Race Isn’t Black and White, Another Way to Think About Race and Diversity

Maybe 15 years ago, I came across a very old wooden chest — perhaps three feet high, the kind you might store quilts inside — at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Although relatively unassuming at first glance, that piece of furniture has since come to occupy more space in my mind than almost any other object I’ve encountered at a museum.

The chest came from somewhere in colonial Latin America. On its lid was a kind of grid of family portraits. Each family portrait depicted a mother, a father, and their child. Below each portrait, a caption spelled out which caste the child had been born into, depending on how much Black, white, or Indigenous blood flowed through their veins. The precise formulas on the painted chest didn’t lodge themselves automatically in my mind the way the images did, but I later learned that the painting which caught my eye is part of a larger tradition of 18th-century casta art, which chronicled the social strata of Latin America at that time. Most casta paintings have 16 racial categories. Beneath the image of a Spanish father and Indian mother, for instance, one might find the word mestizo or “half-blood.”