On Post Colonial Blanquemiento, Racism and Eugenics

 

                                                   

                                            "WHITENING" in South America and Oceania

Blanqueamiento, branqueamento, or whitening, is a social, political, and economic practice used in many post-colonial countries in the Americas and Oceania to "improve the race" (mejorar la raza)^[1] towards a supposed ideal of whiteness.^[2] The term blanqueamiento is rooted in Latin America and is used more or less synonymously with racial whitening. However, blanqueamiento can be considered in both the symbolic and biological sense.^[3] Symbolically, blanqueamiento represents an ideology that emerged from legacies of European colonialism, described by Anibal Quijano's theory of coloniality of power, which caters to white dominance in social hierarchies.^[4] Biologically, blanqueamiento is the process of whitening by marrying a lighter-skinned individual to produce lighter-skinned offspring.^[4]

                                                        BORN IN BLOOD AND FIRE

                                                           (John Charles Chasteen)

Scientific racism, combining scientific methods and erroneous racist ideas, casts a pall over Latin American history in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Scientific racists began with the assumption that Europeans constituted a superior race and that other races constituted lower tiers of a racial hierarchy. Since Latin American populations were not primarily European in origin, scientific racism was very bad news for ruling classes not inclined to question prestigious doctrines emitted by intellectuals in the world's most advanced countries. One hope of Latin American rulers around 1900 was that races could be improved by conscious manipulation of various kinds. The science of racial improvement was called eugenics. "Whitening" populations was one mode of implementing eugenics. The strategy entailed attracting enough light-skinned (European) immigrants who, through the mixing of genes, would whiten the population. Harsher measures sometimes aimed to prevent reproduction among those of African and indigenous descent. The prestige of eugenics was on display at fairs and exhibits where skulls were measured to indicate the level of intelligence (the science known as phrenology), and where human specimens of the "lower orders" were displayed to gawking crowds. Though such practices may astound us today, they were in line with the science of the time, and science then, as well as now, commanded respect. Eugenics programs were carried out in the United States, too. A paper on eugenics should demonstrate a clear understanding of the doctrines of scientific racism and use primary sources to show how these were present in the thinking of Latin American elites and the policies of states around the turn of the twentieth century.

                                                      GHOSTS OF EUGENICS PAST

                                                          (Joanne Faulkner)

While in modernity childhood was increasingly invested with emotional and intellectual energy, it also became a site of scrutiny and intervention, so that philosophers, scientists, and humanitarians pursued the improvement of humanity and the human condition through management of ‘the child’. In the first half of the twentieth century, such attention settled on children deemed to present both problems and opportunities for the improvement of the race, as eugenics came to dominate discussions of human progress. This paper examines the significance of childhood as a resource for human futures and technologies of ‘eugenics’ insofar as they target children: specifically, the development of intelligence testing, institutions of separation, and involuntary sterilisation in the United States and Canada. In these discourses and technologies of eugenics, childhood appears as a reserve of human potential which, appropriately regulated, may be harnessed to ‘build a better future’. The paper also considers the perspective of survivors of these practices who experienced their childhood and future possibilities as having been expropriated from them by the state. By considering these governmental and personal registers side by side, the paper sheds light on the perceived social utility of childhood, as well as the particular character of loss experienced by those whose childhoods were subject to state intervention.

                                  

                                 HISTORIC ROOTS OF 'WHITENING' OF BRAZIL

                                               (Sales Augusto dos Santos)