Racism without race: reconstructing race through culture in Spanish social-science textbooks

ABSTRACT

What happens to race when racial vocabulary disappears? This paper leverages a sudden change in the Spanish social science curriculum in the 1990s to empirically trace how the removal of the language of race, and the negation of biological race, changes the ways the books portray human differences. Through the analysis of 82 textbooks from 1975 to 2017, I find that a racial classification system is replaced by one based on cultural categories. Yet, far from moving away from polygenistic beliefs about human nature, culture continues to reproduce the same social hierarchies previously associated with a phenotype. Because the books present culture as a scientifically valid classification system, the use of culture legitimizes and entrenches those same beliefs in racial differences. The findings have implications for our understanding of colourblind ideologies, and for the study of race relations in European contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• race
• Europe
• identity
• culture
• colourblind

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this work were presented at the Department of Sociology’s Race, Ethnicity and Migration workshop at Columbia University and the 27th Annual Conference of the Council for European Studies in Madrid, I thank all participants for their feedback. I also benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions of my advisor Adam Reich, as well the comments and feedback from Maria Abascal, Josh Aleksanyan, Berenike Firestone, Joss Greene, David Halpern, Tiffany Huang, Jennifer Lee and Asya Tsaturyan.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Because the contents of the books were moved around across grades my sampling unit are all the grades in my sample published by a publishing house for a given publication edition (usually released over a two-year period). Until 1996, this means the sampling unit was two grades (7 and 8 EGB) and afterwards, four grades (1, 2, 3, 4 ESO), as explained in the data section. 3 (pre-1996 periods) * 2 (books per PH) * 2 PH + 3 (post-1996 periods) * 4 (books per PH) * 2 PH = 36.

2 The last editions to include the paradigm for each publishing house in my sample were 1984 for Anaya and 1994 for SM.

3 Data is publicly available from ICPSR (ICPSR 36286) and the re-analysis and tables can be found on the author’s Github.