Mixed Race Studies

Black Hole

Brazzill
November 1999

Kathleen Bond, Missioner
Maryknoll Lay Missioners

It is often said that Brazilians live under a racial democracy, meaning that in Brazil miscegenation has created a cultural mélange in which all races are equally valued. Nothing is farther from the truth.

During the elections of 1997, Margarida Pereira da Silva was the leading candidate for mayor in Pombal in the interior of the state of Paraíba, Northeastern Brazil. Margarida, beloved for her community work with youth, decided to run for office to offer an alternative to the corrupt, special interest politics that dominate the Northeastern region. With little money, she ran the campaign from her home. One week before Election Day, two strangers offered her a R$100,000 (US$50,000) donation for her youth program. There was just one condition—Margarida had to drop out of the race. She politely but firmly refused, “I’m running for my people not for money.”

Within days of the refused bribe, all of her posters were painted over with the words “Negra Feia”, Ugly Black Woman. Unable to discredit her honesty or merits, her opponents orchestrated a smear that focused solely on race. Long-time friends and even some relatives, most likely paid off, suddenly were working against her. Margarida lost by a landslide. When Margarida’s nephew caught his girlfriend tearing down Margarida’s posters, she responded, “I’m not going to waste my vote on that ugly, black thing.”

Margarida’s story of racial discrimination is not isolated to the rural areas of the Northeast. Every day millions of Afro-Brazilians experience racism. From the family living room, where darker skinned children are often discriminated against, to Church pews, barbershops, classrooms, and the Halls of Congress, racism gnaws at the fabric of Brazilian society. The South American giant is often considered by foreigners and Brazilians as a “racial democracy” because of the high number of interracial marriages and seemingly easy banter between the races in every day life. Racial Democracy, coined by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in early 20th century, is the theory that a history of extended miscegenation has created a cultural mélange in which all races are equally valued. Nothing is farther from the truth in contemporary Brazil.

Race in Brazil is complex and distinct. Most Brazilians claim a mixed African, European, and indigenous ancestry. In practice, however, the weight of racism causes people to continually “whiten” themselves. For example, many “morenos” straighten their hair, people search for lighter-skinned marriage partners, and people identify themselves and each other with nicknames indicating a lighter skin tone, such as moreninho (browny), café (coffee), mulato, bronzeado (tanned), and escurinho (darky) to name a few. Rarely will someone assume an identity as negro (black). Even those who call themselves black often have a hard time convincing other Brazilians not to identify them as “moreno” or “mulato”. Calling someone black, for many, is still an insult…

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Racial Democracy in Brazilian Marriage: Toward a Typology of Negro-White Intermarriage in Five Brazilian Communities

The American Catholic Sociological Review
Volume 21, Number 2 (Summer, 1960)
pages 146-164

Austin J. Staley, O. S. B.

Revised version of paper read at the Twenty-first Annual Convention of the American Catholic Sociological Society, Mundelein College, Chicago, Illinois, August 31-September 2, 1959.

It was Robert Park who summed up many observers’ impression of racial democracy in Brazil: “the people of Brazil have, somehow, regained that paradisaic innocence, with respect to differences of race.” After completing his study of intermarriage in São Paulo, Samuel Lowrie concluded that Brazil is “one of the largest, if not the largest, melting-pot of the races.” Brazil has been singled out as the great “laboratory of the races,” which offers a “magnificent field for experimental studies on the contacts of races and cultures.” No facet of the Brazilian culture has been studied as intensively by sociologists and anthropologists as the area included under race relations.

There is a near consensus of opinion among students of race relations at least on one issue. The crucial problem of race relations is that of Negro-white intermarriage. The common denominator and central nerve of the Negro problem is racial intermarriage. The ultimate case against integration and racial democracy…

Obama and the black wave: Deconstructing myths, building strategies

Pambazuka News: Pan-African Voices for Freedom and Justice
2009-02-19 (Issue 420)

Raquel Luciana de Souza

Having closely followed Barack Obama’s electoral success, Raquel Luciana de Souza considers the prospects for a presidential candidate of African descent within the South American giant of Brazil. Scrutinising the historical myth of Brazil’s racial democracy and the supposed absence of formal barriers to Afro-Brazilian social mobility in contrast to the US, de Souza considers the role of the US’s implementation of measures to address socio-racial disparities and the successful struggles of black organisations in framing the broader background behind Obama’s rise.

At last the calendar signals the much anticipated 4 November 2008, the day the long marathon of the latest American electoral process would be concluded. It is impossible to ignore the irony that after spending nine years of my life studying in the United States, I found myself in front of the television in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, homeland of Gilberto Freyre. Freyre, of course, was the very author whose racist, sexist, and fairly imaginative visions about race relations in Brazil influenced generations of national and international researchers, politicians, intellectuals, as well as common sense notions about class, race, and racism in Brazil. As the counting of the votes officially begins, a friend cautions me about the possibility of a McCain victory, which triggers an unutterable anguish in the very core of my being. However, that feeling was quickly replaced by the absolute thrill of witnessing the reconfiguration of the American electoral map. At the first hour of 5 November, it was confirmed that the US had elected its first black president. Barack Obama’s triumph was the culmination of a highly competitive political contest; the media and global frenzy surrounding the Democratic candidate’s campaign became gradually more palpable as he gained strength in opinion and voter intention polls. That day I realised that I had spent months holding my breath, immersed in an intense electoral process that was marked by unprecedented circumstances. For the first time, a black man and a woman vied to be nominated for presidential candidate of the Democratic Party…

…Therefore, while I euphorically contemplated the conclusion of an electoral process that culminated with the election of a black president for the position of commander-in-chief of the US, questions and speculations about the ramifications of such an important political development for Brazil and the African Diaspora consumed me. The triumph of a high-ranking politician, the son of a continental African from Kenya and a white American woman from Kansas, was consolidated before the whole world. Before me was a black president married to a black woman, both products of the highest quality of formal education acquired at Harvard, a prestigious university, and eloquent lawyers who demonstrated in their discourse and intervention an almost unwavering self-confidence and mastery of words that slowly but surely conquered even the favouritism of the media. As a researcher of racial issues through a comparative perspective, I realised then that such a political moment urged for perspectives and approaches that went beyond pre-established parameters. Aiming to discuss the possible ramifications of such political scenery and its broader implications more adequately, I constantly transferred my thoughts to the Brazilian context…

…Conversely, we should now consider the real scenery in which Barack Obama became the first black president of the US. In Brazil, the celebration of such a historical event has been featured prominently on the front page of all the mainstream newspapers and magazines. A sort of cynical satisfaction has also been displayed on the faces of TV anchors, political commentators, and reporters as they announced and discussed the fact that Americans had elected their first black president. Images from the US of whites, blacks, and others who celebrated Obama’s victory in euphoric tears were exhibited, demonstrating that the country had finally transcended the racism that had infested its social, legal, political, and educational relations for so many centuries. Yet, for the most accurate eyes and ears, what was implicit in accounts of celebration disseminated through Brazilian mass media was the notion that such cathartic and healing experiences were not needed in Brazil. In fact, what was almost cynically celebrated was the fallacy that finally the USA had overcome their racial injuries, while our racial problems had been resolved many decades ago, if they ever existed. After all, according to traditional hegemonic narratives that romanticise race relations in Brazil, Brazilians never had to deal with formal racial segregation that established barriers to the socio-economic ascension of Africans and their descendants, and therefore there would be no wounds to be healed and no damage to be repaired…

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Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil 1888–1988

University of Wisconsin Press
November 1991
376 pages
6 x 9; 1 map
Paper ISBN: 978-0-299-13104-3

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

Winner of the 1993 Arthur P. Whitaker Prize

For much of the twentieth century Brazil enjoyed an international reputation as a “racial democracy,” but that image has been largely undermined in recent decades by research suggesting the existence of widespread racial inequality. George Reid Andrews provides the first thoroughly documented history of Brazilian racial inequality from the abolition of slavery in 1888 up to the late 1980s, showing how economic, social, and political changes in Brazil during the last one hundred years have shaped race relations.

No laws of segregation or apartheid exist in Brazil, but by looking carefully at government policies, data on employment, mainstream and Afro-Brazilian newspapers, and a variety of other sources, Andrews traces pervasive discrimination against Afro-Brazilians over time. He draws his evidence from the country’s largest and most economically important state, São Paulo, showing how race relations were affected by its transformation from a plantation-based economy to South America’s most urban, industrialized society.

The book focuses first on Afro-Brazilians’ entry into the agricultural and urban working class after the abolition of slavery. This transition, Andrews argues, was seriously hampered by state policies giving the many European immigrants of the period preference over black workers. As immigration declined and these policies were overturned in the late 1920s, black laborers began to be employed in agriculture and industry on nearly equal terms with whites. Andrews then surveys efforts of blacks to move into the middle class during the 1900s. He finds that informal racial solidarity among middle-class whites has tended to exclude Afro-Brazilians from the professions and other white-collar jobs.

Andrews traces how discrimination throughout the century led Afro-Brazilians to mobilize, first through the antislavery movement of the 1880s, then through such social and political organizations of the 1920s and 1930s as the Brazilian Black Front, and finally through the anti-racism movements of the 1970s and 1980s. These recent movements have provoked much debate among Brazilians over their national image as a racial democracy. It remains to be seen, Andrews concludes, whether that debate will result in increased opportunities for black Brazilians.

Contents

• Lists of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Part 1. Workers
  • Chapter 2. Slavery and Emancipation, 1800-1890
  • Chapter 3. Immigration, 1890-1930
  • Chapter 4. Working, 1920-1960
• Part 2. The Middle Class
  • Chapter 5. Living in a Racial Democracy, 1900-1940
  • Chapter 6. Blacks Ascending, 1940-1988
  • Chapter 7. Organizing, 1945-1988
• Part 3. Past, Present, Future
  • Chapter 8. One Hundred Years of Freedom: May 13, 1988
  • Chapter 9. Looking Back, Looking Forward
• Appendix A. Population of Sao Paulo State, 1800-1980
• Appendix B. Brazilian Racial Terminology
• Appendix C. Personnel Records at the Jafet and São Paulo Tramway, Light, and Power Companies
• Glossary
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Shifting Discourses: Exploring the Tensions between the Myth of Racial Democracy And the Implementation of Affirmative Action Policies in Brazil

Center for Latin American Social Policy – CLASPO
Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
Summer Research Report
University of Texas at Austin
September 2005
29 pages

Raquel Luciana de Souza

1. INTRODUCTION

Are the recent debates surrounding the controversial topic of Affirmative Action in Brazil changing the racial landscape of the country? What impact will these laws have on issues of race, race relations, and racial identity? Will Brazil experience a shift in its racial paradigms and a restructuring of its socio-economic and political organizations in light of these latest developments. This paper is part of an ongoing research about the process of implementation of Affirmative Action policies in Brazil and the possible impacts that these laws may have in discourses about race and racial identity in that country. Those are guiding questions that I will be exploring throughout the text, but they could not possibly be answered fully in such early stages of my research. Therefore, I intend to use these questions to briefly discuss some of the pertinent issues, as well as some events concerning this momentous historical development. In this text, I also point out to the some of the implications of these developments in Brazilian politics, particularly as it relates to their possible impact on traditional discourses about race relations as well as the role of race in Brazilian society. Furthermore, I intend to place these debates within the context of a nation that has been perceived nationally and internationally as a raceless country, or, in other words, a country that does not struggle with the legacy of legally sanctioned barriers that granted or denied benefits to different groups according to their racial ancestry.

Scholars such as France W. Twine, Michael Hanchard, Anthony Marx, and others have focused on the weakness of black organizations in Brazil, especially when combating the alleged overwhelming influence of the ideology of the myth of racial democracy in the country. This myth is viewed by many as the overarching framework that shapes and informs the perceptions of Brazilians of all racial backgrounds. However, I argue that the polemics and the controversy generated by the ongoing implementation of affirmative action policies constitute a major force in the reshaping of discourses and perceptions about the role of race, racial identity, as well as racism and racial prejudice. I contend that the politically charged debates generated by these measures constitute a powerful transformative force in the traditional narratives about the harmonious nature of race relations in the country on several levels. In this paper, I also highlight the key role that black organizations have had in demanding and debating the implementation of laws that aim at compensating for centuries of socio-economic and educational opportunities. Black militants have systematically struggled and challenged traditional discourses that have historically masked Brazil as a ‘racially democratic nation’. The efforts of black organizations and their struggles for the rights of people of African descent in Brazil tend to be obliterated by mainstream narratives that usually emphasize the role of ruling elite. These discourses aim at perpetuating myths about the benevolence of ruling elites and their predisposition to “granting” rights to popular classes and minorities or oppressed sectors of its population.

Slavery and race relations in Brazil have generated an enormous amount of research, especially comparative research, in particular works that tried to establish comparisons between Brazil and the US. Many scholars across disciplines have looked at the various factors that may influence the way in which discourses around race, race relations and discrimination shift according to specific historical moments and settings. Therefore, it is my strong belief that the current controversial process of implementing affirmative action policies in Brazil will certainly contribute to the production of new original scholarship about that country…

…AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: CONTEXTUALIZING THE DEBATE

In order to shed some light into the controversy generated by the implementation of affirmative action policies in Brazil, it is necessary to contextualize them. They must be located within the parameters of a country that has historically placed great importance on the miscegenation and the whitening of its population. Such contextualization will provide the background for the arguments employed to dismiss the validity and the applicability of these policies in the country. The following session provides an overview of the discourses and historical processes that have informed and shaped historically prevailing notions about the role and the relevance of race in the country. In particular, these debates must be placed within the context of prevailing traditional ideologies and narratives about what constitutes the Brazilian. In this session, I will also elaborate on the traditional views about the institution of slavery in Brazil…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil Approves University Affirmative Action Bill

Associated Press
2012-08-08

Stan Lehman

San Paulo—The Brazilian Senate has approved an affirmative action bill that reserves half the spots in federal universities for high school graduates of public schools, and distributes them according to the racial makeup of each state.

The Senate’s news agency says the bill that was approved late Tuesday now goes to President Dilma Rousseff, who is expected to approve it.

The reserved spots will be distributed among black, mixed race and indigenous students proportionally to the racial composition of each state, the official agency said…

…The Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that it was constitutional for universities to use racial quotas.

Brazil has more citizens of African ancestry than any nation other than Nigeria. Fifty-one percent of Brazil’s 192 million people are black or of mixed-race,

Backers say the use of scholarships, quotas and other policies aimed at getting more blacks and mixed-race Brazilians into universities is needed to right the historic wrongs of slavery, centuries of stark economic inequality and a society in which whites are overwhelmingly in leadership roles in government and business…

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Brazil’s New Racial Politics

Lynne Rienner Publishers
2009
251 pages
ISBN: 978-1-58826-666-8

Edited by:

Bernd Reiter, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of South Florida

Gladys L. Mitchell (Gladys Mitchell-Walthour), Assistant Professor of Political Science
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

As the popular myth of racial equality in Brazil crumbles beneath the weight of current grassroots politics, how will the country redefine itself as a multiethnic nation? Brazil’s New Racial Politics captures the myriad questions and problems unleashed by a growing awareness of the ways racism structures Brazilian society.

 The authors bridge the gap between scholarship and activism as they tackle issues ranging from white privilege to black power, from government policy to popular advocacy, and from historical injustices to recent victories. The result is a rich exploration of the conflicting social realities characterizing Brazil today, as well as their far-reaching political implications.

Contents

• Foreword—Michael Mitchell.
• 1. The New Politics of Race in Brazil—Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell.
• BLACK EMPOWERMENT AND WHITE PRIVILEGE.
  • 2. Whiteness as Capital: Constructing Inclusion and Defending Privilege—Bernd  Reiter.
  • 3. Politicizing Blackness: Afro-Brazilian Color Identification and Candidate Preference—Gladys L. Mitchell
  • 4. Out of Place: The Experience of the Black Middle Class—Angela Figueiredo.
  • 5. The Political Shock of the Year: The Press and the Election of a Black Mayor in São Paulo—Cloves Luiz Pereira Oliveira.
• AFFIRMATIVE ACTION CONTESTED.
  • 6. Affirmative Action and Identity—Seth Racusen.
  • 7. Opportunities and Challenges for the Afro-Brazilian Movement—Mónica Treviño González.
• THE NEW POLITICS OF BLACK POWER.
  • 8. Racialized History and Urban Politics: Black Women’s Wisdom in Grassroots Struggles—Keisha-Khan Y. Perry.
  • 9. Black NGOs and “Conscious” Rap: New Agents of the Antiracism Struggle in Brazil—Sales Augusto dos Santos.
  • 10. Power and Black Organizing in Brazil—Fernando Conceição.
  • 11. New Social Activism: University Entry Courses for Black and Poor Students—Renato Emerson dos Santos.
• CONCLUSION.
  • After the Racial Democracy—Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell.

The aesthetic escape hatch: carnaval, blocos afro and the mutations of baianidade under the signs of globalisation and re-Africanisation

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research
Volume 5, Issue 2, 1999
pages 65-98
DOI: 10.1080/13260219.1999.10431798

Piers Armstrong
Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil

This article examines the notion of baianidade, the cultural cosmovision traditionally associated with the state of Bahia and more specifically with the region of the Baía de Todos os Santos. A series of connotations for the term are examined, including cordiality, racial democracy and miscegenation. Through the cultural practice of baianidade, a social compromise is effected whereby material space and symbolic prestige are conceded to the black community in exchange for a relative political passivity. This exchange is not construed here as a conscious manoeuvre by the established powers, but rather in terms of the internal logic of an economy of symbolic capital. To exemplify both the fluidity and the semantic essentialism characteristic of baianidade, the article proceeds to the cultural semantics of the related term, baiana, a nominalized adjective which etymologically denotes a female native of the region, but by extension also denotes one among the various local religions and an associated culinary tradition. Against this essentializing consolidation, the article then considers contemporary uses of the term within a more individualistic consumer society. Finally, baianidade is compared synchronically to other major ideo-esthetic discourses of the Black diaspora.

Introduction: Bahian carnaval

The carnaval of Salvador, capital of Bahia State in Brazil, has grown immensely in popularity in recent years, so that it now rivals the more famous Rio carnaval in terms of numbers of visitors. Carnaval culture—music, dance, consumption and consequent entrepreneurial opportunities—has spread to the whole calendar of annual and weekly festivities, religious and secular, and has transformed Bahian society both in terms of its internal recreation patterns and in terms of its relations with external society. While the prominent traditional agricultural industries (cocoa, cattle, and vegetables) have encountered difficulties and contracted, tourism, largely based around carnaval or carnavalesque attractions, has increased spectacularly and become the centre of growth strategies. The old centre of Salvador has been transformed from extreme poverty and physical decay into the central tourist destination. Bahian pop music has penetrated the national and international markets. Bahian practices such as capoeira (martial arts dance) have spread around the world. An ever-growing number of international visitors (about 400,000 a year in a city of 2.5 million) arrive by plane, in search of cultural vitality and authenticity. The sheer volume of international visitors and the prominence of tourism as a source of new employment has also transformed local experience through personal exposure to foreigners with different ideas. A significant number of persons from previously completely marginalised classes have visited or lived in Western European countries as a result of this contact. While world globalisation (access and interaction between different locations) has been the pre-condition of the cultural marketing of Salvador to the world, the city itself has undergone globalisation in terms of qualitative culture as well as economic modernisation…

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History Counts: A Comparative Analysis of Racial/Color Categorization in US and Brazilian Censuses

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1738-1745

Melissa Nobles, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Categories of race (ethnicity, color, or both) have appeared and continue to appear in the demographic censuses of numerous countries, including the United States and Brazil. Until recently, such categorization had largely escaped critical scrutiny, being viewed and treated as a technical procedure requiring little conceptual clarity or historical explanation. Recent political developments and methodological changes, in US censuses especially, have engendered a critical reexamination of both the comparative and the historical dimensions of categorization. The author presents a comparative analysis of the histories of racial/color categorization in American and Brazilian censuses and shows that racial (and color) categories have appeared in these censuses because of shifting ideas about race and the enduring power of these ideas as organizers of political, economic, and social life in both countries. These categories have not appeared simply as demographic markers. The author demonstrates that censuses are instruments at a state’s disposal and are not simply detached registers of population and performance.

…1850–1920 Censuses

The 1850 census marked a watershed in census-taking in several ways. For our purposes, a large part of its significance rests in the introduction of the “mulatto” category and the reasons for its introduction. This category was added not because of demographic shifts, but because of the lobbying efforts of race scientists and the willingness of certain senators to do their bidding. More generally, the mulatto category signaled the ascendance of scientific authority within racial discourse. By the 1850s, polygenist thought was winning a battle that it had lost in Europe. The “American school of ethnology” distinguished itself from prevailing European racial thought through its insistence that human races were distinct and unequal species. That polygenism endured at all was a victory, since the European theorists to abandon it. Moreover, there was considerable resistance to it in the United States. Although most American monogenists were not racial egalitarians, they were initially unwilling to accept claims of separate origins, permanent racial differences, and the infertility of racial mixture. Polygenists deliberately sought hard statistical data to prove that mulattoes, as hybrids of different racial species, were less fertile than their pure-race parents and lived shorter lives.

Racial theorist, medical doctor, scientist, and slaveholder Josiah Nott lobbied certain senators for the inclusion in the census of several inquiries designed to prove his theory of mulatto hybridity and separate origins. In the end, the senators voted to include only the category “mulatto,” although they hotly debated the inclusion of another inquiry—“[d]egree of removal from pure white and black races”—as well. Instructions to enumerators for the slave population read, “Under heading 5 entitled ‘Color,’ insert in all cases, when the slave is black, the letter B; when he or she is a mulatto, insert M. The color of all slaves should be noted.” For the free population, enumerators were instructed as follows: “in all cases where the person is black, insert the letter B; if mulatto, insert M. It is very desirable that these particulars be carefully regarded.”

The 1850 census introduced a pattern, especially in regard to the mulatto category, that lasted until 1930: the census was deliberately used to advance race science. Such science was fundamental to, though not the only basis of, racial discourse—that is, the discourse that explained what race was. Far from merely counting race, the census was helping to create race by assisting scientists in their endeavors. Although scientific ideas about race changed over those 80 years, the role of the census in advancing such thought did not.

The abolition of slavery and the reconstitution of White racial domination in the South were accompanied by an enduring interest in race. Predictably, the ideas that race scientists and proslaveryadvocates had marshaled to defend slavery were used to oppose the recognition of Black political rights. Blacks were naturally inferior to Whites, whether as slaves or as free people, and should therefore be disqualified from full participation in American economic, political, and social life. Although scientists, along with nearly all Whites, were convinced of the inequality of races, they continued in their basic task of investigating racial origins. Darwinism presented a challenge to the still dominant polygenism, but the mulatto category retained its significance within polygenist theories. Data were needed to prove that mulattoes lived shorter lives, thus proving that Blacks and Whites were different racial species…

…The mulatto category remained on the 1910 and 1920 censuses for the same reason that it had been introduced in 1850: to build racial theories. (Census officials removed the category from the 1900 census because they were dissatisfied with the quality of 1890 mulatto, octoroon, and quadroon data.) The basic idea that distinct races existed and were enduringly unequal remained firmly in place. What happens when superior and inferior races mate? Social and natural scientists still wanted to know. But the advisory committee to the Census Bureau decided in 1928 to terminate use of the mulatto category on censuses.

The stated reasons for removal rested on accuracy. Had the advisory committee possessed confidence in the data’s accuracy or the Census Bureau’s ability to secure accuracy, “mulatto” might well have remained on the census. The committee did not refer to the evident inability of the mulatto category to settle the central, if shifting, questions of race science: first,whether “mulatto-ness” proved that Whites and Blacks were different species of humans, and then, whether mulattoes were weaker than members of the so-called pure races. The exit of the mulatto category from the census was markedly understated, especially whencompared with its entrance in 1850 and its enduring significance on 19th-century censuses.

Beginning with the 1890 census, all Native Americans,whether taxed or not,were counted on general population schedules. Much as racial theorists believed that enumerating mulattoes would prove their frailty, they thought that Native Americans were a defeated and vanishing race. Given the weight of these expectations in the late 19th century, it is not surprising that census methods and data reflected them. As the historian Brian Dippieobserved, “the expansion and shrinkage of Indian population estimates correlate with changing attitudes about the Native American’s rights and prospects.” The idea of the vanishing Indian was so pervasive that the censuses of 1910 and 1930 applied a broad definition of “Indian” because officials believed that each of these censuses would be the last chance for an accurate count.

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Measures of “Race” and the Analysis of Racial Inequality in Brazil

Social Science Research
Available online 2012-07-05
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.06.006

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Jeronimo O. Muniz, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Federal University of Minas Gerais

Quantitative analyses of racial disparities typically rely on a single categorical measure to operationalize race. We demonstrate the value of an approach that compares results obtained using various measures of race. Using a national probability sample of the Brazilian population that captured race in six formats, we first show how the racial composition of Brazil can shift from majority white to majority black depending on the classification scheme. In addition, using quantile regression, we find that racial disparities are most severe at the upper end of the income distribution; that racial disparities in earnings are larger when race is defined by interviewers rather than self-identified; and that those classified as “black” suffer a greater wage penalty than those classified as “brown.” Our findings extend prior conclusions about racial inequality in Brazil. More generally, our analysis demonstrates that comparison of results across measures represents a neglected source of analytic leverage for advancing empirical knowledge and theoretical understanding of how race, as a multidimensional social construct, contributes to the production of social inequality.

Read or purchase the article here.