The idea that “money whitens” is a classic topic in the sociological literature on race in Brazil. This article estimates the extent to which socioeconomic status translates into racial boundary-crossing (“whitening” and “darkening”) across generations. I do so by highlighting specifically how parents' racial classification of their children varies by status (i.e., parents' own educational levels). Results from a national household survey (PNAD 2005) show that highly educated nonwhite parents are more likely to classify their children as white than are comparable less-educated nonwhite parents. This happens because (1) more-educated nonwhite parents are more likely to marry whites and less likely to marry nonwhites and (2) more-educated interracial couples label their children white more often than do less-educated interracial couples. Comparisons with 1996 data suggest that recent shifts in racial politics have offset the whitening effects of college education for nonwhite men with white wives. The results allow us to better understand the nature of racial boundaries in Brazil and lead us to reexamine the relationship between race and the inheritance of socioeconomic advantage.

This article addresses the question of how and in what terms states constitute ethnicity and citizenship around statistical categories when these categories lack explicitly ethnic principles of classification. It does so based on a qualitative content analysis of the way that the German statistical category of 'persons with a migration background' is deployed in parliamentary debates on education. We argue that state actors in organized politics, who are embedded in Germany's national cultural repertoire and integration policy repertoire, transform this nuanced statistical category into a homogenized social category that is defined in terms of language, class and exclusion from the imagined national community. Our findings demonstrate that, in order to understand how the state uses statistics to draw boundaries within a society, it is necessary to go beyond the content of statistical categories themselves.

This paper investigates how students at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), one of the first Brazilian universities to adopt race-based quotas for admissions, interpret racial categories used as eligibility criteria. Considering the perspectives of students is important to understand the workings of affirmative action policies because UERJ's quotas require applicants to classify themselves. Students' interpretations of those categories often diverge from the interpretations intended by people who shaped the policy. Students' perspectives are formed by everyday experiences with categorisation and by their self-assessment as legitimate beneficiaries of quotas. In contrast, the policies were designed according to a new racial project, where black consciousness-raising and statistics played an important role.

No abstract

Multicultural policies have been spreading around the world. How does implementation of multicultural polices affect local ideas about race, inequality and multiculturalism? This paper investigates this issue with respect to affirmative action policies in Brazilian universities. Our interviews with university administrators and university students indicate that, when implemented in Brazil, affirmative action acquires class-based justifications, and ideas about racial diversity are replaced by ideas about class diversity. Our findings suggest that, differently from what some analysts have argued, affirmative action is not necessarily associated with postmodern concerns and identities: In Brazil, it is mostly associated with a modern discourse in which class cleavages are still very salient and the state plays a significant role in addressing inequalities.