whiteness

is perceived as an ethical and civilization condition rather than a biological one which, as capitalism was taking root, was considered as necessary to meeting capitalist modernity's ethical demands.

In the preliminary note to his Sociology of Religion, Weber suggests that the ability to correspond to the ethical request of capitalist modernity, the capacity to assume the ethical practice of Puritan Protestantism, may have had an ethnic foundation and been connected to certain racial charac- teristics. The following reflections attempt to problematize Weber's approach to this topic by describing a kind of "racism" constitutive of capitalist modernity, a "racism" that demands the presence of ethical or civilizational "whiteness" [blanquitud] as a condition of modern humanity, but that in extreme cases, such as the one of Nazi Germany, further demands the presence of ethnic, biological, and "cultural" whiteness [blancura].

Bolivar EcheverriaThinkers

Bolivar Echeverria