Interrogating the constitutive silences of whiteness: racial categorizations and spatial racialization in Argentina

ABSTRACT

This article interrogates the role of silence in Argentine ‘racial grammar.’ Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork on youth migration in Buenos Aires, as well as a case study analysis of a state-sponsored anti-racism campaign, it analyzes how silences and silencing mechanisms serve to (re)produce the naturalization of whiteness in Argentina despite recent challenges. Specifically, it analyzes (1) the ways in which racial categories have been essentialized and erased historically, (2) the changing slippery and spatialized forms of racialization that emerge in the present, and (3) the silencing mechanisms that, although localized and nuanced, can continue to powerfully mitigate potential challenges to white supremacy. In exploring the role of silences on processes of racialization and anti-racist efforts, this article calls for further comparative research onanti-racism in the region, echoing past work that has challenged the narrative of Argentine ‘racial exceptionalism’ in Latin American race and ethnic studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• Race
• Silences
• Racialization
• Anti-Racism
• Argentina

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Bonilla-Silva (2012) has defined racial grammar as ‘the hidden racial ideological substratum or residue which like the oil in a car, allows the engine to operate somewhat smoothly in any racial order’ (188).

2. All participant names are pseudonyms. Participants agreed to be part of this research through a informed consent process approved by the Florida International Institutional Review Board (#IRB 16-0403-CR01).

3. See Edwards (2020) for a periodization and analysis of how the myth of ‘Black disappearance’ was historically constructed. See also Lamborghini, Geler, and Guzmán (2017) for an overview of the emergent Afro Argentine studies and how such scholarship challenges not only the narrative of disappearance but also misconceptions about historical and contemporary Afro Argentine realities.

4. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2018/sessions/special-address-by-mauricio-macri-president-of-argentina-and-chair-of-the-g20-on-the-2018-g20-agenda, accessed on 5 February 2020.

5. Comment made in a Trip Advisor review on 7 September 2017 by a Louisiana-based tourist.

6. Importantly, an anti-essentialist approach to studying race and whiteness – while it is often juxtaposed to materialist approaches and can feel counter-productive, especially in contexts where racial categories have been actively erased – is necessarily connected to exploring the material conditions of racialization and racism. As Kobayashi and Peake (2000) note, ‘the material and the ideological, in this respect, are not separate, nor are they alternative, explanations, but rather two dimensions of human action, ontologically inseparable. “Racialization” is therefore the process by which racialized groups are identified, given stereotypical characteristics, and coerced into specific living conditions, often involving social/spatial segregation and always constituting racialized places. It is one of the most enduring and fundamental means of organizing society’ (393).

7. Following Bonds and Inwood (2016), I understand white supremacy here not as a project tied only to White power groups, but as a central logic of settler colonialism tied to the ‘presumed superiority of white racial identities, however problematically defined, in support of the cultural, political, and economic domination of non-white groups’ (720). As De Genova (1998) notes, ‘“whiteness” is not a fact of nature; it is a fact of white supremacy’ (87).

8. As discussed by Frigerio (2006), while there is a distinction between how these constructions of blackness are normally described, both are deeply racialized. I discuss this further below.

9. Ian’s response highlights the unstable, situational, and relational elements of whiteness. Indeed, while he was not sure about his non-whiteness, he came to his answer in relation to me. Ian would later say that he did not feel comfortable at that specific café, which quite artsy and ‘posh.’ While he frequented the northern part of the city in his taxi routes, he felt that if he had been dressed any differently that day – specifically with sports clothes that would signal a working-class identity – he would be criminalized (‘the patrol would be outside waiting’ [Barbero 2020]). I, on the other hand, lived close by and had picked the location out of convenience to both of us, not thinking twice about how my comfort in that particular space was conditioned by whiteness: by my fair-skin tone, my (mostly) porteño (Buenos Aires) Spanish accent, and my middle-class status as a U.S. researcher and (albeit temporary) resident of the Northern barrio of Palermo, where the café was located. As Ahmed (2007) writes, whiteness can function as ‘a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape. Those spaces are lived as comfortable by allowing bodies to fit in; the surfaces of social space are already impressed upon by the shape of such bodies’ (158).

10. See Grimson (2017) for more on Peronism and the entanglements of race and class in Argentina.

11. The Argentine historian Ezequiel Adamovsky, for example, wrote a Twitter thread that garnered hundreds of retweets pointing out that the very reaction to the campaign is a form of colorblind racism. Adamovsky argued, ‘INADI’s campaign does not in any way reinforce stereotypes: it visibilizes them and teaches us they are racist’ (my translation).

12. According to the report, more than eight percent of these complaints were flagged as related to migration or racism.

13. Retrieved from <https://agrupacionxango.wordpress.com/que-hacemos-donde-estamos/>.

14. In a 26 January 2021 virtual talk titled, ‘Afro Argentines, Anti-Blackness and Argentina’s National Identity,’ hosted by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, the Andean Cultures and Histories Working Group, and the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University, Edwards argued for a shift to understanding and studying Argentina more specifically as an ‘Anti-Black Nation.’ Retrieved on 26 January 2021 from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5aqYd_wWoI>.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

María V. Barbero

María V. Barbero is Assistant Professor of Integrated Studies at Florida Gulf Coast University. She conducts interdisciplinary research at the intersection of migration studies, youth studies, and critical race and ethnic studies. She is particularly interested in issues of migration, belonging, and nationalism in the Americas.