Deals with two interrelated topics. The first one is the extent to which the rejection of racism has led to a rejection of racial self-identification, and its group-differentiated dimension: for indigenous people in the countries under study, the rejection of racism did lead to a rejection of racial self-identification; for people of African descent, by and large, it did not. The second topic is the extent to which collective action and the political claims voiced by minority groups rely on cultural distinctiveness and, again, its group-differentiated dimension: the paper suggests that for indigenous people, the politicization of culture has been both more extensive and more successful than for people of African descent.