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

identity construct #1: race 101
refl ects the importance of changing cultural geographies for people in the
modern world.
Race and Ethnicity: Is There a Difference?
From the argument so far it may seem that race and ethnicity are distinct
concepts. There are, however, two sets of reasons why some people might
argue that they are the same. First, some people who do not effectively
distinguish between race and ethnicity argue that race should be jettisoned
as a term with too much invidious history; they prefer to talk about ethnic
relations and ethnic minorities (or, less often, majorities—it is often forgotten
that, for example, Anglo-Saxon North Americans are just as “ethnic” as
Italian-Americans). A variant on this view argues that “ideas of ‘race’ may
or may not form part of ethnic ideologies and their presence or absence does
not seem to be a decisive factor.” Anthias and Yuval-Davis do distinguish
between race and ethnicity as modes of social categorization, but also see
racism as the “discourse and practice of inferiorizing ethnic groups.” 12 The
second set of reasons is more complex and I will argue through it before
returning to the fi rst problem.
The dismantling of the biological concept of race and its general acceptance,
at least in social sciences, as a social construction has brought about
a recognition of the mutability of race—the comparison between North and
Latin America discussed earlier is an example. Racial identities are now
seen in somewhat the same way as ethnic identities: they are contextual,
situational, multivocal. This view is an inevitable result of seeing races as
social constructions, which by their nature must depend on shifting social
relations, but more recently it also owes a lot to poststructuralist and postmodernist
social theories [. . .].
It may be objected that racial identifi cations cannot be as fl exible as this
sort of view implies: social categories that use physical, bodily cues to assign
identities do not seem that open to “decentering.” There are two issues
here. The fi rst is that bodily cues can be used to mean various things:
thus a certain skin tone and hair texture in the US might mean “black,”
whereas in Latin America it might mean mulatto: bodies themselves are
socially constructed. In addition, bodies are not immutable: plastic surgery
is the most obvious example, but hair-straightening, skin-lightening and
sun-tanning are all ways of altering the body that can have an impact on racial
identifi cation—and Michael Jackson is only a recent example. The second
issue is that anti-essentialism does not necessarily contest the apparent
fi xity of racial identifi cations: rather, the point is that the fact that someone