{"id":474,"date":"2010-08-18T17:26:47","date_gmt":"2010-08-18T17:26:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=474"},"modified":"2017-04-10T02:13:50","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T02:13:50","slug":"unmixing-for-race-making-in-brazil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=474","title":{"rendered":"Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

American Journal of Sociology<\/a>
\nVolume 114, Number 3<\/a> (November 2008)
\npages 577\u2013614
\nDOI: 10.1086\/592859<\/a><\/p>\n

Stanley R. Bailey<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of Sociology
\nUniversity of California, Irvine<\/em><\/p>\n

This article analyzes race-targeted policy in Brazil<\/a> as both a political stake and a powerful instrument in an unfolding classificatory struggle over the definition of racial boundaries. \u00a0The Brazilian state traditionally embraced mixed-race classification, but is adopting racial quotas employing a black\/white scheme.<\/strong>\u00a0 To explore potential consequences of that turn for beneficiary identification and boundary formation, the author analyzes attitudinal survey data on race-targeted policy and racial classification in multiple formats, including classification in comparison to photographs. The results show that almost half of the mixed-race sample, when constrained to dichotomous classification, opts for whiteness, a majority rejects mixed-race individuals for quotas, and the mention of quotas for blacks in a split-ballot experiment nearly doubles the percentage choosing that racial category.<\/strong>\u00a0 Theories of how states make race emphasize the use of official categories to legislate exclusion.\u00a0 In contrast, analysis of the Brazilian case illuminates how states may also make race through policies of official inclusion.<\/p>\n

At the federal university in Brazil\u2019s capital city, Bras\u00edlia<\/a>, a special committee was constituted in 2004 to evaluate the application file photographs of self-classified negros<\/em> (read \u201cblacks\u201d or \u201cAfro-Brazilians\u201d) applying to the university via a new racial quota system. An anthropologist, a sociologist, a student representative, and three negro movement actors make up that committee, and their identities are kept sub secreto<\/em><\/a> (Maio and Santos 2005). If the committee does not consider a candidate to be a negro <\/em>or negra<\/em>, then he or she is disqualified.<\/strong> The applicant can, however, appeal the decision and appear in person before the committee to contest his or her racial classification (Universidade de Bras\u00edlia 2004). The State University of Mato Grosso do Sul has also adopted the use of photographs and a verification committee for a racial quota system (UEMS 2004). At that institution, the committee is made up of two university representatives and three negro<\/em> movement actors (Corr\u00eaa 2003).<\/p>\n

This unusual modus operandi<\/a> highlights a period of instability in racial categories, associated with a novel phase in the political struggle for identity and inclusion by the Brazilian negro<\/em> movement. Through a multifaceted process, but without disruptive protest or mass mobilizations, the movement has successfully pressured state actors to mandate negro inclusion in higher education and to encode that legislation with language emic to the movement. The label negro<\/em> is not an official census term; the Brazilian state has for well over a century used a ternary, or three-category, format to represent the black-white color continuum that includes an intermediate or mixed-race category. In contrast, negro<\/em> is part of a dichotomous racial scheme, counterposed to white, whose novelty in official contexts leads to the thorny issue of defining its boundaries. Nonetheless, some 30 Brazilian public universities have already adopted race-targeted policies (Ribeiro 2007).\u00a0 Moreover, legislation is now before the national congress mandating that all federal universities adopt racial quotas…<\/p>\n

…The Brazilian census has used the categories branco<\/em> (white), pardo<\/em> (brown or mulatto<\/a>), preto<\/em> (black), and amarelo<\/em> (yellow or Asian descent) since 1940 and added the ind\u00edgena<\/em> (indigenous) category in the 1991 census. According to its 2000 census, Brazil\u2019s racial or color composition is 54% white, 39% mulatto, 6% black, 0.5% yellow, and 0.4% indigenous. The correspondence of Brazilian census terms with a color continuum is often contrasted with the U.S. use of ancestry for classifying its population (Nogueira 1985). In the United States, ancestry has been historically understood via the rule of hypodescent<\/a> (Davis 1991). According to that rule\u2019s logic, for any person of mixed ancestry that includes some ponderable African extraction, all other ancestries are generally obviated.<\/p>\n

In Brazil, the mulatto and black census categories are considered by negro<\/em> movement actors, as well as by many scholars, to comprise persons of some discernible degree of African ancestry, whom they view as members of a negro<\/em> racial group (Guimara\u02dces 2001; Ribeiro 2007). Prominent negro<\/em> politician, movement actor, and scholar Abdias do Nascimento clarifies this specific vision of ancestry, color, and race in Brazil:<\/p>\n

Official Brazilian census data use two color categories for African descendants: preto<\/em> (literally, \u201cblack\u201d) for the dark-skinned and pardo<\/em> (roughly, mulatto and mestizo) for others. It is now accepted convention to identify the black population as the sum of the preto<\/em> and pardo<\/em> categories, referred to as negro<\/em>, afro-brasileira<\/em>, or afro-descendente<\/em>. In English, \u201cblack,\u201d \u201cAfrican Brazilian,\u201d and \u201cpeople of African descent\u201d refer to this same sum of the two groups. (Nascimento and Nascimento 2001, p. 108)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In contrast to the traditional color classification scheme, this new system approximates the U.S. understanding of racial group membership (Nobles 2000, p. 172; Guimar\u00e3es 2001, p. 173). That is, the negro<\/em>-versus-white dichotomous classification scheme in Brazil similarly joins together individuals with some discernible degree of African ancestry into one racial group for race-targeted policy administration, in essence representing an attempt to clarify ambiguous boundaries by \u201cunmixing\u201d the population.<\/p>\n

Mulattos and blacks in Brazil, however, may not view themselves as common members of a negro<\/em> racial group (Agier 1993; Marx 1998). Winant writes of nonwhites\u2019 tendency in Brazil \u201cnot only to deny, but to avoid<\/em> their own [black] racial identity\u201d (Winant 2001, p. 246; emphasis in original). Hanchard, too, calls attention in his work to Brazilian nonwhites\u2019 \u201cnegation of their [black] identity\u201d (Hanchard 1994, p. 22). The term negro<\/em>, then, may be more a classification attributed to nonwhites by movement actors than a real social group embraced by the general nonwhite population (Nobles 2000; Telles 2004)…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To\u00a0read the entire article, click\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article analyzes race-targeted policy in Brazil as both a political stake and a powerful instrument in an unfolding classificatory struggle over the definition of racial boundaries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,83,21,33,8,26,394],"tags":[440,3018,199],"class_list":["post-474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-brazil","category-latincarib","category-census","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","tag-american-journal-of-sociology","tag-stanley-bailey","tag-stanley-r-bailey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=474"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53381,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions\/53381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}