White Latin American - Being "White"

Being "White"

Being "White" is a classificatory term that emerges from the tradition of racial classification, a system that developed as Europeans colonized large parts of the world and employed classificatory systems to distinguish themselves from the local inhabitants of those countries. However, while most racial classifications include a concept of being White that is ideologically connected to European heritage and specific phenotypic, biological features associated with European heritage, there is a wide variability about the ways in which they are used to classify people. These differences have to do with the particular historical processes and social contexts in which a given racial classification is used. Since Latin America is characterized by widely differing histories and social contexts, there is also wide variability in the use of the classification "white" throughout Latin America. According to Peter Wade specialist in race concepts of Latin America "...racial categories and racial ideologies are not simply those that elaborate social constructions on the basis of phenotypical variation or ideas about innate difference but those that do so using the particular aspects of phenotypical variation that were worked into vital signifiers of difference during European colonial encounters with others." In many parts of Latin America being white is connected more to socio-economic status than to specific phenotypic traits - and it is often said that in Latin America "Money Whitens" Also within Latin America there is variation in how racial boundaries have been defined. In Argentina, for example, the notion of mixture has been downplayed resulting in the country having no real Mestizo group, whereas in countries like Mexico and Brazil the notion of mixedness has been fundamental for nation-building, resulting in a large group of Mestizos in Mexico or Pardos in Brazil (unlike the Mestizos of Mexico, most non-White Brazilians self-identify as Pardo, not Mestiço; the ancestral background of most Brazilian Pardos is a mix of mostly European and African ancestry) being considered neither fully "white" nor fully non-white. Unlike the U.S where ancestry is used to define race, Latin American scholars came to agree by the 1970s that race in Latin America could not be understood as the "genetic composition of individuals" but instead "based upon a combination of cultural, social, and somatic considerations. In Latin America, a person's ancestry is quite irrelevant to racial classification. For example, full-blooded siblings can often be classified different races (Harris 1964).

For these reasons the distinction between "white" and "mixed", and between "mixed" and "black" or "indigenous" is largely subjective and situational meaning that any attempt to quantify racial categories into discrete categories is fraught with problems.