Blog 4

The perception of race in Latin America was ever changing as the result of the elite’s desire for racial control and positive presentation to the European nations. Initially, Latin American countries followed a strict caste system or Sistema De Castas. In this system, the top would consist of Spain born whites known as Peninsulars with natives and African slaves at the bottom of the hierarchy. While this theoretically separated everyone into different groups they were viewed more akin to how we view ethnicities today, with the strongest emphasized differences being in language and culture. The caste system, while vast, was also too simple and failed to account for where children of the parents of these groups would fall into the system, basically rendering it unavailable to count for all the possible combinations of ancestry.

  On top of this, many people of color could buy their way up to the higher part of the caste system (not to the top as that was reserved for whites) as long as they could prove they did not have any Muslim or Jewish heritage. This perception of race would eventually change as a result of racial pseudoscience and philosophy which was really just false justification for white men to have power over other groups of people. Examples include Auguste Comte’s positivism, in which he states that societies all eventually will eventually progress to an utopian society, but that some areas of the world stalled in the process and as a result are more “primitive”, with France (his home) being put at the top of the list of the most progressed, as with any pseudoscience that only wanted favorable results, different nations putting their own countries at the top in the name of white supremacy. He claimed that in order for other societies to reach utopia they must remove their savage (read that as non white) ways in order to progress. As a result, a large portion of the Latin American elite went out of their way to encourage European immigration and remove natives (sometimes violently) from their society in order to appear as cultured and civilized to the Europeans, along with importing European luxury goods to show off how “cultured” they were. 

Further influencing this behavior was philosopher Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism theory (not supported in any way by Charles Darwin theory of evolution) which stated that the poor were poor because they were inferior racially, culturally, and religiously, and like positivism, believed that while you could improve by studying white culture, but in Social Darwinism your race would always hold you back to a degree. While these white supremacist views held by philosphers and the elite always did exist, these pseudoscientific studies were used as an attempt to help justify the poverty and inequality of non white races along with giving and give what was supposed to be a “logical” explanation for why non whites couldn’t achieve as much for reasons other than the result of their oppresion by the white elite. Despite this, the Latin American elite could not significantly stop the mixing of races in their countries and despite all of their efforts to appear as “white” to the rest of the world, was bothered by the racial mixing and predominantly non white populations of their countries along with the perception that such mixing of races was indicative of a corrupt country with no culture, skill, or intelligence, as well as the possible collapse of their society. Eventually they decided to come up with the idea of what was referred to as whitening. In this context whitening refers to the belief of the Latin American elite that while they did not associate with what was viewed as inferior races, the mixing of races was not bad as long as it lead to a whiter population overall, this idea was promoted by various Latin American scholars and artists such as Brazillian literary critic Silvio Romero and Brazillian artist H. Broccos.

 While it was met with controversy by European foreigners and is still an incredibly problematic viewpoint, it was a major point in the shifting of the perception of the mixing of races, which before this point was always considered as a bad thing. It is incredibly clear that the concept of race was created as a way to divide and exert power over other people, and the lengths people both in Latin America and Europe would go to not only justify oppression, but show themselves as part of the white elite speaks volumes.