The myth of white Argentina still shapes the nation

In late March, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a landmark resolution, spearheaded by Ghana and backed by the African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), recognising the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery as the gravest crime against humanity and calling for concrete steps towards reparations. A total of 123 member states backed the initiative. Most former European colonial powers abstained. Only three countries voted against it: the United States, Israel and Argentina under President Javier Milei.

While a large majority of countries acknowledged the need to address the contemporary consequences of slavery and colonialism, a smaller bloc of governments moved to defend an international order shaped by those very same experiences. Argentina’s vote defined which side the current government has chosen to be on. That decision, however, reflects a deep historical continuity. Argentina’s rejection of reparations is part of a state-sponsored tradition that has organised the nation, since its independence, based on specific racial hierarchies. The vote against the UN resolution projected onto the international stage an architecture of power that has structured Argentinian history since the 19th century.

The formation of the Argentinian state was marked by its elites’ explicit project of demographic and cultural whitening. Their vision framed European immigration as a privileged vehicle of civilisation and progress. Juan Bautista Alberdi, the main intellectual architect of the 1853 Constitution, summed it up in the phrase “to govern is to populate”. This logic was embedded in Article 25 of the Constitution, which instructed the state to actively promote European immigration. The clause has, since then, survived every constitutional reform. Neither the 1949 social constitution nor the democratic reform of 1994 altered the principle that associated Europe with the nation’s desirable horizon.

This institutional architecture consolidated one of Latin America’s most enduring national narratives, that Argentina is a white and European society. The myth that Argentinians “descended from the ships” shaped public policy, school discourse and knowledge production, while Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations were pushed to the margins. The result was a distinctive form of racial denial. The Argentinian state constructed a national identity that erased and denied large segments of its own population, elevating whiteness into the universal representation of the nation. Even today, a country composed largely of racialised majorities continues to be described institutionally as a homogeneous European society.

The erasure of Afro-Argentines is one of the clearest expressions of this process. In the early 19th century, people of African descent made up roughly a third of the population and played a decisive role in the country’s economic, social, cultural and military structures. Yet school discourse, censuses and mainstream historiography promoted the idea of their natural disappearance, transforming a history of exclusion into demographic inevitability. Indigenous peoples underwent a parallel process, portrayed as residual minorities despite their continued demographic, territorial and cultural relevance. Argentinian racial denial thus systematically minoritised Indigenous peoples and erased Afro-Argentinians from the national narrative.