How States Make Race: New Evidence from Brazil

Abstract

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 closedended 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.

Does race response shift impact racial inequality?

“…Our results also show an increase in the stability of whiteness over the same period, though the trend of racial identification stability is most pronounced for nonwhites. 13 These classification trend dynamics are consistent with research that suggests the waning of racial classification fluidity in contemporary Brazil (Bailey, Fialho, and Loveman 2018;Miranda 2014). The more accelerated decline in the salience of racial lightening compared to the modest decline in darkening, though not impactful during the ten-year period under study, could lead to future reconfigurations of the composition of whites and nonwhites in Brazil that could hypothetically impact estimates of racial earnings inequality.…”

“…This darkening response shift may be most salient among younger and more educated individuals, as well as those subject to the impact of wide-ranging race-targeted affirmative action beginning in the early 2000s (Francis-Tan and Tannuri-Pianto 2015; Marteleto 2012; . In sum, the increasing destigmatization and valuation of blackness through racially affirmative discourse, social movements, and public policy distinguish 21st-century Brazil's darkening dynamics from the whitening dynamics of the 20th century (Bailey, Fialho, and Loveman 2018;Marteleto 2012;Miranda 2015;Bailey 2009).…”

Racial Reclassification and Political Identity Formation

“…152 From this perspective, race-targeted affirmative action, cultural policies recognizing and celebrating racial differences, international cultural influences, and a changing discourse on racial inequality and discrimination are all sources of symbolic institutional change that can lend legitimacy to alternative racial discourses or make salient altered racial boundaries and identities. 153 Although these changes may well be part of the exposure to new information and discourses that I describe, national-level factors are analytically too blunt to account for individual-level variation in reclassification. Diffuse institutional changes wouldn't predict the heterogeneous patterns of reclassification segmented along educational and class lines.…”

“…152 Bourdieu 1985;Paschel 2016;Hanchard 1994. 153 E.g., Bailey, Fialho, andLoveman 2018. of reclassification segmented along educational and class lines. If these factors alone were responsible for shaping racial subjectivities writ large, then we would expect more uniform patterns of reclassification across social sectors.…”

Race, Nation, and Resistance to State Symbolic Power in Rwanda since the 1994 Genocide

“…27-58;Kertzer & Arel, 2002;Lieberman & Singh, 2012Loveman, 2014;Star & Lampland, 2009;Starr, 1992). Still others note how state practices of tying categorical distinctions to the allocation of privilege or punishment naturalizes those same distinctions by endowing them with material consequence Bailey, Fialho, & Loveman, 2018;Brubaker, 1996;Cornell & Hartmann, 1998;Davis, 1991;Jenkins, 1997;Marx, 1997;Mora, 2014;Nagel, 1995). As a 7 result, seemingly benign administrative practices that rely on naming, demarcating, and defining categories of people often have the result of producing those very kinds in the first place (Hacking, 1986).…”