Primeval Whiteness: White Supremacists, (Latin) American History, and the Trans-American Challenge to Critical Race Studies

Abstract

In both the United States and Latin America, racial myths projected onto the colonial period still masquerade as models for talking and teaching about race in the Americas. Among the most tenacious of such myths are the racial hybridity paradigm attached to colonial Iberian Atlantic history and its mirror image: British Atlantic history and the racial purity paradigm. This hybridity-purity dyad has dominated mainstream historiography and the public sphere in the Americas, on the left and the right, since the nineteenth century, and continues to exercise an enormous influence over scholars and students in both Americas.1 Indeed, just as religious conservatives and white supremacists in the United States sometimes find themselves on common ground, liberal scholars of race and white supremacists share an attachment to those twin paradigms that structure their interpretation of the histories of the United States and Latin America.2