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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]

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]