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

94 reframing latin america
6. Races are generally also distinct in certain aspects of physical appearance.
These somatic or phenotypic features are, therefore, indicators of the
group’s racial essence, its inner reality. For example, light skin and straight
hair indicates initiative and inventiveness; dark skin and woolly hair indicates
musicality and laziness.
7. Racial differences are fi xed, innate, and unchangeable, because they
are grounded in biology.
8. Races can be ranked in terms of superiority and inferiority generally
or at least with regard to particular signifi cant characteristics. This ranking
should be and generally is refl ected in the relations of power and status
in society and civilizations.
9. The social order appropriately refl ects, through its legal, institutional,
and customary norms, the distinctness in nature between races by separating
them as much as possible in occupational, social, personal, and public
space. Segregation is “natural” and mixing is “unnatural,” especially in
regard to sexual and marital relations. When individuals of different races
do interact, their interactions are to refl ect the hierarchical order, the
inferior group members showing deference to the superior.
Classic late nineteenth-century race involved both a vertical and a horizontal
dimension. Horizontally, races were radically distinct from one another,
and social distance and separation were meant to refl ect this. Vertically,
races were superior and inferior to one another, and the hierarchical social
order was to refl ect this as well.
This conception is the culmination of several centuries’ development of
the idea of race, a product of the interaction of economic, political, historical,
social, and scientifi c factors. Yet it is not really coherent. No groups
large enough to be “races” on this conception could possibly have the internal
commonality, nor the comprehensive difference from other races, demanded
by this view. Nor can somatic features plausibly be linked to the
wide range of signifi cant human characteristics involved in the view. Entire
racial groups cannot be inherently “inferior” to entire other ones in any
intelligible sense, though of course they can be treated as if they were [. . .].
[Part Two]
Is “Race” a Social Construction? Recent academic writing frequently
refers to race as a “social construct” or “social construction.” This
language can illuminate the meaning of “race,” but only if it clearly and
explicitly distinguishes between races, which do not exist, and racialized