Race and class: the case of South American blacks.

Ambiguity and ambivalence is typical of black/non-black relations in Afro-Latin America and it has its roots in a number of factors, principal among which is the weakness of a politically oriented black consciousness which is prepared to anatomize and publicize mechanisms of racial discrimination that exist. This weakness is in turn based, firstly, on the presence of a black-white continuum, as opposed to the North American black-white division, which allows mulattoes to dissociate themselves from Blacks and be accepted as socially distinct and which permits some of them to marry up racially and, secondly, on the absence of the very overt and aggressive state-enforced discrimination typified by the Jim Crow era of the U.S. which oppressed a clearly defined category of Black people and thus set conditions for a politicized reaction by that category. However, it is also the case that sociological studies of race relations in Afro-Latin America have not helped to dispel this ambiguity and contrariness about the nature of race in the area.