The politics of « racial » classification in Brazil (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Consequences of “Race and Color” in Brazil
Social Problems, 2016
The vast majority of quantitative research on ethnoracial inequality uses census categories. In this article, however, I question whether census categories (in Brazil) are the most adequate measure for estimating ethnoracial inequality. Using the first nationally representative survey to include interviewer-rated skin color data in Brazil (LAPOP 2010), I examine: (1) the association between skin color and stratification outcomes, (2) how using multiple measures of race may reveal different information about inequality across different outcomes, and (3) whether census race categories and skin color should be considered equivalent or analytically distinct concepts. I find that skin color is a stronger predictor of educational attainment and occupational status among Brazilians than race (operationalized as census race-color categories used in virtually all research on ethnoracial inequality in Brazil). Centrally, this study finds that "race" and "color" are analytically distinct concepts given that they are empirically distinct, even though they are often conflated in everyday life and by social scientists. The implications of these findings for the study of ethnoracial inequality in Brazil and beyond are discussed, with a focus on directions for future research.
HISTORY OF BLACK PEOPLE IN BRAZIL AND THEIR ANCESTRAL IDENTITY (Atena Editora)
HISTORY OF BLACK PEOPLE IN BRAZIL AND THEIR ANCESTRAL IDENTITY (Atena Editora), 2023
The construction of "ethnic-racial" identity as a social process is crossed by a wide range of factors that condition or permanently transform it. This article aims to carry out an analysis of the political and cultural factors that conditioned the construction of the identity of the black population in rural and urban areas after the emergence of the Constitution, but through a deconstructionist exercise of essentialist approaches to ethnicity. The article analyzes how the mechanisms have been of political inclusion from the top down, but with processes of social organization. On the other hand, it analyzes the way in which black identity has emerged in urban centers and areas and their areas of influence, where there is cultural syncretism and its traditions reinventing urban cultural dynamics. A relationship of black alterity, in which representations play between black and non-black individuals. The article also reflects criticism on the role of academic research on "ethnic-racial" social movements and the discourses that are built around this type of social mobilization.
The Symbolic Power of Color: Constructions of Race, Skin-Color and Identity in Brazil
ABSTRACT Some current cultural anthropologists define race as a social construct, yet explorations of the socio-historical constructions that give form and structure to racial identities perpetuating notions of “race” are rarely discussed. This study explores the theory of racial formations proposed by Michael Omi and Howard Winant as it applies to Brazil’s racial project, arguing that Brazil’s rhetoric on race and national identity during the late19th to early 20th century culminated in a racial project ultimately known as democracia racial. As a result, I propose that Brazilian racial consciousness is symbolically pluralistic, encompassing race, social class, and social position, generating a particularly virulent, yet silent form of racism. I expand upon racial formation theory through analysis of my fieldwork carried out in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerias, in 2004. This analysis illustrates how contemporary Brazilian social structure and daily cultural discourses on race, skin-color, racial identity, and social marginalization reflect the nation’s early racist ideology, yet contest its reality. Informants discuss self-identifications of skin-color, the meanings attributed to color tonalities, and the impact racism has on their daily lives.
Brazil has had a distinctive definition of national and racial identity, and it has changed considerably over time, and at each time held out different possibilities for social mobility and citizenship. This paper traces changing relationship between black identities and citizenship through four periods in Brazilian history: abolition, black protests in the 1930s, postwar re-democratization and the democratic movement against the military dictatorship in the 1970s. It emphasizes how the complex intersection of nation, social relations, class and race has had profound effects on not only the categories used to label people, but also on the nuanced definition of the goal of efforts to overcome inequality.