Does Whitening Happen? Distinguishing between Race and Color Labels in an African-Descended Community in Peru

Does Whitening Happen? Distinguishing between Race and Color Labels in an African-Descended Community in Peru

Social Problems
Volume 57, Number 1 (February 2010)
pages 138-156
DOI: 10.1525/sp.2010.57.1.138

Tanya Golash-Boza, Professor of Sociology and American Studies
Kansas University

This article explores how race and color labels are used to describe people in an Afro-Peruvian community. This article is based on analyses of 88 interviews and 18 months of fieldwork in an African-descended community in Peru. The analyses of these data reveal that, if we consider race and color to be conceptually distinct, there is no “mulatto escape hatch,” no social or cultural whitening, and no continuum of racial categories in the black Peruvian community under study. This article considers the implications of drawing a conceptual distinction between race and color for research on racial classifications in Latin America.

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