Mixed Race in Brazil: Classification, Quantification, and Identification

Abstract

Race mixture (mesticagem) has been fundamental to Brazilian history, culture, and politics. Brazil has validated this racial blending by recognizing multiracials, along with whites, blacks, and Native Americans, in everyday parlance as well as officially on the census and other instruments of data collection. Categories of racial difference between white and non-white are relative, representing the positive and negative extremes, respectively, on a continuum in which physical appearance, combined with class and cultural factors, has determined one’s race and location in the social hierarchy. Yet, extensive miscegenation and the absence of legalized racial discrimination became essential to Brazil’s racial democracy ideology, which deflected attention and public policy away from tracking and addressing pervasive race-based inequality. Borrowing from Goldberg, as well as Omi and Winant, we argue the racial state has played a pivotal role in this continuous tension between the politics of racial inclusion and equality and those of racial inequality and exclusion. Censuses and other official instruments of data collection are not neutral documents that report only ‘facts’ but rather are themselves instruments of state and elite control that reflect the social construction of race. The classification, quantification, and identification of mixed race individuals have been central to these dynamics.