Judging Argentina by U.S. racial categories is a historical error. Not because Argentina is free of racism, but because both countries built profoundly different national projects. When we simply export U.S. racial categories to the rest of the continent, we stop explaining Latin America and begin projecting Global North history onto it.

Last night, U.S. actor Samuel L. Jackson stated on his social media that Argentina is «historically the most racist country in the world.» Later, U.S. comedian Eric André judged Argentina as an “ethno-state”. These statements not only reveal a profound historical ignorance on the subject, but also a striking lack of historical self-awareness about their own country’s past.

Their voices echo the logic of cultural and epistemological imperialism: the attempt to impose the dynamics and categories of the Global North on a radically different socio-historical reality where the issue of race is understood from a historical experience of mestizaje and syncretism, far removed from the legal segregation and puritanical binarism of the United States and Europe.

It’s not about denying that Argentina has racial problems. It does, like virtually any modern society. The problem lies elsewhere: in assuming that the entire history of racism must resemble that of the Global North, or worse, in measuring human progress by the standards of those who took two centuries longer to recognize basic rights.

I’m Oscar Adame, and as a Mexican, I ‘ve spent years working as a consultant on Latin American culture for global brands and some of the world’s most renowned trend analysis companies. I’m also a Narrative Designer and have written about the region’s identity and culture for publications such as Dazed, Wired, and Rolling Stone.

First, let’s make a quick, specific comparison between the historical state policies and anti-racism social movements of both countries:

• Argentina was born without a legal system of racial segregation. From its first constitution in 1853, there was no legal system that separated people by race, religion, or color comparable to the U.S. Jim Crow system.
• Even before it existed as a nation, in 1813 the «Freedom of the Womb» was established, meaning that the children of any enslaved woman lived freely, regardless of their skin color. This marked the beginning of the gradual process of abolishing slavery, a process that the United States did not achieve until 1865 after a bloody civil war.
• Bernardino Rivadavia assumed the presidency of Argentina in 1826 without the legal system imposing racial barriers for the office, even though he faced racist attacks from his opponents due to his alleged African ancestry. The United States would have its first African American president almost two hundred years later.
• The Argentine Constitution of 1853 granted all civil rights to foreigners residing in the country, while the United States only managed to guarantee African American suffrage in 1965 and there are still no rights for foreigners maintaining to this day systems of persecution and criminalization of migrants.
• Since 1949 anyone in the world can study for free at an Argentine university, the only country in the world that grants this right to all citizens of the world.

This list is not intended to rank virtues or whitewash Argentina. History is not an Olympic competition of morality. If I dwell on these milestones, it is solely to demonstrate that racism is not a monolith: it expresses itself in radically different ways depending on the national project. And therein lies the most important nuance that Anglo-Saxon analysts completely omit:

The Law Against Miscegenation is something that never existed in Argentina and that got implications that ultimately shaped the country’s national identity. While the Anglo-Saxon world turned racial purity into a legal category, one need only recall the one-drop rule or the anti-miscegenation laws in force until 1967, much of Latin America articulated its national identity around mestizaje (racial mixing). Not because racism had disappeared, but because mixing was never persecuted by the State and in being so, it became the official ideal of this nations.

Argentina: A Country Born of Mestizaje

Latin American countries were formed under a foundational myth radically different from that of the countries of the Global North, a north which, it should be noted, continue to pursue an ideal of a fixed race. It started in the Hispanic Colonial Caste System, which categorized civilians not by race, but by its mixed roots, and when each country started to become its own nation, it was further developed by intellectuals such as José Vasconcelos as a philosophical formulation: The idea of the Cosmic Race, which dictates that the future belongs not to separation or purity, but to synthesis, a «fifth race» called to integrate the blood and culture of all peoples.

This legitimized the idea of mestizaje as a Latin American civilizational project, embodying the mixing of cultures for centuries, not merely coexisting with it, as the U.S. does today. For good reason, during the 19th and 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of African Americans did not seek freedom within the borders of the United States, but rather escaped en masse to Latin America: Read South to Freedom – Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War.

Despite this, this ideal brought with it racial problems. The narrative of mestizaje (racial mixing) has served to render minorities invisible through a process of radical homogenization, in most cases seeking a completely Spanish-speaking and as white a nation as possible. In Argentina, this process was taken to its extreme, operating a gradual system of progressive whitening that included terrifying episodes, such as the Conquest of the Desert, the military campaign against the Indigenous peoples, which included censuses that literally erased the Afro-descendant population from the national registry. This remains the tragic counterweight to the very founding myth, but it’s in no way unique to Argentina.

Their history  was compounded by the implementation of migration policies that sought to attract Europeans, Italians, Irish, Poles, and Slovenians, fleeing wars and famines, but also, years later, Nazi and fascist leaders. It should be added, however, that this occurred while also receiving other Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians.

Yet mestizaje never meant complete cultural disappearance. Afro-Argentine contributions remain embedded in many of the country’s strongest cultural symbols, even if their origins have often been forgotten or minimized.

Tango emerged from the interaction between Afro-River Plate rhythms such as Candombe, Cuban Habanera, European dance traditions and immigrant musical cultures. On the other hand, a couple of their biggest independence national heroes are afro-argentinian: Juan Bautista Cabral, known to be the savior of General San Martin, and María Remedios del Valle, known as «the mother of the nation» even figures on argentine bills. 

Ethnocentric Criticisms

With all this in mind, it’s worth asking why the media and social networks are becoming filled with ethnocentric homogenizations in the face of a country of more than 40 million people with a complex history, yes, but in which, ironically, Latin Americanist, leftist, and anti-colonial policies have historically stood out?

The answer is that much of the international press tends to interpret Latin America using categories developed to explain the historical experience of the Global North: they apply their own racial categories, forged in the crucible of the one-drop rule, genocide, and legal segregation, as if they were universal templates. In doing so, they are unable to understand that the demographic transformation of the Afro-descendant population in Argentina is a phenomenon completely distinct from those in the history of the Global North: a long process of racial mixing coupled with waves of massive European immigration.

And this is where this debate ceases to be academic or anecdotal and becomes strategic. Because the risk for any brand that wants to operate in the region isn’t choosing between the narrative of the North (the segregationist lens) or that of the South (the lens of mestizaje). The risk is failing to understand that both have enormous blind spots.

My job isn’t to defend or condemn Argentina, but to help companies navigate this double standard: neither applying foreign templates that don’t fit, nor buying into local myths without questioning them. When an organization interprets Latin America solely through the cultural lenses of the Global North, it not only risks being wrong, it risks failing to see the region as it truly is.