Post by Souriquois on Feb 23, 2019 16:16:45 GMT -4
Isn't it quite different in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America? Like I know the Spanish had a concept of "race" way back in the 1400s, and it is said to be an ancestor of racism, but not exactly the same.
Yeah that was what I meant when I said it is a different representation of the race construct. Its a rather long story, both are of course rooted in ancient patriarchal tribal identities.
Yet the chief difference I think is that the anglo-saxon model is inherently bipolar. You are white or "nonwhite". You can't be both, you can't be neither. Kids of mixed ancestry got thrown into the "nonwhite" bucket and that was their place to stay, with no claims to their white father's (its always the white father) estate. This is where the "one drop rule" comes into being and the "kids of my slave are still just my slaves, even if I sired them" dynamic of disenfranchisement.
Its a power structure and hierarchy of white men, but it also priviliges white women in a way, because they ar ethe only ones who can provide legal male heirs.
Now the Latin model? It is in its very core a multipolar one. If you are half-black, you aren't just black. You are your own special category. If you are 1/8 black, 1/8 native and the rest white... that too is a separate category and has its own name. Moreover whites are divided into many categories themselves. Those born in Spain are higher in status than the criollos.
What this system does, is allow people who are not purely white to advance in society (doesn't make them equal, but provides opportunities to grow). This is why Brazil or Dominicana is today such a diverse country unlike souther USA. Even though both USA and Brazil were slaveholding empires.
The Latin system also does something the anglo-saxon does not - it empowers women of color at the cost of white women. If the white woman is not conforming to the established power hierarchy (or the husband just doesn't like her), the husband is given socially-acceptable-space to have a son with a mulatto mistress and then declare him to be his legal heir. The son then elevates his mother in status above the white stepmother. Thus the woman of color often becomes the independant and influential latin gobernanta that we all recognize from folk tales and literature. All of this is of course happening under the surface of white macho cultue.
You can even still hear remnants of this racial hierarchy in expressions of anti-Americanism today. I sometimes laugh, at how Donald Trump so much fits the characteristics of the typical American presented in anti-American propaganda from the 19th and 20th centuries.
These elites were against the American ideal of constitutional democracy, and threw a racial element into it. They believed the American system had a lack of moral structure and allowed people to breed with whomever they please.
In French Canada, the structure was more like Latin America.