Racism In Latin America Essay

Racism (and racial discrimination) is, to a certain extent, alive and well in every society, country and region of the world.1 It can appear in a variety of forms depending on the culture or context in which it occurs and the period of history during which it rears its head. Nonetheless, one common thread that seems to be woven throughout almost every culture, country and region is that people deny that racism even exists.
In this article, we attempt to delve into the different forms of denying the existence of racial discrimination in Latin America. The crux of our argument is that the people of our region are prone to conceal, twist and cover up the fact that racism and racial discrimination exists in our part of the world. This phenomenon
In this study, three different types of denial are posited: literal denial (nothing has happened); interpretive denial (what is happening is actually something else); and justificatory denial (what's happening is justified).8 Sometimes these types of denial appear in sequence; when one type is struck down, it is replaced by another type. For example, literal denial may prove ineffective because the facts may simply bear out that the black population is indeed more disadvantaged than the white population. Therefore, strategy shifts towards use of another type of denial such as a legalistic reinterpretation or a political
This type of denial has many variations but essentially amounts to saying, if races do not officially exist, then racism cannot exist either. Nevertheless, erasing the concept of race from laws and other official documents, by no means, has led to the end of race as a key factor in determining how the benefits of society are distributed, nor does it negate the fact that Latin American society is predicated upon a clearly pyramidal structure with blacks and indigenous people at the bottom and whites at the