‘I’m classist, but not racist’

Blog post by Mauricio Rentería, University of Manchester, UK

‘Do you cholea?’                                                  
‘In what sense, choleo?’
‘Using terms such as “cholo motherfucker” or “serrano piece of shit”.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m classist, but not racist.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you use those phrases?’
‘Yes... believe it or not.’
‘Why?’
‘Because driving in this country is horrible.’ (smiles). [1]
 
This exchange took place in 2015 on the streets of San Isidro, one of Lima’s most affluent districts. The interviewer, host of a popular Peruvian YouTube channel, was asking passers-by whether they practised choleo. The term refers to the use of cholo as an insult: a racial slur directed at people of mixed Indigenous ancestry and, in the Peruvian context, carrying a level of violence comparable to that of the N-word in the United States. The interviewee was a middle-aged woman whose appearance and accent would be immediately recognized by most Peruvians as typical of a White, upper-class Limeña. Her responses are striking: she admits to using racial slurs yet insists she is not racist, instead describing herself, without apparent embarrassment, as classist. As if this contradiction were not enough, she justifies her stance with an unrelated grievance: Lima’s traffic.

Although her claims may seem confusing at first glance, it is far from a slip of the tongue. Beneath its apparent incoherence lies a familiar and internally consistent form of prejudice, one that most Peruvians, particularly Limeños, would immediately recognize. Her words reveal a key aspect of how race and class are understood in Peru: their close entanglement, frequent interchangeability, and context-specific meanings. This entanglement allows racialized language to function as a marker of class judgment. For example, it can be used to describe something as tasteless or vulgar with the word cholo, or to link urban problems such as traffic to images of deprivation that are both classed and racialized. It also frames social mobility as a form of ‘whitening’ and, as this interview shows, enables people to distance themselves from one form of prejudice by appealing to another: ‘I am not racist’ (unacceptable), only classist (more socially tolerated).

These are the dynamics that I explore in my Identities article, ‘Blurred boundaries: understandings of race and class in Lima’s dominant sectors’ on how members of Lima’s dominant social groups understand and evaluate class and racial inequality. Drawing on people’s comments, justifications, and moral judgements about privilege and disadvantage, this article examines how class and racial boundaries are routinely produced, negotiated, and contested. I argue that understanding inequality in Lima requires careful attention to the ways hierarchical and oppositional ideas of race and class intersect across multiple domains, from bodily appearance and embodied dispositions to spatial and territorial divisions. The article also shows how this racialized and classed social imagination is challenged by competing cultural repertoires that both reproduce and question this symbolic order. Ultimately, I contend that any serious study of class or racial inequality in Peru, and in Latin America more broadly, must take account of the complexity of this deeply rooted and unsettling system of prejudice.

[1] ​Henry Spencer, available at: https://youtu.be/FbvVvgbc3d0?t=172.

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​Image credit: Photo by Alexandra Tran on Unsplash

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Read the Identities article:
​​Rentería, M. (2026). Blurred boundaries: understandings of race and class in Lima’s dominant sectors. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 0.1080/1070289X.2026.2614179   OPEN ACCESS

Read further in Identities:

Whiteness, housing and the ‘Migrant Issue’: race and class in urban Chile

Taking race seriously: Whiteness in Argentina's national and transnational imaginary

Sovereignty and the other in Ecuadorian nationalist discourse