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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 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]