Category: Definitions

  • Creating the Ideal Mexican: 20th and 21st Century Racial and National Identity Discourses in Oaxaca University of Massachusetts, Amherst September 2015 235 pages Savannah N. Carroll Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy This investigation intends to uncover…

  • Blanqueamiento, or whitening, is a social, political, and economic practice used in many post-colonial countries to “improve the race” (mejorar la raza) towards a supposed ideal of whiteness. The term blanqueamiento is rooted in Latin America and is used more or less synonymous with racial whitening. However, blanqueamiento can be considered in both the symbolic…

  • Signare was the name for the Mestizo French-African women of the island of Gorée in French Senegal during the 18th and 19th centuries. These woman of color held some power in a patriarchal system throughout the Atlantic Slave Trade. These women were the wives of merchants. Signares commonly had power in networks of trade and…

  • Critical mixed race studies (CMRS) is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in scope. It places the concept of mixed race at the critical center of focus such that multiracial individuals become subjects of historical, social, and cultural processes rather than simply objects of analysis. This involves the study of racial consciousness among racially mixed people, the…

  • Source: National Survey by Household Sample (PNAD). Extracted from: Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, “Not black, not white: just the opposite. Culture, race and national identity in Brazil,” Centre for Brazilian Studies, Working Paper Number CBS-47-03, (2003): 5.

  • Sambo is a term for a person with African heritage and, in some countries, also mixed with Native American heritage (see zambo)…. Source: Wikipedia.

  • White Supremacy is an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples classified as “non-White” by continents, nations, and peoples who, by virtue of their white (light) skin pigmentation and/or ancestral origin from Europe, classify themselves as “White.” Although history illuminates the fabrication, changeability, and contingencies of Whiteness (e.g.…

  • Race: A social invention originating as a folk idea and ideology about human differences in order to create a white elite based on white race supremacy and to justify the exploitation of darker skinned people. Scot Nakagawa, Race Files: On Race and Racism in our Politics and Daily Lives.

  • Racial democracy is the notion that Brazilian society is relatively free from the racial prejudice, discrimination, and tension found historically in the United States, South Africa, and other western nations. Supporters of this view indicate as evidence in its favor Brazil’s alleged peaceful abolition of slavery, the supposed lack of racial violence, the prominence of…

  • The “mulatto escape hatch” (Degler 1986), also called the “intermediate mulatto stratum” (Safa 1998), refers to the notion that someone can be born black, yet become mulatto through an increase in social status, or intergenerational whitening. This intermediate category emerged from the large free colored population in many Latin American countries during the time of…