Social Categorizations: Blackness as the Starting Point, Whiteness as the End Point

Abstract

Categorizations have been, throughout human history, a means of entering known and recognized places, becoming spaces of belonging and reference with which to construct personal and collective identity and identification. Categorizations function as containers of meaning to generalize and synthesize information about certain collectives or social groups that share similar identity elements. However, when racialized people seek their place of recognition, we often place them in subjective limbo references that form spaces of discrimination and racism. In this essay, the archetypal references of the presence of whiteness as the central axis of categorization from which to place all people are studied, thus generating the invalidation of otherness and blackness. Colonial ethnocentrism establishes whiteness as a referential framework, so that those individuals who cannot be confined within white boundaries are named from absence, from a place of nominal silence that affects and problematizes the categorizations themselves.