When skin talks: whitening strategies used in higher education*

This paper aims to identify the ‘whitening’ strategies used by undergraduate students in a developing country with strong levels of ethno-racial discrimination and social mobility. We adopt a critical, constructivist theoretical perspective and a qualitative approach, in the design and analysis, for which we use three instruments: surveys, focus groups and the Q-Methodology. We find that students use several ‘whitening’ strategies (e.g. wearing expensive clothing, improving their diction and managing their bodies) in order to shield against the ethno-racial discrimination they face, and protect from the negative effects it imposes on their personal, academic and employment outcomes. Our findings also reveal that race is redefined in such a way that it involves more than just the skin colour, a process that is enabled by a relatively high degree of social mobility, experienced in the wake of a booming economy.