Mixed Race Studies

How States Make Race: New Evidence from BrazilHow States Make Race: New Evidence from Brazil

Sociological Science
Volume 5, (2018-11-26)
pages 722-751
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a31

Stanley R. Bailey, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Fabrício M. Fialho, Postdoctoral Researcher
Centre de Recherches Internationales, Sciences Po Paris, France

Mara Loveman, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

The Brazilian state recently adopted unprecedented race-targeted affirmative action in government hiring and university admissions. Scholarship would predict the state’s institutionalization of racial categories has “race-making” effects. In this article, we ask whether the Brazilian state’s policy turnabout has affected racial subjectivities on the ground, specifically toward mirroring the categories used by the state. To answer, we conceptualize race as multidimensional and leverage two of its dimensions—lay identification and government classification (via open-ended and closed-ended questions, respectively)—to introduce a new metric of state race-making: a comparison of the extent of alignment between lay and government dimensions across time. Logistic regression on large-sample survey data from before the policy turn (1995) and well after its diffusion (2008) reveals an increased use of state categories as respondents’ lay identification in the direction of matching respondents’ government classification. We conclude that the Brazilian state is making race but not from scratch nor in ways that are fully intended.

Read the entire article here.

National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America [Review]

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Volume 3, Issue 1, (January 2017)
pages 141-145
DOI: 10.1177/2332649216676789

Mark Q. Sawyer, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles

Mara Loveman, National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014. 376 pp. $26.95. ISBN 978-0-19-933736-1

States, and in particular Latin American states, have been classified by race. National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America by Mara Loveman seeks to answer how and why states do so. The book is remarkable for its depth and scope, analyzing several countries essentially from some of the earliest colonial attempts at measurement driven by central authorities to contemporary census policies that may follow the dictates of social movements and international organizations.

Loveman rightly argues that states do not make race out of nothing but rather pick recognizable signs of human variation and endow them with characteristics and also use these axes as a means of allocating social value, either formally or informally. Loveman notes there can be slippage between state, personal, and socially recognized categorization, given all parties have different ideologies and incentives with regard to categorization. However, out of the cacophony emerge dominant discourses and ideas that define race for groups of people that come to be defined as discrete populations. But the Latin American story is not without complications at various historical points. Different logics have driven state categorization, and the state may not formally categorize at all.

Mara Loveman argues that the census first reflected colonial issues and concerns. It buttressed national projects developed by state elites. Colonial administrators saw populations as “key resources” to be enumerated. Racial categories imposed by colonial authorities identified the civilized and the uncivilized and in many cases outlined castes and detailed racial-ethnic mixtures and hierarchies that in different forms have remained part of the racial lexicon in Latin America. Loveman follows what has become the growing orthodoxy applied to historical and contemporary race in Latin America. She correctly finds that colonial authorities constructed and maintained elaborate racial hierarchies, which related to forced labor, land dispossession, and social and economic discrimination. Categories thus had material and symbolic consequences.

Loveman joins scholars like Michael Hanchard, Edward Telles, Peter Wade, Melissa Nobles, Tianna Paschel, Christina Sue, and Tanya Golash-Boza, who document both the ways in which white elites maintained racial hierarchies using the state, and how blacks, Indians, and mixed-raced individuals resisted categorization and racial discrimination in big and small ways…

Read the entire review here.

We evaluated two distinct but not mutually exclusive scenarios for the underlying mechanism that prompted reclassification of individuals as white in the 1920 Puerto Rican census: the movement of individuals across racial boundaries (boundary crossing) and the movement of racial boundaries across individuals (boundary shifting). The underlying boundary dynamics that drove racial reclassification in the 1920 census are illuminated by the results of our counterfactual multinomial regression analysis, which suggests that changes in individual characteristics account for roughly one-fifth of the whitening between 1910 and 1920, together with our cohort analysis, which reveals clustering of the white surplus population among children and young adults (especially women), and our analyses of trends in union formation and classification of children between 1910 and 1920. Our analysis of the unusual changes in union combinations suggests that individual boundary crossing, via union with a lighter spouse, was a likely trigger of reclassification between 1910 and 1920. Intergenerational boundary crossing via miscegenation, procreation, and acceptance as “white” of physically lightened offspring may have contributed to Puerto Rico’s gradual whitening trend in the first half of the twentieth century, but it does not appear significant to explain the unparalleled increase in the enumerated white population that took place between 1910 and 1920.

Mara Loveman and Jeronimo O. Muniz, “How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Intercensus Racial Reclassification,” American Sociological Review, Volume 72, Number 6 (December 2007). 934. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000312240707200604. (See also here.)

National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America

Oxford University Press
2014-07-07
400 pages
22 b/w line illus., 4 b/w halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199337354
Paperback ISBN: 9780199337361

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

• The first comprehensive history of census-taking and nation-making in nineteen Latin American states across nearly two centuries.
• Argues that the relationship of individual states to the international system of states plays a decisive role in shaping how states classify and count citizens on their censuses.

The era of official color-blindness in Latin America has come to an end. For the first time in decades, nearly every state in Latin America now asks their citizens to identify their race or ethnicity on the national census. Most observers approvingly highlight the historic novelty of these reforms, but National Colors shows that official racial classification of citizens has a long history in Latin America.

Through a comprehensive analysis of the politics and practice of official ethnoracial classification in the censuses of nineteen Latin American states across nearly two centuries, this book explains why most Latin American states classified their citizens by race on early national censuses, why they stopped the practice of official racial classification around mid-twentieth century, and why they reintroduced ethnoracial classification on national censuses at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Beyond domestic political struggles, the analysis reveals that the ways that Latin American states classified their populations from the mid-nineteenth century onward responded to changes in international criteria for how to construct a modern nation and promote national development. As prevailing international understandings of what made a political and cultural community a modern nation changed, so too did the ways that Latin American census officials depicted diversity within national populations. The way census officials described populations in official statistics, in turn, shaped how policymakers viewed national populations and informed their prescriptions for national development–with consequences that still reverberate in contemporary political struggles for recognition, rights, and redress for ethnoracially marginalized populations in today’s Latin America.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Ethnoracial Classification and the State
• 2. Classifying Colonial Subjects
• 3. Enumerating Nations
• 4. The Race to Progress
• 5. Constructing Natural Orders
• 6. From Race to Culture
• 7. We All Count
• 8. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index

Whiteness in Latin America: measurement and meaning in national censuses (1850-1950)

Journal de la Société des Américanistes
Volume 95, Number 2 (2009)
pages 207-234 (63 paragraphs)

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Drawing on an analysis of all national censuses conducted in Latin America from 1850 to 1950, this article examines how tacit assumptions about the nature of « whiteness » informed the production of statistical knowledge about Latin American populations. For insight into implicit racial beliefs that shaped census-taking in this period, the article considers how census agents accomplished three basic tasks: 1) identifying the « race » of individuals in the population; 2) preparing statistical tables to publicize census results; and, 3) projecting the racial composition of national populations in the future. The analysis identifies variation in notions of « whiteness » across the region, but also points to a set of broadly shared premises about the nature, value, and boundaries of whiteness that transcended nation-state boundaries in this period. Fundamental similarities in ideas about whiteness found in Latin American censuses appear even more starkly when the scope of analysis expands to include the censuses of the United States.

Table of Contents

• Racial classification in Latin American censuses
• The nature of whiteness: who is white?
• The value of whiteness: describing and inscribing racial hierarchy
• The boundaries of whiteness: projecting a whiter future
• Discussion and conclusion

Read the entire article here.

The Race to Progress: Census Taking and Nation Making in Brazil (1870–1920)

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 89, Number 3 (2009)
pages 435-470
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2009-002

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

From the mid-nineteenth century, central statistics agencies contributed to nation-state building through their dual mission of producing statistical description and policy prescription in the name of national progress. This article examines how one such agency, Brazil’s Directoria Geral de Estatística, worked to simultaneously measure and promote national progress from 1870 to 1920. The article documents a fundamental shift in this period in the DGE’s vision of the qualities of the population essential for Brazil’s progress as a nation. In the 1870s, the DGE saw educational statistics as the key measures of national progress and lobbied for government investment in primary schools to ensure the advancement of the nation. By the 1920s, the DGE looked instead to immigration and racial statistics to measure progress and advocated cultural and biological “whitening” of the population to improve the Brazilian nation. Analysis of a broad range of archival and published primary sources reveals the gradual racialization of the DGE’s institutional definition of “progress.” The study contributes to a growing body of research that examines how racial thought influenced the development and official practices of state agencies in Latin America.

Read or puchase the article here.

Measures of “Race” and the Analysis of Racial Inequality in Brazil

Social Science Research
Available online 2012-07-05
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.06.006

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Jeronimo O. Muniz, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Federal University of Minas Gerais

Quantitative analyses of racial disparities typically rely on a single categorical measure to operationalize race. We demonstrate the value of an approach that compares results obtained using various measures of race. Using a national probability sample of the Brazilian population that captured race in six formats, we first show how the racial composition of Brazil can shift from majority white to majority black depending on the classification scheme. In addition, using quantile regression, we find that racial disparities are most severe at the upper end of the income distribution; that racial disparities in earnings are larger when race is defined by interviewers rather than self-identified; and that those classified as “black” suffer a greater wage penalty than those classified as “brown.” Our findings extend prior conclusions about racial inequality in Brazil. More generally, our analysis demonstrates that comparison of results across measures represents a neglected source of analytic leverage for advancing empirical knowledge and theoretical understanding of how race, as a multidimensional social construct, contributes to the production of social inequality.

Read or purchase the article here.

Brazil in black and white? Race categories, the census, and the study of inequality

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Number 8, August 2012
pages 1466-
1483
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.607503

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Jeronimo O. Muniz, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Federal University of Minas Gerais

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Many scholars advocate the adoption of a black-and-white lens for the analysis of racial inequality in Brazil. Drawing on a nationally representative dataset that includes race questions in multiple formats, we evaluate how removal of the ‘brown’ category from the census or other social surveys would likely affect: (1) the descriptive picture of Brazil’s racial composition; and (2) estimates of income inequality between and within racial categories. We find that a forced binary question format results in a whiter and more racially unequal picture of Brazil through the movement of many higher income mixed-race respondents into the white category. We also find that regardless of question format, racial inequality in income accounts for relatively little of Brazil’s overall income inequality. We discuss implications for public policy debates in Brazil, and for the broader scientific and political challenges of ethnic and racial data collection and analysis.

Read the entire article here.

How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Intercensus Racial Reclassification

American Sociological Review
Volume 72, Number 6 (December 2007)
pages 915-939
DOI: 10.1177/000312240707200604

Mara Loveman, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

Jeronimo O. Muniz
Department of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

According to official census results, the Puerto Rican population became significantly whiter in the first half of the twentieth century. Social scientists have long speculated about the source of this trend, but until now, available data did not permit competing hypotheses of Puerto Rico’s whitening to be evaluated empirically. This article revisits the question of how Puerto Rico whitened using newly available Public Use Micro-Samples from the 1910 and 1920 U.S. Censuses of Puerto Rico. Demographic analysis reveals that racial reclassification between censuses generated a “surplus” of nearly 100,000 whites in the 1920 enumerated population. Previous studies of intercensus change in the racial composition of populations have demonstrated that racial reclassification occurs. Going beyond previous studies, we investigate empirically the underlying social mechanisms that fueled change in categorical membership. Reclassification between censuses may reflect the movement of individuals across racial boundaries (boundary crossing), the movement of racial boundaries across individuals (boundary shifting), or both of these boundary dynamics simultaneously. Operationalization of these conceptually distinct boundary dynamics shows that Puerto Rico whitened in the second decade of the twentieth century primarily through boundary shifting-an expansion of the social definition of whiteness itself. Our analysis helps advance general sociological understanding of how symbolic boundaries change.

Read the entire article here.