Search

The recent adoption of race-targeted public policies makes Brazil an insightful place to study the social construction of race. This article estimates the effect of racial quotas in college admissions on patterns of racial identification. The authors collected data on persons who matriculated before and after the implementation of quotas at the University of Brasilia, which reserved 20% of admissions slots for persons who self-identified as black. A baseline survey was conducted during college and a follow-up survey was conducted post-college. In sum, the findings suggest that racial quotas had inspired a persistent shift in racial identification from non-black to black and from lighter to darker racial categories. As a whole, the evidence indicates that the policy induced race-making boundary effects, which broadly confirms the insights of social constructionist theories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Can an analytic map crafted to describe and explain urban marginality in the USA serve as a guide for research in cities in other countries? I argue that to correctly diagnose the causes and consequences of urban marginality in cities around the globe demands grounded, historical analyses of specific cases. Historical analyses will reveal that repression of the poor not only takes different forms across contexts, it is also produced and legitimized through different mechanisms. Contextualized revisions to any general analytic map of urban marginality are an essential prerequisite to arriving at appropriate prescriptions for change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how racial socialization in poor and working-class Afro-Brazilian families conveys messages about racial features that reproduce and resist racial hierarchies. Relying on 116 semi-structured interviews and ethnography in fifteen Afro-Brazilian families conducted in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, I argue that racial socialization consists of discursive strategies, concrete practices and affective displays that stigmatize black racial features. This study examines racial socialization within the intimate context of parent and sibling relationships, highlighting how Afro-Brazilians negotiate racial features such as skin colour, hair texture and nose shape during day-to-day interactions and life transitions. To illustrate the complexity of Afro-Brazilian families, I discuss critical moments when socialization simultaneously reproduces and inverts racial hierarchies. I conclude by arguing that racial hierarchies are constantly negotiated in Afro-Brazilian families, but racial socialization most often reinforces dominant racial structures in ways that compromise the affective quality of family relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study advances literature on the role of cultural tastes in racial identity and work on race in Brazil. I ask how racial categories and cultural tastes co-constitute each other in meaningful patterns and how these patterns reveal the racialized meanings of cultural objects. Using correspondence analysis, I identify taste clusters and then compare these patterns across three racial classification schemas in Brazil. Across all schemas, there is a distinction between blackness and whiteness in terms of the cultural tastes that constitute identities. This holds across symbols of national identity, foreign-influenced genres and Brazilian popular culture. The strength of underlying racial meaning offers a second axis of variation – between ‘strong’ (primordial, fixed, strictly bounded) versus ‘soft’ (descriptive, ambiguous, porous) racial identities. Some symbols of national identity carry more primordially laden and invariable racial meaning than do others and thus associate with two distinct types of black identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]