1. Racism without race: reconstructing race through culture in Spanish social-science textbooks.
- Author
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Triguero Roura, Mireia
- Subjects
- *
RACE , *RACISM , *SOCIAL sciences education , *TEXTBOOKS , *RACIAL classification , *RACIAL differences , *EMIGRATION & immigration - 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
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