Colorism and classism confounded: Perceptions of discrimination in Latin America

Despite competing narratives of mestizaje (race-mixing) emphasizing class discrimination and social movements highlighting the existence of racial discrimination in Latin America, little work has examined the overlap of class and color in people's understandings of discrimination. This study moves beyond the color/class binary by examining perceptions of only class, only color, and both class and color discrimination (dual discrimination). I also examine whether individuals have difficulty attributing the causes of discrimination by expanding upon the social psychological concept of attributional ambiguity. Using nationally representative data from the 2010 LAPOP's Americas Barometer survey, I find that color-based explanations have not replaced class-based explanations. Instead, both class and color appear to be part of schemas drawn upon by individuals to understand the unfavorable treatment they perceive-in line with scholarship showing both class disadvantage and color conjointly influence the stratification systems of Latin America. There is also suggestive evidence that individuals may have trouble disentangling the causes of the discrimination they perceive.