Mixed Race Studies

How States Make Race: New Evidence from BrazilHow States Make Race: New Evidence from Brazil

Sociological Science
Volume 5, (2018-11-26)
pages 722-751
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a31

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

Fabrício M. Fialho, Postdoctoral Researcher
Centre de Recherches Internationales, Sciences Po Paris, France

Mara Loveman, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

The Brazilian state recently adopted unprecedented race-targeted affirmative action in government hiring and university admissions. Scholarship would predict the state’s institutionalization of racial categories has “race-making” effects. In this article, we ask whether the Brazilian state’s policy turnabout has affected racial subjectivities on the ground, specifically toward mirroring the categories used by the state. To answer, we conceptualize race as multidimensional and leverage two of its dimensions—lay identification and government classification (via open-ended and closed-ended questions, respectively)—to introduce a new metric of state race-making: a comparison of the extent of alignment between lay and government dimensions across time. Logistic regression on large-sample survey data from before the policy turn (1995) and well after its diffusion (2008) reveals an increased use of state categories as respondents’ lay identification in the direction of matching respondents’ government classification. We conclude that the Brazilian state is making race but not from scratch nor in ways that are fully intended.

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Shifting Racial Subjectivities and Ideologies in Brazil

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World
First Published 2018-09-20
12 pages
DOI: 10.1177/2378023118797550

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

Fabrício M. Fialho, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Centre de Recherches Internationales, Sciences Po Paris, France

Census ethnoracial categories often reflect national ideologies and attendant subjectivities. Nonetheless, Brazilians frequently prefer the non-census terms moreno (brown) and negro (black), and both are core to antithetical ideologies: racial ambiguity versus racial affirmation. Their use may be in flux as Brazil recently adopted unprecedented race-targeted public policy. We examine propensities to self-classify as moreno and negro before and after the policy shift. Using regression modeling on national survey data from 1995 and 2008 that captured self-classification in open and closed formats, we find moreno is highly salient but increasingly constricted, while negro is restricted in use, though increasingly popular. Negro’s growth is mostly confined to the darker pole of Brazil’s color continuum. Education correlates in opposing directions: negative with moreno and positive with negro. Our findings proxy broad ideological shift from racial ambiguity to negro racial affirmation. They suggest race-targeted policy is transforming racial subjectivities and ideologies in Brazil.

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Interrogating Race: Color, Racial Categories, and Class Across the Americas

American Behavioral Scientist
Volume 60, Number 4 (April 2016)
pages 538-555
DOI: 10.1177/0002764215613400

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

Fabrício M. Fialho
University of California, Los Angeles

Andrew M. Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

We address long-standing debates on the utility of racial categories and color scales for understanding inequality in the United States and Latin America, using novel data that enable comparisons of these measures across both broad regions. In particular, we attend to the degree to which color and racial category inequality operate independently of parental socioeconomic status. We find a variety of patterns of racial category and color inequality, but that in most countries accounting for maternal education changes our coefficients by 5% or less. Overall, we argue that several posited divergences in ethnoracial stratification processes in the United States, compared with Latin America, might be overstated. We conclude that the comparison of the effects of multiple ethnoracial markers, such as color and racial categories, for the analysis of social stratification holds substantial promise for untangling the complexities of “race” across the Americas.

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