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

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Issue Date
2010-02Author
Golash-Boza, Tanya
Publisher
University of California Press
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
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. Keywords: blackness, race, skin
color, Latin America, whitening.
Description
Published as "Does Whitening Happen? Distinguishing between Race and Color Labels in an African-Descended Community in Peru." Tanya Golash-Boza. Social Problems. Vol. 57, No. 1 (February 2010), pp. 138-156 . © 2010 by Society for the Study of Social Problems. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by Society for the Study of Social Problems for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® on [Caliber (http://caliber.ucpress.net/)] or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center, http://www.copyright.com.
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Citation
2010. “Does Whitening Happen? Distinguishing between Race and Color Labels in an African-Descended Community in Peru” Social Problems 57: 1: 138-156. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/sp.2010.57.1.138
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