Mixed Race Studies

The Puzzling Whiteness of Brazilian Politicians

Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies
Center for Latin American Studies
University of California, Berkeley
Fall 2012
pages 30-32

Jean Spencer, Outreach and Publications Coordinator
Center for Latin American Studies

Is Brazil really a racial democracy? The idea of racial democracy, originally put forth by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s, holds that racial discrimination is much more moderate in Brazil than in countries like the United States, due in part to widespread racial mixing. If Brazil is truly a racial democracy, however, why are the city council members in both Salvador and Rio de Janeiro significantly whiter than their electorates? Thad Dunning, an associate professor of Political Science at Yale University, designed a study to discover the reason for this lack of descriptive democracy.

The first problem Dunning faced was a basic one: defining terms. In Brazil, black, white, and brown are in the eye of the beholder. To get “a quick and dirty” baseline for how different politicians are perceived, he conducted an internet survey where participants were asked to assess the race of a random sample of elected officials and unelected candidates using several different scales. In one, candidates were evaluated on a zero-to-10 scale with zero being the lightest and 10 being the darkest; in another, respondents located candidates in one of multiple color categories; and in a third, participants were asked to place the candidates in one of the five categories used by the Brazilian census: branco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black), amarelo (yellow), and indigena (indigenous). In general, Dunning found that there was a good match between the results of the scales, with the pardo category generating the most heterogeneous responses. Comparing the codings of politicians with census data on residents of Salvador and Rio, he also found that whites were heavily overrepresented on the city councils of both cities, just as he had suspected.

But why? Dunning considered three main possibilities: whites hold racist attitudes toward other groups; black and brown voters have internalized disparaging attitudes about their own groups; or voter preferences are more influenced by class than race. To test these hypotheses, Dunning ran an experiment designed to tease out voters’ underlying racial biases. He hired black and white actors to create videos that followed the same format as the free hour of coverage that Brazilian television gives to candidates for city council. In order to compensate for differences in the personal appeal of individual “candidates,” he hired six black and six white actors for each city…

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