Avoiding backlash: Narratives and strategies for anti-racist activism in Mexico

Abstract

Structural race-based inequalities in Mexico cannot be denied. Anthropologists and social scientists have thoroughly documented racism at both personal and systemic levels. Following I.M. Young’s framework, this paper identifies two possible pathways for the anti-racist movement in Mexico: the liability and the social connection models. The former uses guilt to assign responsibility —it requires an agent to be voluntarily and causally connected to injustice; the latter does not isolate perpetrators but assigns responsibility to all agents who contribute (voluntarily or not) by their actions to the structural processes that produce injustice. After examining the trajectory of the Mexican anti-racist movement, this paper demonstrates that activists are relying too heavily on the liability model. Furthermore, drawing from ethnographic material from Brazil and the United States, the paper suggests that this model is not only unnecessarily confrontational and ineffectual, but potentially counterproductive for the anti-racist movement, as it is prone to provoke a defensive response. In turn, this paper suggests focusing on the structural nature of racism in Mexico and developing ways to communicate this effectively, in order to foster the positive prospects of successful anti-racist activism.

Classification Algorithm for Skin Color (CASCo): A new tool to measure skin color in social science research

“…In its default configuration, CASCo will assign the portrait to a category of the PERLA project. PERLA, based at Princeton University, created this color palette with 11 items to facilitate skin tone studies in Latin America, and it has been widely used in social research (Campos‐Vazquez and Medina‐Cortina 2019; Rejón Piña 2022; Telles, Flores, and Urrea‐Giraldo 2015). We preconfigured this palette into CASCo to support future research in a region where the topic continues to be understudied; however, the color palette in which to categorize the portraits is completely customizable as well.…”