blanqueamiento

thumb|''Ham's Redemption|A Redenção de Cam (Redemption of Ham), by Galician painter [[Modesto Brocos, 1895, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes. The painting depicts a black grandmother, mulatta mother, white father and their quadroon child, hence three generations of racial hypergamy through whitening.]]

' in Spanish (), or ''' in Portuguese (; both meaning 'whitening'), was a social, political, and economic practice used in many post-colonial countries in the Americas and Oceania to "improve the race" towards a supposed ideal of whiteness. The term is rooted in Latin America and is used more or less synonymously with racial whitening. However, can be considered in both the symbolic and biological sense. Symbolically, represents an ideology that emerged from legacies of European colonialism, described by Anibal Quijano's theory of coloniality of power, which caters to white dominance in social hierarchies. Biologically, is the process of whitening by marrying a lighter-skinned individual to produce lighter-skinned offspring.