Despite pretending to be permanent, fixed and scientific, racial classifications have always been bent to the perceived needs or wills of ruling groups. For example, in colonial Spanish America mixed people could buy a certificate of ‘whiteness’6 and at a certain point under very specific circumstances in eighteenth century Georgia, when the frontier ‘needed protecting’ from Native Americans and the Spanish, even a black person could become white.7 At various points in history, Hindus, Arabs and even the Japanese could find themselves defined as honorary whites; racial theory was never as
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