Introduction Money Lightens: Global Regimes of Racialized Class Mobility and Local Visions of the Good Life

This Brazilian idiom, serving as the title of this issue, reflects a broader Latin American folk belief that once racialized minorities have accumulated sufficient financial capital they can escape stigmatized non-white racial identities in name (e.g., Indígena, moreno, prieto) and in practice, that is, the poor treatment and lack of respect that accompanies non-white status. Money lightens is a provocative turn of phrase that unmasks the mutability of race and this mutability’s intrinsic link to capital accumulation. It is also deceptively simple: it claims that all that is needed to uproot and transcend racism is money. Of course, the inverse is also true: a lack of money can further entrench racism’s hold. Money lightens, is a belief in a particular kind of mobility, one where accumulation of money trumps race. Drawing from this conceptualization, we define mobility as the uneven processes whereby lower-status individuals and their families attempt to ascend hierarchies of social stratification, access additional material resources and comforts, and enjoy a meaningful change in their social status. Furthermore, mobility is defined by the structural violences that disable it. Chief among these violences is racism. We examine the ways mobility and race intersect, demonstrating how our interlocutors make sense of their chances for mobility as constrained by racialization and how they critique racial orders of inequality as they attempt to get ahead and forge a good life. We chose money lightens as our title for three reasons. First, it makes clear the enduring power of racism in structuring opportunities for mobility. Across the globe, being a racial other—as defined locally—can negatively impact one’s ability to access what scholars and interlocutors alike see as the foundational tools of mobility, such as educational opportunities, access to financial capital, home ownership, and freedom of movement. Even with access, there is no guarantee that money will override racial animus. Second, the idea of money lightening, or perhaps lessening one’s racial other-ness, reveals the fiction of race—if also the persistent and pernicious effects of racism. Though access to money may be understood to ease racist treatment, it can also exaggerate it, as new folk theories arise about racial others’ mobility, such as assuming ties to racially marked crime and criminality. Moreover, attempts to access wealth in ways that do not mimic the consumption patterns of “responsible” middle classes and elites can become a way to further “darken” minoritized others. At the same time, accessing the privileges of money—elite higher education, higher-end businesses, the ability to spend money on luxury goods—can be a defiant act when one’s racial group has been denied access to these social niceties and raw materials of mobility. Finally, in contrast to the idiom’s racial premise, as our interlocutors come to access these trappings of mobility they do so without abandoning difference. Rather, they definitively assert that their difference—and success—–are intimately tied. Thus, for many of our interlocutors, mobility is not based on whiteness as a mode of property (Harris 1993) or assimilation into whiteness (Drouhot and Nee 2019; Portes and Zhou 1993), but rather by banking on difference. If our interlocutors sometimes invest in the idea that money lightens, money also reveals the racial orders of mobility and resistance to those orders that place whiteness on top. Despite a widening global wealth gap defined by racial inequality, our papers demonstrate how minoritized individuals strive toward a materially and morally “good” life that affords them respect as minoritized individuals, and not merely as those lightened by money. Our interests stem from anthropologists and allied scholars’ recent efforts to explore, optimistically, the rise of new middle classes that include individuals historically marginalized …