African-
Americans. This contorted legal context no doubt promoted bright racial cleavages in
the perception of group-based interests and attitudes (…)In addition to that legacy,
highly racialized political and social discourses as well as high residential segregation
in the United States remain, perhaps contributing to the persistence of sharper group-
based interests and attitudes.
(…)race was not reinscribed in law or generally stated in policy in Latin America, and
ideas of mestizaje blurred racial boundaries and thus perceived racial group-based
interests and attitudes. Brazil is illustrative in this regard (…) Although elite white
interests dominated Latin American societies, the lack of an explicit/legal use of race, a
mestizaje discourse, and relatively moderate racial segregation may have mitigated the
perception of contrasting racial interests and attitudes among the masses of poor black,
brown, and white Latin Americans. Hence, despite racial inequality and discrimination,
racial attitudes in Latin America are not straightforwardly racial-group specific as
would be posited by group conflict framings.
The embrace of mestizaje means that large swaths of Latin Americans may view the
racial or ethnic “other” as part of themselves, if not through miscegenation, then
through national imagination (…)This dynamic of overlapping or nested identifications
is also suggested by the fluidity that characterizes ethnoracial boundaries throughout
much of Latin America (…)Wade argues that while mestizaje may be framed as an
ideology, it is also a lived experience among the masses in ways that a singular focus
on ideology may miss.
In contrast, when we measured the embrace of mestizaje directly in our models, those
who most embraced racial mixing were often also most likely to endorse structuralist
accounts. We suggest, then, that the sociocultural context of belief in white racial
purity in the United States, which necessarily excises the “other,” contributes to
ethnoracial attitudinal asymmetry, thereby contrasting with the symmetry of attitudes
between Latin American ethnoracial populations that we have documented here. Do
these findings suggesting an agreement on the structural causes of minority inequality
in Latin America speak to the possibility of growing support for anti-inequality policy
measures in those countries? Social scientific theories on the relationship between
stratification beliefs and policy attitudes clearly suggest that agreement between
dominants and minorities in support of structural explanations could positively affect
the chances of future policy in favor of disadvantaged minorities Latin America.
Indeed, Bailey (2004) documented a positive association between structuralist
stratification beliefs and support for the idea of race targeted affirmative action in the
Brazilian context as early as 2000.
Although much of their “Latin Americanization” thesis is beyond the scope of this
analysis, our results suggest that, as measured through large-sample survey data on
explanations for racial inequality, the broad association of a denial of discriminatory
racial structuring with Latin American racial ideologies is not supported.
Comment: The authors concluded that the findings contradicted some of the general
characterization of the effects of mestizaje myths. According with them, those
assumptions would imply that the general perceptions in the survey would indicate
both a denial of discrimination against minorities and a contrast between the
perceptions of dominants groups and members of minorities. As this was not
empirically verified, the authors concluded, the research challenged the understanding
of racial common sense in Latin America.
However, the data ratified, rather than contradicted, the general conceptualization
concerning mestizaje myths. As Wade points out, the mestizaje ideology became,
overtime, a lived experience among the groups in Brazil, besides having been
incorporated in national official discourse and public policy. It is then intuitive to argue
that the ideology integrated the established racial structures to maintain racial tensions
by hiding. In truth, at first, hiding meant blatant denial of any racial discrepancies.
However, to argue that the hiding would be maintained unchanged would mean to deny
the already well-known feature of structural racism: its flexibility. The racial structures
contracts, expands and reshapes following the racial struggles and the dynamics created
by movements of recognition and backlash. I suggest that in Latin America, those
processes of reshaping led to instead of denying racial discrepancies (here described as
 unequal treatment based on race), denying the existence of racial tensions, both of
which impair the elimination of structural racism.
To put it simply, what before was “there is no racism”, now turned into a “there is no
racial tension”. They are different statements but have similar effects. If you don’t
recognize a stiff between social groups – if you deny conflict -, then you deny the
structures that maintain those tensions and refrain the call for significant changes.
In my view, the research itself clearly indicated racial tensions. The two examples
provided came from the places in which targeted policies were implemented in favor of
afro descendants (Brazil) or members of a minority has risen to power (Bolivia). In the
case of the latter, the authors expressly recognized the relation between this social
reorganization, the subsequent thereat to racial and class hierarchies present in that
society, and the populations’ attitudes toward racial discrimination. This shows that the
racial tensions that were already there, when brought up to the surface, stirred up
cleavages in the perceptions regarding racial discrimination across groups. Therefore,
opposite to Telles and Bailey (2013) conclusion that “racial attitudes in Latin America
are not straightforwardly racial-group specific”, the data showed that in the region
mestizaje myths masked racial-group specific racial attitudes until the utter denial.
Denial of the existence of racial discrimination
Denial of racial tension
Confusions on racial identity
[consider explain the tensions between recognition of racial groups identities – who is
black – p. 30]

Estudios sobre el racism en América Latina

Introduction En la actualidad, ningún sector social y casi ningún grupo político en América Latina
se autodefine como racista ni defiende la existencia de una raza superior o propugna
abiertamente la violencia racial (...)n el racismo se expresa generalmente de manera
más difusa (...)Sin embargo, entre los más diversos estratos de las poblaciones están
presentes cotidianamente categorías raciales como parte de las valoraciones
socioculturales. Éstas van desde las apreciaciones estéticas más difundidas en la
publicidad, en los medios de comunicación, en las relaciones interpersonales,
familiares, amorosas, de amistad o de compadrazgo, hasta las formas de inserción en el
 mercado laboral.
El indígena o el negro tienen expectativas muy escasas para el ascenso laboral, el
acceso a puestos políticos importantes en el ámbito nacional, el desempeño educativo o
el éxito cultural. Existe una gran coincidencia entre los procesos de explotación, de
dominación y de opresión étnico-racial (...)Hasta los años ochenta, los pocos escritos
sobre el racismo y los movimientos antirracistas abordaban el plano filosófico
internacional, con una relación mínima —o nula— con la crítica del racismo en los
países de la región. Probablemente una de las causas fundamentales del escaso interés
por el racismo fue el éxito de ciertas ideologías nacionalistas que implicaban la defensa
oficial de la mezcla racial y cultural para marcar la diferencia frente a la metrópoli y,
sobre todo, la existencia de raíces identitarias en un pasado precolonial. El mestizo, en
algunos países, y el mulato, en otros, eran considerados encarnaciones por excelencia
de la identidad nacional.
Comment: The elastacity of racism is evident in the discrepancy of the appearance of
the phenomenon in the region. While in the 80s little was written about racism from the
perspective of the region, scholars have signalized that nowadays no sector or political
group in Latin America defends the existence of a superior race or openly enforces
racial violence. Despite that, racial stratification and marginalization continues to be
prominent in the social, cultural and economic relations in the region.
Doctrines, ideologies tenemos que diferenciar las doctrinas racistas, desarrolladas fundamentalmente durante
and racist practices los siglos XVIII y XIX en Europa y “exportadas” con mucho éxito hacia América
Latina en aquella época, de las ideologías racistas que parecen tener mucha mayor
sobrevida y capacidad de difusión en el mundo entero, hasta la actualidad.
Las doctrinas racistas fueron influidas por algunas tesis elaboradas en el marco de las
ciencias naturales durante esa época, tales como el darwinismo, el neodarwinismo, el
positivismo y la biosociología. Se basaban en dos procedimientos complementarios: a)
Clasificación, valoración y jerarquización de las poblaciones humanas. b)
Naturalización, fijación en el tiempo (consideración atemporal) de los rasgos culturales
más visibles de algunas comunidades.
Después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial muchos filósofos llegaron a considerar que la
refutación científica de las teorías racistas sería suficiente para derrotar el racismo en el
mundo modern. La lucha antirracista parecía entonces girar en torno a la refutación de
las axiologías raciales con pretensiones científicas (...)Más que nada, consideraba
Comas, se trataba de grupos desinformados que tendían a disminuir o a desaparecer a
 medida que avanzaba la labor educadora (en particular la labor indigenista) para
suprimir el menosprecio hacia el indio.
Sin embargo, a pesar de las amplias campañas de educación y conscientización que
siguieron al holocausto en Europa y en América, el racismo parecía difundirse
inexplicablemente, materializarse en todas las instituciones, multiplicarse en formas de
discriminación y de segregación en todas las ciudades y metrópolis occidentales.
La historia del racismo parece demostrar que la continuidad de las ideas, actitudes y
prejuicios racistas no puede explicarse por la ignorancia y la falta de desarrollo del
espíritu científico. Por ello, debemos entender hoy en día el racismo como una
ideología que mantiene ciertos mecanismos de categorización y de exclusión para
ejercer el poder sobre sectores subalternos.
Comment: [on racismo – part 1] The conceptualization of racism as an ideology stem
from the racist doctrine developed between XVIII and XIX in Europe, based on which
individuals were classified and hierarchically categorized following ideas of
“biological differences” (the “races”2). This association of science with the
development of the ideology and the conceptualization of racism as the ideology that
followed allured many authors to believe that racism could be eliminated with
education and enlightenment. In this sense, by stigmatizing racism as an irrational
thought (baseless ideology followed by disinformed people), unintended consequences
followed: instead of analyzing racism as a social phenomenon, scholarship and
institutions misunderstood racism as the racist. Racism was viewed as a great mistake,
but mistakes can only be carried out by individuals.
Race, racial discrimination and racism were once studied together, often as sides of the
same coin. As paradoxical as it may seem, the attempts of refuting or eliminating
racism – or rather, their failures – that prompted the shift in the understanding of each
concept. Even more, the same continuity and pervasiveness of racism signalizes that
racism can only be structural.

De acuerdo con Hannah Arendt, la ideología es un sistema fundado sobre una opinión
única cuya fuerza permite atraer a la mayoría de la gente y cuya amplitud le permite
guiarse a través de diversas experiencias y situaciones en la vida moderna (...)la
ideología a afirma detentar la clave del devenir histórico, o bien la solución a todos los
enigmas del universo, o incluso el conocimiento profundo de las leyes ocultas del
2
I am using quotation marks as there is no genetic differences that support those claims.
universo que gobiernan, supuestamente, sobre la naturaleza y sobre el ser humano.
Hannah Arendt afirma también el valor político de las ideologías, que intervienen en
todas las situaciones relacionadas con el poder. Es importante resaltar, en este sentido,
el papel legitimador de la ideología. De alguna manera, ésta constituye un mecanismo
discursivo que refuerza la opresión y justifica la desigualdad.
En el caso del racismo, esta tesis sigue afirmando (...)tener un carácter científico— la
superioridad natural de algunos pueblos, basada en una percepción ahistórica de sus
culturas. El racismo opera como un pilar ideológico de los procesos de dominación en
la medida en que legitima el predominio político de cierto grupo etnorracial a partir de
su identificación con la nación.
La ideología racista es un sistema de representaciones que se materializa en
instituciones, en relaciones sociales y en una organización peculiar del mundo material
y simbólico. La discriminación es una de las prácticas que refleja más claramente el
imaginario racista. Consiste en un trato diferencial hacia ciertos sectores sociales
definidos por rasgos culturales, biológicos o fenotípicos, reales o imaginarios. A través
de las prácticas discriminatorias, la ideología racista parece difuminarse en todas las
instituciones sociales moderna
Comment: Racism was regarded as an ideology. This meant, in sum, that it conveyed a
discourse tool that affirmed the superiority of a race above others. This tool reinforced
oppression and justified inequalities of treatment. Moreover, it influenced institutions,
social relations and the organization of societies. To put it simply, racism was an idea
that served a purpose.

Algunos autores han llamado la atención sobre la falta de concordancia que existe, en
las sociedades latinoamericanas, entre el discurso y las prácticas sociales, de manera
particular en torno al racism. mientras que, a pregunta expresa, la enorme mayoría de
las personas parece rechazar la existencia de razas superiores o inferiores, las prácticas
de discriminación y los prejuicios racistas son generalizados. Esta duplicidad es
resultado de la complejidad de los procesos identitarios en los pueblos que tienen un
pasado colonial. Efectivamente, la fortaleza de los vínculos identitarios depende de los
sentimientos de autenticidad y de la construcción arquetípica de un “nosotros” (...)A
partir de la independencia (...)e la nación en las raíces históricas precoloniales para
justificar la ruptura ideológica con la metrópoli y ampliar la base popular de
legitimidad del Estado (...)se basan siempre en el mestizaje y en la urgencia de asumir
 como propia la modernidad occidental.
Mientras que el nacionalismo estatal proclama la existencia de una comunidad
imaginada homogénea, con un proyecto común de desarrollo, en las prácticas
socioculturales, políticas y económicas se sigue evidenciando un universo simbólico
racista.
Comment: After all, there was always a discrepancy between official discourse and
practice in Latin America when it comes to racism. Often, when directly asked, people
would reject racial discrimination, while data would show generalize social and
economic inequalities across racial groups. This disparity refers back to the divergence
in which the mestizaje ideology was born: where, on one hand, state nationalism would
vouch for the existence of an unitary, homogenic community, on the other, social and
cultural practices would expose wide racist symbolisms and costumes.

En América Latina existen niveles muy distintos de sistematicidad de la ideología

racista. En la mayoría de los países, el racismo no constituye un cuerpo doctrinario
coherente ni cerrado. (...)En ciertas regiones se difunden opiniones y prejuicios sobre
las predisposiciones culturales de los pueblos indígenas o de las poblaciones negras. En
otras regiones, la fuerte tradición autoritaria del poder político, aunada a la pervivencia
de oligarquías blancas fuertemente excluyentes, han provocado un racismo sistémico
que atraviesa la sociedad y las instituciones. En coyunturas críticas, esta ideología ha
llegado a transformarse en un racismo total, asumido por el Estado como doctrina
oficial. Éste fue el caso del Estado guatemalteco a inicios de los años ochenta cuando el
gobierno de Ríos Montt, representante de una alianza militar-oligárquica, cometió un
verdadero etnocidio al tiempo que la ideología racista se manifestaba en todas las
instituciones políticas.
Comment; Structural racism is not homogeneously manifested in Latin America.
While some countries are marked by strong negative stereotypes associated with
indigenous and afrodescendant populations, others institutionalized racist practices
through authoritarian political power or carried out racial massacres and widespread
incorporation of racist ideologies in the political institutions.

Latin American El racismo latinoamericano hunde sus raíces en la Conquista, la Colonia y el

racism esclavismo (...)conllevaba, la necesidad de legitimar la subordinación y la
transformación de los indios y negros en esclavos, a través de discursos sobre la misión
religiosa-civilizatoria y la superioridad natural de los europeos (...)consiste en la
clasificación y jerarquización de las razas, la desvalorización de algunas de ellas y la
postulación de la limpieza de sangre (...)La tesis de la diferencia fundamental de los
pueblos conquistados —en el extremo, su carencia de naturaleza humana— conduce a
la de la desigualdad. En cambio, la suposición de que los pueblos recién conquistados
son humanos y esencialmente iguales a los conquistadores deriva hacia la
consideración de la identidad-asimilación y la proyección de los valores propios a los
seres recién subordinados (...)Sin embargo, en la medida en que varía su visión de los
pueblos conquistados, es distinta también la forma de sometimiento y cambia por lo
tanto la ideología racista.
el racismo latinoamericano es neocolonial y está imbuido de una misión civilizadora
(educadora y paternalista) (...)Suele ser más bien una ideología que justifica el poder
étnico y la explotación de los pueblos indígenas por la defensa del linaje y sentimientos
de superioridad asociados con la herencia.
(...)conjunto de prejuicios coloniales sobre los indios, fundamentalmente el de
“haragán”, que permite mejor que ninguno legitimar los privilegios de la etnia
dominante.
El racismo neocolonial está ligado generalmente a una estructura económica y clasista
basada en la estratificación étnica del campesinado y a una forma particular de
incorporación de los indígenas y de los negros al trabajo obrero (...)Estos autores
señalaron la frecuente correspondencia entre la clase y la etnia debida a los distintos
niveles de discriminación en las instituciones estatales, a las formas de intercambio
desigual y, en ocasiones, a la segregación etnorracia
Comment: Three differentiation aspects of America Latina stands out the most in
comparison the study of structural racism in Europe and United States: its origin, the
impact of the mestizaje ideology and the manifestations of racial stratification in the
region.
Racism in Latin America was and is connected with economic structures of
exploitation based on racial stratification. Historically, this meant that the
categorization of race was used to define relations of labor. The success of slave trade
and the use of slave labor of indigenous and African populations relied on racist
doctrine that justified the system by claiming that those populations were inferior and
needed saving. As a consequence, the region is confronted with strong interrelations
between race and class (this is often manifested in correspondence), both of which (and
 at the same time) conforms different levels of discrimination and segregation.
Indigienity, racisms Durante décadas, el mestizaje fue el sostén de la ideología nacionalista en varios de los
and antiracisms países latinoamericanos (...)inventar una suerte de origen genealógico común y fundar
el sentimiento nacional sobre una homogeneidad racial y cultura.
la reivindicación exaltada del pasado indio como parte de la identidad nacional
parecían alejarlo de las políticas discriminatorias y segregacionistas propias de los
nacionalismos etnicistas y ofensivos europeos del siglo XIX e inicios del XX (...)la
idea de integración tuvo efectos perversos: mientras que pretendía refutar las ideas
racistas europeas y liberales, terminaba por postular también la necesidad de un
fundamento racial o de una asimilación cultural para la construcción de la
nacionalidade (...)programas de aculturación, la persistencia de las comunidades indias
reflejaba un fracaso, un incómodo retraso hacia la ansiada unidad nacional (...)
desembocó en una inferiorización de las culturas indias y en el cuestionamiento de la
diferencia.
Comment: The mestizaje ideology thrived on ideas of homogeneity. The building of
nation states independent from the colonial past legitimized the elites to claim the
mestizo, or color-mixing, as the common genealogy between the different groups
present in America. This unitary group was meant to conform the national sentiment
and to represent the new-born states.
The ideology was born out of a calculated paradox: the idea of integration (mixing
across races) was based on the necessity of assimilation and homogeneity, and
therefore a further stigmatization of diversity.

insistían en que el racismo mexicano tenía una relevancia pequeña y limitada a ciertas
regiones. Se reconocía la existencia de ciertas ideas de superioridad racial y de
prejuicios asumidos por las burguesías ladinas regionales; sin embargo, se aseguraba
que las definiciones raciales eran excepcionales debido a un predominio de la
definición cultural del indio.
(...) quien consideró el integracionismo y los procesos de desindianización como
causantes de una pérdida de identidad y de la continuidad de los procesos de
dominación colonia
(...), se afiliaba totalmente a una sola de las vertientes de la civilización: la occidental
(...)por la bipartición de la nación en dos entidades escindidas: el México profundo,
formado por la realidad indígena, herencia de las culturas mesoamericanas, y el México
 imaginario, formado por “la vieja oligarquía aristocratizante y sus epígonos tecnócratas
de la modernidad”.18 El problema cultural fundamental de la sociedad mexicana sería
justamente esa dualidad, esa incapacidad de reconciliar dos realidades contrapuestas
emanadas del pasado colonial
(...)Sus ideas no sólo constituyen una crítica aguda del criollismo, del gamonalismo, de
la mentalidad feudal de la clase dominante peruana y del racismo oficial contenido en
las ideas de mestizaje que predominaban en la época.
(Ecuador) Los indigenistas antirracistas se dedicaron a refutar cada uno de los
argumentos del racismo biologicista por medio de estudios de anatomía y mediciones
antropométricas
(...)En algunos países que no conocieron la experiencia indigenista como política
oficial, la ideología nacionalista de mediados del siglo XX partía de una suerte de
desmemoria del pasado colonial y de rescate de un indio romantizado, guerrero salvaje
y libre del periodo precolombino, valiente hasta en su propia muerte. Así, el
nacionalismo brasileño se construye también con base en un endorracismo, en la
exaltación del mestizaje y la proliferación de los prejuicios contra los negros. Blancas
por dentro, mestizas por fuera, las élites se ven escindidas entre la necesidad de negar y
afirmar su diferencia en relación con el poder metropolitano.
(...)Los exponentes de la democracia racial, con clara influencia en la cultura popular
brasileña y en el sentido común de la población, afirmaban también que en ese país la
cultura y la apariencia eran mucho más importantes que las razas y que la
discriminación era clasista y no racial.
La idea de integración y mestizaje, mito fundador del nacionalismo en la mayoría de
nuestros países, contribuyó indudablemente a ocultar el racismo como una ideología
profundamente enraizada en las creencias populares, en las relaciones interpersonales,
en las prácticas cotidianas y en los ámbitos institucionales
Comment: Ultimately, the mestizaje ideology produced dualities. In some countries,
the dualities manifested in the denial of the existence of racism. Mexican scholars, for
example, often placed racism as an incidental and sparse phenomenon, present only in
particular communities of the country. The inexistence of racism was proclaimed in the
same space and time in which racism was pervasive and institutional. Much like the
contradictions identified by París Pombo (2002) in Mexican society regarding its
imagery of the concerning indigenous populations 3, also the contrast between general
3
explain here
 perception and social reality demonstrated that the country refused to reconcile the
opposite realities that stemmed from colonial past. In others, such as Brazil, the
mestizaje ideology created a romanticized perceptions of indigenous populations and
the proliferation of negative stereotypes concerning afrodescendants. París Pombo
(2002) indicated the paradox as follows: “White on the inside, mestizo on the outside,
the elites were torn between the need to deny and assert their difference in relation to
metropolitan power”. In this sense, the same country lived with the real indigenous
population and the romanticized ideal created by the elites, afrodescendants as
perceived through stereotypes and everyday afrodescedants, and mestizos, who were
sometimes white, sometimes really color mixed.
The ideology of mestizaje contributed to the concealment of racism.

Studies on the Existe actualmente una producción sistemática de estudios sobre el racismo, de carácter
practices of the racist psicológico, histórico, antropológico y sociológico, en países, como Brasil, Perú,
ideologies in the last Ecuador y República Dominicana (...)En México y Venezuela ha sido escasa la
decades of the XX producción de estudios empíricos sobre la ideología racista (...)En otros países de la
century región, el racismo puede ser patente y manifiesto en las más diversas áreas de la vida
social —como es el caso de Argentina y Uruguay—, pero por razones diversas el
problema sigue sin constituir un campo de estudio de las ciencias sociales.
Un elemento común de las distintas obras antes citadas es la constatación de que el
racismo latinoamericano ha sido solapado, mantenido oculto, y al mismo tiempo, se
transforma fácilmente en un endorracismo, una suerte de rechazo y desprecio por la
propia historia. Esto puede llegar a producir un desgarramiento de la identidad y una
suerte de amnesia histórica.
(...)dos tipos diferentes de ideologías racistas en América Latina que tienen orígenes
históricos distintos: por un lado, un racismo cuya raíz se encuentra en la migración
forzada de poblaciones africanas a América y en la esclavitud; por el otro, la ideología
neocolonial elaborada en torno a la imagen del indio.
(...)encontramos varios dedicados a la discriminación de negros y negras en Brasil. A
diferencia de los demás países de la región, Brasil tiene una tradición investigativa de
más de tres décadas sobre las relaciones de raza y de clase.
Comment: Generally, studies on racism in Latin America converge in the
acknowledgment of two distinct historical origins and thus two racisms: the one rooted
in slavery of African populations and the other based on the imposed colonial ideology
 onto the indigenous communities. In both cases, racism is concealed and produces
group identity complexities and historical amnesia. However, concerning the racism
against afro descendants, while pervasive in the region, research is fragmented and,
apart from Brazil (where scholarship has been developed over 40 years), severely
scarce.

Paschel, Tianna S, and Mark Q. Sawyer (2008) Contesting Politics as Usual: Black
social movements, globalization and race policy in latin america”
Introduction (…)Black and indigenous social movements have become central to mainstream
politics in the region (…)Latin America’s Black population, scholarship must now shift
from trying to find ‘‘invisible’’ Blacks to understanding contemporary social issues
affecting these populations
(…)These shifts in Latin American politics are taking place within the context of
increased globalization, making transnational networks and advocacy a key component
in their articulation (…)We find that Afro-Latin American leaders are involved in
many transnational networks of Afro-descendants, which they see as stemming from a
similar history of slavery in the Americas as well as similar conditions of
marginalization, discrimination, and inequality today.

collective identity is a precondition for the emergence and effectiveness of social

movements (…)However, in Latin America, there are still many questions about the
extent to which Black identity actually exists (…)Blackness has often been perceived
to be a much more ambiguous category (…)many Latin American countries, when
people were given different racial choices, there were many norms and incentives that
encouraged people of African descent to choose to identify with intermediate colors
(…)The legacy of the discursive and juridical recognition of race mixture—rather than
the existence of race mixture itself—has created multiple categories that allow people
who might be considered Black in some contexts to not consider themselves to be so.
(…)The empirical reality is that people who come from a range of different ‘‘racial’’ or
ethnic groups identify ethno-racially for political, social, and economic reasons. That
is, if we think about Blackness as a social and political category rather than as a
biological construct, it is capacious enough to include a wide range of people. Even
those who may be defined by some as ‘‘racially mixed’’ might choose to identify as
‘‘Black.

Black and indigenous peoples in Latin America, their paths to economic and political
exclusion have been paved through unique histories of economic, social and political
incorporation, specifically related to their status vis-a`-vis the state (…) whereas Afro-
Latinos have been incorporated into the nation (even if only as second-class citizens),
indigenous peoples have had a somewhat ambivalent status. Consequently, both Latin
American governments and scholars have treated indigenous peoples in terms of
ethnicity, whereas their scholarship has treated Blacks, many of whom are indeed
assimilated into mainstream Latin American culture, in terms of race.
(…)In the context of the myth of racial democracy and the belief in Latin American
exceptionalism, Black activists who choose to emphasize their racial identity above
their national identity are often charged with being racists themselves or with having
imported ideas from foreign lands (…)the articulation of a Black movement and the
emergence of Black NGOs requires overcoming a stigma that labels those activists as
being against a unified national identity and as taking actions that are ultimately
divisive (…). Even worse, they were charged with creating racism where it did not
previously exist.

Racism is frequently measured against the specter of Jim Crow in the United States and
little else. Therefore, scholars and politicians have frequently concluded that racism
does not exist in Latin America because there is no documented history of legally
enforced segregation in the region’s societies (…)race was still more fluid in this
context and that it operated along a continuum in which skin color correlated directly
with income and status. According to this logic, mulattoes were moving toward
whiteness, and thus were able to escape the negative outcomes and stereotypes
associated with Blackness (…)If ‘‘browns’’ or mulattoes are not actually better off than
Blacks in Latin America, then there are more barriers to mobility for non-whites in
Latin America than in the United States, and thus more racial inequality (…)conflict
between growing social scientific evidence and the historical perceptions that the
societies continue to hold about themselves. Much of the scholarship in this idiom
makes the mistake of not analyzing how the existence of perceptions of racial
democracy and widespread miscegenation interact or intersect with measurable
 experiences of discrimination and racial hierarchy.
(…) still wrestle with the belief in the myth of racial democracy that remains salient in
Latin America. These beliefs create a difficult ideological barrier in the same way that
the emergence of colorblindness in the U.S. creates difficulties for race policies
designed to create equality for Blacks

Another potential barrier (…)Black social movements is that the basis upon which
Blacks can make claims on the state is unclear. In many countries in Latin America,
particularly in newly democratic states, citizenship does not typically include the right
to social welfare or basic services, including education, retirement, and in some cases,
basic human rights (…)Black activists have overcome these limitations to launch
movements and challenge both governments and civil society. Despite thin claims to
individual citizenship, other types of rights claims have been made (…)they have
sought to take advantage of constitutional and international human rights protections
developed for indigenous peoples both in the Americas and worldwide
(…)governments across Latin America have had a history of repressing racial social
movements (…)The legacy of state repression endures and frequently tempers the ways
in which movements and groups enter the public sphere (…) In addition to state
repression, Black populations have also faced the problem of poverty (…)International
organizations have played a crucial role in helping Afro-Latin American social
movements overcome resource difficulties and reframe policies. Transnational
networks have provided critical resources, legitimacy and pressure, aiding activists in
making claims (…) Organizations (…)have helped to provide a forum for Black
organizations to challenge their invisibility in their own countries (…) In other words,
the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank ultimately play both sides.
(…)the issue of cultural distinctiveness of Black populations and the salience of race
and existence of discrimination against Blacks. Further, mobilization in other parts of
the Americas (including the U.S.) have provided strategies, tactics, and solidarity
networks that have been translated by Black activists into their domestic political
contexts (…)we contend that Black social movement organizations have been effective
not only in bringing about symbolic and material policy changes, but have also shaken
national ideologies of mestizaje and racial democracy.
Brazil Historically, Brazil has been seen as emblematic of a society in which racial apartheid
does not exist and would be impossible to implement. Since the 1950s scholarship has
contrasted what was called the ‘‘racial democracy’’ of Brazil with the ‘‘racial
apartheid’’ of the U.S. Brazilian elites have consistently sought to subdue the Black
and brown majority population in Brazil by emphasizing racial mixture and harmony
(…)These assertions have involved a revision of the history of slavery in Brazil, such
that it has been viewed as both paternalistic and benevolent and also as a precursor to
the egalitarian race relations in contemporary Latin America.
The country’s transition from a military regime to a democratically elected civilian
government has provided added space for such movements in civil society (…)Afro-
Brazilian movement’s cultural approach was not particularly effective in mobilizing the
masses nor in achieving their desired ends within the political sphere, given the near-
hegemonic political discourses of universalism of that era. This may be why the
movement shifted from discourses of cultural distinctiveness. Armed with growing
demographic data, they began to push on issues of discrimination, inequality, and the
history of the brutality of and resistance to slavery.
These shifts combined with Brazil’s new democracy, a growing neoliberal economy
(…)Afro-Brazilian organizations were very much at the forefront of the regional
preparation for the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, and ultimately
represented the largest civil society delegation from the Americas (…)Brazil’s signing
on to the Durban resolution provided the Black movement with much needed leverage,
that was then utilized in future negotiations with the state. This confluence of events
provided an opening for activists armed with data, support from international
organizations and Brazilian elites who increasingly saw the recognition of racial
problems to be in their own interests.
(…) in 2002 President Fernando Henrique Cardoso made a stunning announcement: he
denounced Brazilian society as racist and declared that the state must take steps to
address the problem (…)it was in part the product of constant pressure from both
domestic and international activists and social scientists (…)the ‘‘fact’’ of Brazilian
racial democracy started to become more popularly referred to as the ‘‘myth of racial
democracy.’’ (…)Following Cardoso’s administration, the Workers Party (PT)
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (AKA ‘‘Lula’’) has embraced the idea of
affirmative action and incorporating Blacks at all levels of government (…)Afro-
Brazilian civil society leaders have been incorporated into the state at various levels.
Lula announced the creation of the Ministry for the Promotion of Racial Equality
(SEPPIR) (…)Two of SEPPIR’s main initiatives have been to promote affirmative
 action programs and land titling for quilombolas (…) On one hand, it is situated in a
strategic position where it could presumably push for targeted policies within the
government. On the other hand, it occupies a strange and often precarious space
between government and civil society, one that has created serious tensions.
(…)In the aftermath, quota and affirmative action laws have remained controversial,
with debates largely being shaped by the media. In many respects, quota policy
interests have constituted Black and brown Brazilians as an interest group in a way that
previously did not exist (…)While supporters of affirmative action admit that Brazilian
society has not been characterized by racial violence and overt conflicts, the level of
inequality that Afro-Brazilians experience is so desperate that inaction itself represents
a form of violence.
Cuba, Puerto Rico Did not read
and Central America
Colombia (…)starting in the late 1980s Black social movements emerged and intensified their
mobilization in this region (…)Ecuador and Colombia represent two important places
where Black movements are in many ways regionally fragmented, but have made
significant policy gains.
The 1980s were marked by what some have called ‘‘crises of governability’’ that led to
constitutional reform in a number of Latin American countries, including Colombia
(…)domestic factors alone cannot explain why, given the context of racial democracy
in Colombia, these propositions did not fall on deaf ears. Agudelo situates these
domestic changes in the global context by arguing that the emergence of multicultural
policies (MCPs) in Colombia were the result of a crisis of legitimacy for the
Colombian government that had political and economic consequences in the
international arena. The global ‘‘pressure’’ to which Agudelo refers was, on the one
hand, increasing pressure for pluralistic multicultural democratic reform, and on the
other hand, increasing pressure from the international human rights community.
Despite a long institutional and legal history of not acknowledging Colombia’s cultural
diversity, the 1991 Colombian Constitution states that the government ‘‘recognizes and
protects the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Colombian Nation’’ and grants a
number of collective rights both to indigenous populations and what the government
calls ‘‘Black communities.’’ Moreover, these constitutional reforms blazed the trail for
a number of controversial policies, including Law 70 that institutionalizes racial quotas
in the Colombian congress and grants Afro-Colombians collective land rights (…)the
process was a difficult one that highlights many of the obstacles to Black mobilization
in Latin America, among them issues with identity, the salience of poverty in the lives
of everyday Afro-Colombians and perhaps most importantly, national discourses of
mestizaje that hold that Afro-Colombians are not a group as such and that any
articulation of an Afro-Colombian community or organization is itself an importation
from the United States.

These new organizations from the Pacific coast region were arguably more rural and
grassroots than previous ones and were the most active agents in the development of
Law 70 (…) Still, although some of the ‘‘new’’ ethno-territorial organizations,
particularly in the Choco, had been organized for years (…)they were implicitly rather
than explicitly ‘‘Black’’ before the 1990s. Starting in 1990, organizations like the
Organization of Popular Neighborhoods in the Choco (OPABO) and the Peasant
Association of Atrato (ACIA) shifted both their focus and discourse as they began to
mobilize in the national policy arena and form alliances with other Black and
indigenous organizations both in the Choco´ and in Colombia more generally.
(…)the process around Law 70, beginning with the inclusion of Transitory Article 55
in the 1991 Constitution, was the first time that Afro-Colombian activists from
different regions met each other and began to consolidate a national Black identity
(…)Afro-Colombian activists have been effective in their use of multiple strategies:
lobbying, forming alliances with key indigenous leaders, and using the media
(…)activists have also formulated their demands in terms of ethnicity and not race, a
strategy that has both challenged and appropriated dominant ideologies of the nation.
Ultimately, Afro-Colombian movements have been successful precisely because they
couched their claims in terms of ethnic group identity and the preservation of culture,
steering away from questions of racial exclusion, discrimination, and urbanization.
The implementation of Law 70 (…)After the passage of Law 70, government
retrenchment and new challenges related to violence have forced Afro-Colombian
activists to directly engage in transnational advocacy, employing a variety of tactics to
pressure the Colombian government to enact policy reforms and to hold them
accountable for the full enforcement of existing legislation. In this process, Afro-
Colombian leaders and organizations have built solid transnational coalitions with non-
state actors, including religious and Black organizations throughout the hemisphere,
and have effectively leveraged the influence of state actors in the U.S. and other Latin
 American countries through the use of the global human rights frame.
Serious human rights violations, including massacres, political kidnappings, and the
forced displacement of thousands of Afro-Colombian families, have plagued these
populations in recent years (…)This has pushed Afro-Colombian organizations to
adopt a more international approach to activism. (…)The Afro-Colombian Working
group is one example of how Afro-Latin American organizations are increasingly
‘‘going global,’’ effectively using transnational advocacy as a way to act at the local
and national levels. The Working Group was a coalition of human rights organizations
and advocates ‘‘working to develop regional and international strategies to address the
situation of communities of African descent in Colombia.’’
Gender (…)In some cases, as in Colombia, women have been integral to Afro-descendant
organizations, taking up many leadership roles. Safa (2005) notes that ‘‘Afro-
Colombian women have become prominent in the Black movement and traditional
partisan politics (…)The emergence of Black women’s organizations is most clearly
documented in the case of Brazil, where beginning in the early 1990s, Black women,
disenchanted with traditional white feminist organizations as well as male-dominated
Black organizations, began to form organizations like GELEDES and Criola
(…)transnational networks give such organizations leverage to address general issues
affecting Afro-descendant communities, but also to discuss issues of gender
representation, sexism, and women’s issues more broadly within the Black movement.
Conclusion (…)events like the 2001 World Conference against Racism marked a pivotal point in
the struggle against racism and racial inequality in Latin America (…)this event and the
preparatory meeting in Santiago, Chile represent an important shift in race relations and
policy in Latin America. The effect of transnationalism in ethnic struggles on domestic
politics in Latin American countries should not be understated.
(…)their critique ignores the fact that ‘‘race’’ is a relatively modern concept, fabricated
by Europeans and applied to peoples around the world, making it global since its
inception (…)the nature of Black movement politics, though in some senses
transnational and global, remains very much rooted in local political processes in other
ways. Consequently the emergence of movements and their effectiveness at the
national and local levels depends greatly on the extent to which their language,
strategies, and configuration fit into domestic politics (…) that resonate within their
domestic contexts, including addressing how mixed race peoples figure into their
vision of the world. In other cases movements have emphasized cultural distinction as a
 basis for collective rights (…)This transformation from domestic politics into more
global ethnic and anti-racist struggles by sectors of Black communities in Latin
America is part of a larger phenomenon of what Keck and Sikkink call ‘‘activism
without borders.’’ (…)‘‘We came as Blacks and left as Afro-descendants. ... Santiago
(a preparatory meeting for the U.N. Conference Against Racism) forced Afro-
descendants of the Americas to place their development within a regional perspective
and to articulate their demands along with their sister communities’’ (…)will continue
to force us to situate domestic politics and local resistance struggles within the context
of global economic, political, and cultural flows.

Challenging Mestizaje: A Gender Perspective on Indigenous and Afrodescendant

Movements in Latin America

Introduction Mexico, like other Latin American and Caribbean countries, predicated the integration
of their indigenous and Afrodescendant populations upon a policy of mestizaje.
Mestizaje celebrated racial and cultural mixture as a way of forging a unified and
homogeneous national image at the same time that it reasserted the supremacy of the
European race and civilization by favoring blanqueamiento or whitening (…) in
Mexico mestizaje cultivated a respect for indigenous roots at the same time that it
negated self-determination for the Indian population . . . by equating progress with
acculturation to European ways’.

Afrodescendant movement gained a huge impetus from the preparation for the third
United Nations (UN) World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination,
Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa in September 2001.
This conference brought Afrodescendant populations from around the globe together
for the first time. A major achievement of the Durban process was the recognition by
Latin American and Caribbean governments (…)that slavery constituted a crime
against humanity and was a direct cause of the widespread poverty and marginalization
of Afrodescendant peoples in the Americas.

The emergence of these movements has been linked to the weakness of the Latin
American state and to the decline of traditional political parties following the
dismantling of authoritarian military regimes. The imposition by external forces of
 neoliberal policies (…)These neoliberal policies, together with globalization,
contributed in the 1980s and 1990s to increasing inequality and poverty, (…)Inequality
and growing immiseration increased the urgency of Afrodescendant and indigenous
groups to legitimate their claim to resources from the state and recognition of their
cultural autonomy.1 However, Afrodescendants and the indigenous claim these rights
not simply as citizens of the state, like peasants or women, but as culturally different
groups demanding autonomy within the national state (…)Respect for cultural
differences and support for these racial/ethnic movements was encouraged in Latin
America through the spread of liberation theology in the 1970s and the formation of
Christian base communities, as well as by the growth of a human rights movement in
Latin America.
Statistical data by race and gender is still lacking in all areas, even in Brazil, which is
the best documented. This lack of data also demonstrates the state’s unwillingness to
deal with the issue of Afrodescendant people who remain largely invisible.
Nevertheless, Afrodescendants are beginning to challenge the old mestizaje or
indigenista paradigm, particularly in its emphasis on blanqueamiento or whitening, as
will become apparent in the following analysis.
The emergence of The special juridical status of indigenous peoples in Latin America may have made it
indigenous and easier for them to organize against the white bias in mestizaje than it has been for
afrodescendant Afrodescendants. Certainly, the indigenous population has received much more support
movements in Latin from international organizations like the United Nations (UN) and the Organization of
America American States (OAS) than has the Afrodescendant community (…)The rights of
Afrodescendants and indigenous peoples were recognized in the 1988 Constitution of
Brazil and the 1991 Constitution of Colombia. But a region-wide declaration is still
lacking, even though the number of Afrodescendants is almost five times larger than
the indigenous peoples, and they constitute 30 percent of the total population of Latin
America and the Caribbean

The special juridical status of indigenous groups in Latin America dates from the
colonial period (…)Indigenous slavery was outlawed and Indian resguardos or reserves
were placed under the special protection of the Spanish Crown.
(…) But in the 20th century (…) this negative concept of racial mixture began to change
(…)Supposedly lacking a culture of their own, Afrodescendants were regarded as
incomplete or deviant versions of Euroamerican culture (…)This distinction between
Afrodescendants and indigenous peoples is reminiscent of the difference in the United
States between the treatment of Native Americans as ‘nations’ and of black people as
minority.

After the rejection of scientific racism (…)The indigenous peoples in Latin America
were termed an ethnic group (…)links to the increasing importance of cultural criteria,
such as language and dress, in racial and ethnic designations (…)this shift from
physical to cultural and later class criteria did little to weaken social hierarchies.
Nevertheless, the greater attention in racial classification to cultural and class criteria
did contribute to a more fluid concept of race in Latin America and the Caribbean
(…)In Latin America, it was possible for persons to pass out of the indigenous or
Afrodescendant communities by adopting the cultural and class characteristics of the
dominant white, mestizo society. Education and income ‘whitened’, contributing to a
large intermediate sector of mestizos or mulattos. In several Latin American countries,
states consciously tried to whiten the population by encouraging European
immigration, but only in Argentina were Afrodescendants virtually erased as a racial
group.

In Brazil, the term ‘race’ was replaced by ‘ethnicity’ in scientific texts and government
documents for 50 years, starting in the post-Second World War period, while color
categories such as preto (black) or pardo (brown or mulatto) remained (…)that in Latin
America the refutation of the biological foundations of race, or non-racialism, is
equated with anti-racism and the impossibility of racial discrimination. This has been
used in many Latin American countries to justify the elimination of racial categories
from the census, arguing that, if not officially recognized, race cannot serve as the basis
for discrimination. However, such a stance ignores the importance of the social
construction of race, which goes far beyond official, legal categories and still
differentiates and discriminates against the Afrodescendant.

In most Latin American countries, Afrodescendants are not included as a census

category, rendering them largely invisible. Under pressure, Colombia and Costa Rica
have recently included blacks as a census category for the first time, but there was an
acknowledged severe undercount of the Afrodescendant population (…)But the
problem also lies with the Afrodescendant population themselves, who are reluctant to
 identify as black because of the negative stereotypes long associated with blackness
(…)which may be explained as a process of cultural whitening. The ‘mulatto escape
hatch’, as Degler (1971) termed it, helped Afrodescendants escape the oppression of
blackness and distinguished Brazilian racial stratification from the bipolar construction
of race in the US (…)mulattos and blacks face similar limitations on critical issues such
as life expectancy, school enrollment, and occupational distribution.

The term ‘Afrodescendant’ used in this article to cover both mulattos and blacks, was
promoted by Brazilian black leaders as a way of countering invidious distinctions
between the two racial groups. The term ‘Afrodescendant’ focuses on the African
component among the great majority of racially mixed blacks, and thus dismisses the
whitening bias inherent in mestizaje (…)since it signifies a change of emphasis from
phenotype to descent, and adopts a bipolar dichotomy between Afrodescendant and
white, which many Latin American activists strongly reject.
The importance of Afrodescendants (with some exceptions noted below) were never tied to the land and
land are today a primarily urban people. Under slavery Afrodescendants were denied a land
base and this continued after emancipation. Few were able to purchase land and instead
drifted to the cities (…) low-paid manual jobs. Black and mulatta women, who were
largely illiterate, worked largely as domestic servants, laundresses and seamstresses,
but they had a much higher labor force participation rate than white women, who were
largely confined to the home. Black women had to work because families could not be
sustained by a single male breadwinner, and never adopted the ‘cult of domesticity’
prevalent among the white elite.

(…)the Maya and other indigenous possessed land, often in closed corporate
communities, which was owned collectively. Land helped them preserve their culture
and resist the dehumanizing effects of an ever-encroaching market economy. Few
Afrodescendant groups could lay claim to such territorial rights.
(…)Indigenous attachment to the land served as a basis for cultural continuity and the
preservation of strong kinship and territorial ties (…)1996 Convention of the
International Labor Organization concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples. Article I
of this Convention defines beneficiaries in terms of their ancestral or pre-colonial link
to land and their maintenance and consciousness of cultural difference. Indigenous and
ethnic peoples are represented as naturally ‘rooted’ to the land and as ‘natural
 conservationists’ of local resources (England, 1999). Here again we find a privileging
of indigenous claims over those of Afrodescendants.

The Afro-Colombian communities of the Pacific coast of Colombia developed in

isolation after the collapse of the mining economy in the 18th century. They have
succeeded in gaining some state recognition of their territorial rights, but far less than
the much smaller indigenous communities in the same area (…) Afro-Colombian
communities of the Pacific have emphasized the importance of maintaining control
over their territories and natural resources as a precondition for the survival and
strength of their culture (…) demands reject integration and own collective identity
based on territorial autonomy. Yet autonomous movements among both Afro-
Columbians and indigenous peoples in the Pacific region have been seriously
weakened by traditional developmentalism, clientelistic politics and particularly armed
conflict (Grueso et al., 1998). Both groups now face massacre and large-scale
displacement from their riverine communities as a result of harassment by the
Colombian army, paramilitaries and drugs traders.
(…)The lack of a territorial base has made it more difficult for Afrodescendants to
challenge mestizaje as the indigenous peoples have done. Afrodescendants, even more
than the indigenous peoples, have consciously had to build pride and dignity in their
own culture, as we shall see in the following section.
The search for Autonomy is important for both Afrodescendants and the indigenous peoples, because
cultural autonomy it signifies respect for their cultural differences and more control over their own
resources (…)‘prioritizing the fulfillment of basic community needs’ (…)most
Afrodescendant groups are not rejecting mestizaje per se, but rather the bias toward
blanqueamiento promoted in its earlier Eurocentric versions.
(…) Indigenous peoples, autonomy means recognition of their territorial rights and
respect for their cultural differences (…) to earn the rights of belonging through
responsible participation.’
Afrodescendants do not place nearly as much emphasis on the collective. They are a
more urbanized, wage-earning community, which has favored the process of
individualization (…) Culture has also played an important role in the formation of
black identity, especially in Brazil, where the blocos afros, musical groups rooted in
Salvador, were formed to reinforce a politics of identity among Afro-Brazilians,
emphasizing self-esteem, anti-racism and equality in difference. Rather than autonomy,
the term ‘community’ became important, not in a territorial sense, but including ‘all
those who share an identity by their exclusion and marginality’ (da Cunha, 1998: 236).
The emphasis on culture helps explain why heavily populated black areas like Bahia
retain a strong African identity (Walker, 2002), but the appropriation of black culture
by the national society has weakened its potential as a strategy for mobilization.
Hanchard (1994) even argues that appropriation of Afro-Brazilian culture by the
national society as commodities of popular culture hinders the growth of racial
consciousness among Afro-Brazilians. The Afro-Brazilian population is the least
territorially based of the Afrodescendant communities studied here, since with
migration to São Paulo and other areas of the south-east, they are now spread
throughout the country. Strong racial regional differences remain.

(…) Brazil has long been upheld as a ‘racial democracy’, a thesis which argued that
racial inequality was basically the result of poverty and class differences, and would
disappear with development. However, the continuing racial gaps in socio-economic
status following the period of rapid economic growth from 1960 to 1980, and the
growth of a black middle class which still suffers from racial discrimination, have
weakened the belief in racial democracy.

The proliferation of Afro-Brazilian organizations has not yet achieved mass support
among the Afrodescendant population (…) for reasons about which there is still much
debate (…)Still many Afrodescendants are reluctant to identify with blackness, which
continues to carry a negative connotation (…)But class and color differentiation
persists, and continues to fragment the black community. Because of the co-optive
strategy of mestizaje, which convinced mulattos they were more like whites than like
their black brothers, there is also a reluctance to create confrontational racial blocs such
as exist in the US. (…)that weak black solidarity in Brazil may also be due to sharp
class stratification (…)Since most Afrodescendants are poor, class consciousness may
be more important than race consciousness, at least among the working class. Race has
never served as the basis for any form of legal discrimination in Brazil, nor as the basis
for residential segregation, but there are marked class residential differences (…), for
Brazil, race and class is a false dichotomy, and that ‘the lie at the heart of the myth of
racial democracy was not necessarily in the overwhelming prevalence of open and
purposeful racial discrimination, but rather in the fallacy that social discrimination
 could be practiced free from racial implications’.
Gender did not read
subordination in
afrodescendant and
indigenous
communities
Conclusion Structural factors such as collective control of land and a strong cultural heritage favor
ethnic consciousness among indigenous peoples as compared with racial consciousness
among Afrodescendants (…)Racial solidarity is more difficult to achieve among the
urbanized, wage-earning Afrodescendants.
Both indigenous and Afrodescendant groups question the traditional ideology of
mestizaje in terms of its white bias and Eurocentric norms. Both gorups have
succeeded in promoting a more positive image of their communities, both within their
own communities and among the elite, and are gaining legitimacy as full citizens
worthy of specific public policy aimed at redressing past wrongs (…)But class
divisions remain, as can be seen in the difficulty the leadership of the Afrodescendant
movement has in garnering mass support for racial solidarity in Brazil.

Racial democracy in the Americas: A Latin and U.S Comparison

Introduction The thesis known as “Racial democracy theory” (also referred to as Iberian
exceptionalism) argues that, relative to the United States, the nations of Latin America
are largely free of the ferocious racial prejudice (…)Racial democracy theorists base
these conclusions upon the fact that, compared to North America, the nations of Latin
America experienced a marked absence of post-manumission institutionalized racism
(e.g., segregation & Jim Crow laws), a general absence of race-based group violence
(e.g., lynching, race-base hate crimes), or racial protest, and a strikingly high rate of
miscegenation. It is argued that, the extent to which racial inequality is still discernible
in Latin American societies, this inequality is almost exclusively due to the residual
effects of past racially contingent resource allocation and not to the effects of ongoing
racial prejudice.
(…) unlike the European colonists of North America, the Iberian conquerors of Latin
America had the experience of living under the political and social hegemony of the
Moors, a dark-skinned people, for nearly 800 years. Having experienced these dark-
skinned conquerors as their political and cultural “superiors,” the Iberian colonists
could not then regard the darkskinned African and Indian slaves as sub-human with the
same degree of celerity as the North American colonists found possible
(…)Catholicism regarded Native Americans, and even African slaves, as people with
souls and equally beloved of God; thus, the Catholic conquerors were less averse to
intermixing with them (…)the early Latin American colonists did not venture into the
New World with intact families. As a result, the Iberian colonists established sexual
and emotional relationships with the Indian and African slave women rather quickly,
creating a more positive attitude toward those of African descent and resulting in the
high rates of miscegenation we see today in Latin America (…)they argue that broad-
based social movements like the Civil Rights Movement in the United States were not
necessary because of the more egalitarian nature of race relations in Latin America.
(…). Given the fact that Whites enjoy discernible advantages over Blacks (…) critical
race theorists argue that the only exceptional thing about Latino race relations is the
success with which Latin American nations have promulgated the myth rather than the
reality of racial equality. Critics argue that proponents of the racial democracy thesis
make the mistake of viewing race relations in Latin America through the prism of the
racial dynamics found in the United States. As a result, racial democracy theorists have
been insensitive to the distinct forms of racial exclusion that are practiced in Latin
America. For example, Latin American countries have a history of “Whitening”
privileges and laws that give jobs, land, tax breaks, and other benefits to European and
Asian immigrants in an effort to decrease the relative portion of Blacks in Latin
societies. Rather than trying to eliminate people of African descent through informal
violence (e.g., pogroms), high rates of imprisonment, or execution, Latin America
nations have opted to attenuate African influence via the process of dilution (…)the
goal is the same: white hegemony (…)Thus, racial democracy is seen as nothing but a
myth functioning to maintain the very thing it denies—racial oppression (Twine,
1998). Among other ways, this is accomplished by installing identification with and
allegiance to the nation as a whole rather than to specific racial groups, thereby
impeding the development of group-based social mobilization needed to confront real
social grievances (…)They argue that the lack of social movements based on race and
the denial of racial inequality have created a discursive space where overt racism
flourishes but is denied due to the myth of racial democracy.

(…)As is well known, explicit measures of prejudice suffer from the major problem of
 social desirability and self-presentation bias. When faced with explicit, highly
sensitive, and potentially inflammatory racial issues, participants often feel under
considerable pressure to provide more politically acceptable responses than might be
warranted (…)As a result, the use of explicit measures has led American race relations
researchers to conclude that racial prejudice has been in a continuous decline over the
past 40 years, whereas less obtrusive techniques (such as experiments and priming
studies) indicate no such decline.

(…)in this article, we compare levels of both explicit and implicit prejudice in the
United States and three countries of Latin America: Puerto Rico, the Dominican
Republic, and Cuba (…)all three Latin nations have had a similar pattern of Spanish
conquest. Second, like the rest of Latin America, these three countries share a similar
history of racial slavery (…)Also, none of the countries have had major mass
movements for racial equality. Last, these three countries predominantly have a
White/Black racial composition that allows for the study of race relations between
those of African and European ancestry (…), each country was selected to test specific
aspects of the racial democracy thesis. Since the socialist revolution of 1959, and its
assumed deep commitment to an egalitarian society and the confrontation of racism
both at home and abroad, some have claimed that Cuba represents a society in which
racism has been all but eliminated (…)To test the notion that miscegenation is a
precursor to racial democracy, we have chosen as our second country the Dominican
Republic. It is among the nations with the highest level of miscegenation (…)to assess
the limits of Latin America’s racial democracy, we have chosen Puerto Rico because it
is the only country in Latin America that is presently under U.S. control.
Construct validation We reasoned that if the explicit, anti-Black racism measure was valid, there should be a
of explicit and difference in explicit racism scores as a function of participant’s racial
implicit prejudice selfclassification. In particular, those classifying themselves as Black should have
measures significantly lower explicit racism scores than those classifying themselves as either
White or Mulatto (or light/brown-skinned African American).
The overall differences between groups was highly significant (…)and the contrasts
between Blacks and the two other groups were also highly significant.
Strong racial Whereas evidence of implicit racial prejudice against Blacks has been found in more
democracy thesis than 30 studies in the United States, the strong version of the racial democracy
 hypothesis would expect this prejudice to be absent in Latin America.
(…)Because of the small number classifying themselves as Negroes in Cuba and
Puerto Rico (…)we classified all participants with any discernible degree of African
heritage into the same “Black/Brown” group. This simply meant combining the
Mulatto and Negro categories for the Latin American participants, and light-skinned
and dark-skinned African Americans for the U.S. participants.
(…)We started first with the participants in the United States and found, consistent
with the overwhelming body of previous research, that European Americans had a level
of implicit prejudice against Blacks that was significantly greater than zero.
(…)However, although African Americans showed a very slight tendency toward pro-
Black/anti-White implicit prejudice, this tendency was not statistically greater than
zero.
We found that same general trend for all three Latin American samples as well. Whites
had levels of implicit prejudice against Blacks that were significantly greater than zero
within each nation (…)Furthermore, and in contrast to the results found for the United
States, this anti-Black prejudice was also shared by those with discernible degrees of
African heritage (…) Therefore, these data appear to clearly contradict the strong
version of the Iberian exceptionalism thesis. Not only can evidence of implicit anti-
Black racial prejudice be found among Latin American as well as North American
Whites (i.e., Whites from the United States), but it can also be found among Latin
Americans of color.
Weak racial (…)there was not a single case in which the implicit prejudice scores were higher in the
democracy thesis United States than in any of the three Latin countries.
(…)Whites had significantly higher implicit prejudice scores than Blacks/Browns
(…)This indicates that the degree to which Whites had higher anti-Black prejudice
levels than Black/Browns was essentially constant across nations (…)Implicit racial
prejudice was found to be significantly lower in the United States than in the
Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba.
(…) These showed that the North American sample was significantly less prejudiced
than either the Cuban or Dominican samples, whereas there was no significant
difference between the North American and Puerto Rican samples. Furthermore, the
Puerto Rican sample also had a significantly lower explicit prejudice average than did
the Cuban sample.
(…)level of implicit racial prejudice found in the United States is largely due to the
 relatively intense degree of racial discourse this nation has experienced over the past 45
years and the resultant pressure toward political correctness.
(…)American sample had significantly lower implicit prejudice scores than each of the
other three Latin American nations (…)after controlling for levels of explicit prejudice,
there was now also a significant effect for race, showing that Whites had significantly
higher implicit prejudice scores than Blacks.
(…)Furthermore, the pairwise contrasts also continued to show significantly lower
levels of implicit prejudice among Whites in the United States than among Whites in
Latin America; however, the contrast between North American and Puerto Rican
Whites was only marginally significant.
Discussion When exploring potentially explosive and sensitive topics such as racial prejudice, it is
well known that explicit measures of prejudice can be quite sensitive to social
desirability and self-presentation effects in a way that implicit measures are not.
(…)Use of the implicit measure of racial prejudice provided no support whatsoever for
the Iberian exceptionalism thesis, in either its strong or its weak form. Not only was
significant implicit racial prejudice against Blacks found among Whites in all the
nations examined, but this anti-Black prejudice was found also among Latin American
participants with discernible African heritage as well (…)is consistent with the notion
that a certain degree of prejudice against members of subordinate groups is
consensually shared by both members of dominant and subordinate groups alike within
hierarchical social systems (…)In direct contradiction to the racial democracy claim,
both indices suggested higher levels of anti-Black prejudice in Latin America than in
North America.
(…)these findings seem to present us with something of a paradox. Although it seems
relatively well established that explicit racism has had a substantially less ferocious
history in the Caribbean than in the United States, this regional difference does not
appear to be reflected in either explicit or more unconscious forms of prejudice within
contemporary populations. Not only were both explicit and implicit prejudice in the
Caribbean higher than in the United States, but it is also noteworthy that the levels of
both forms of racial prejudice in socialist (ostensibly classless) Cuba appeared no less
severe than that found in either the Dominican Republic or the American-controlled
island of Puerto Rico. Furthermore, despite the very high level of miscegenation in the
Dominican Republic, participants in this sample also failed to exhibit particularly low
levels of either explicit or implicit prejudice (…)Given this, our findings also appear to
 suggest that neither the elimination of the class struggle (as in Cuba) nor the creation of
high levels of miscegenation (as in the Dominican Republic) is a sufficient condition
for the elimination of implicit and unconscious racial prejudice.

(…)First, we must keep in mind that this study used nonprobability samples. Whether
or not these results would also hold within probability samples from each nation
remains to be seen. Second, despite the suggestion that implicit and assumedly
unconscious racial prejudice is higher in the Caribbean than in North America, the
extent to which this implicit prejudice expresses itself in actual discriminatory behavior
is also an open question that needs to be settled by further research. Third, it is entirely
possible that, on both the implicit and explicit measures, we are capturing the effects of
the Civil Rights Movement (…)the lower levels of prejudice in the United States as
compared to Latin America are probably genuine and not merely artifactual (…)The
results also may speak to the power of antiracist social movements in determining both
implicit and explicit prejudice. That is, implicit prejudice is perhaps affected by the
intervention of antiracist discourse and policies specifically bringing racial inequality
to consciousness. They also suggest that the implicit and explicit measures of racial
prejudice may have a more indirect relationship to historic or current racial barriers and
inequality than previously thought (…)This conjecture may now be true more than
ever, after almost 40 years of living with the fruits of the Civil Rights Movement, with
no such corollary in Latin America.

The idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940

Race theorizing in Argentina’s rapid ethnic change, couple with its economic expansion, led most
Argentina: the intellectuals to glorify the Europeanization of their country: it had vast space, fertile
glorification of land, and a mainly white population (…) They based their interpretation of Latin
whitening America and Argentina on the work of social Darwinist and positivist Europeans or on
North American writings about race, psychology and history. (p. 39)