Colour violence, deadly geographies, and the meanings of "race" in Brazil.

This paper analyses the relationships between "race" and violent victimization, and between "race" and support for violent practices of social control in Brazil, using nationally representative survey data. I start from the premise that "race" is a set of relational practices rather than bounded "racial groups". I operationalize this relational understanding of "race" methodologically by triangulating three measures of "race" – self-identified "census race", interviewer-identified skin colour, and racial composition of the municipality – in conjunction with measures of class, gender and space. I find that whiter geographic spaces have lower overall levels of violent victimization, but that interviewer-identified darker-skinned individuals are disproportionately victimized in these whiter geographic spaces. Controlling for other variables, self-identified census race is not correlated with violent victimization. I find that public support for violent practices can best be understood by considering people's simultaneous relationships to race, gender, class and spatial categories and hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]