Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

88 reframing latin america
race, minority groups (blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc.) lack the capacity to
actively discriminate against whites. These scholars therefore encourage us
in the United States to reserve the term racist for people with economic
and social power, typically whites, and to identify supremacists of disenfranchised
minority groups as xenophobes or bigots, or as just downright
ignorant.
A racialist is someone who holds a hermeneutic view on race and believes
in racial essences but does not necessarily think these differences
should be a basis of discrimination or separation. Racialists believe in race
but are not inherently racists. The danger in this view is that a belief in racial
essence easily lends itself to discriminatory views, regardless of intent.
For this reason, Lawrence Blum, a professor of philosophy at the University
of Massachusetts and a scholar of racial issues, titled his recent book “I’m
Not a Racist But . . .”: The Moral Quandary of Race.
In the fi rst of two excerpts from his work in this chapter, Blum lays out
a series of beliefs that constitute racial essentialism in the United States
in the nineteenth century. What he writes is directly applicable to Latin
America. Blum’s nine-point typology refl ects issues specifi c to the nineteenth
century. His reference to biology would not be part of his list if it
were based on ideas from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. But this
view from the nineteenth century more or less synthesizes modernity’s generalized
belief, dating back roughly fi ve hundred years, that racial difference
is an essentialism.
Some scholars consider Blum’s list inapplicable to Latin America because
North American views on race were supposedly developed from a truly
deep-seated racism based on notions of essentialism and immutable traits.
Racial issues in Latin America purportedly lacked essentialism and were
based solely on a cultural recognition of physical difference. This argument
has had many advocates and with good reason. Places with distinct histories
will produce different views on race. But a counterargument has been
steadily growing and arguably is now more accepted. One of its advocates is
Peter Wade (also excerpted in this chapter), who argues that regardless of the
almost infi nite variations on racial views, not only between North America
and South America but also within these regions, the commonality of all
racialist interpretations is that they rest upon a foundation of essentialism
rooted in Western modernity.
Some essentialists reject the idea of race and therefore believe their hermeneutically
racialist ancestors had it wrong. Contemporary biologists and
geneticists constitute one important part of this group. They argue that
there is no connection between the genes that produce the physical traits