I found the Pedro de Ayarza: The Purchase of Whiteness article very interesting. Ayarza was a very wealthy and dark-skinned man who had a lot of connections and was actually more or less treated like he was white. His son did not get accepted into a university because of his race which made Ayarza go on a many year quest to attain white status and the title of “don” for himself and his three sons. As it turned out, the oldest son was granted whiteness and the rest of the family was not. This created a huge divide in the family and certainly would have caused many problems. I think the authorities must have thought if they did make this exception for this dark-skinned family it would set a precedent that they were not willing to make.
This whole idea that individuals could buy whiteness is just amazing to me. If you simply had enough money, persuasion, and connections you could improve your status in society by legally becoming white. This says so much about what was valued in this culture and how race was seen. Something I had never thought about until class the other day is that people did not see race in that time the way we do now. The scientific evidence for biological reasons for race and nature determining that aspect of our humanity for us did not exist back then. Race was something that they considered able to be changed- which is far from true in our society today. I wonder what it would be like if that kind of thinking had continued.
Although the basis for this system is that being white is the ultimate status in society, it could potentially make race relations better. If we could let a mixed or light skinned person buy whitness in America and legitimately then saw them as such, would prejudice and racism exist so intensely? Would the 1960s have been different in America? I know that fully black African Americans would perhaps never have the ability to really be high status in this system, but it would give a lot more people the ability to be out of the minority. It would even the playing field in ways that can never really be achieved in this day and age. I suppose the major drawback would be that poor and impoverished people would never have the ability to get out of their place in society. Money meant a lot more in terms of status than it does today, where in America we are at least all theoretically seen as equal. I do not agree, obviously, that whiteness is the ultimate achievement in life at all, but I cannot help but notice that it is more difficult in a lot of ways to be born into the minority in American society and I wish that this was not the case.
I was also surprised by the purchasing whiteness article. There is a big difference in the way people saw race 400-500 years ago and the way people view race now. We, as Americans, see race as a color. Which is sad because we actually invented the word race to describe the physical characteristics of someone, instead of their heritage line.