Racial dynamics in contemporary Brazil: an empirical review

Abstract

Racial dynamics in Brazil are shifting. Once considered a context in which the pernicious legacy of the African slave trade had no comfortable home, today this giant of Latin America has begun to officially recognize both historical and contemporary ethnoracial discrimination. Part of this process involves a move away from celebrating racial ambiguity to embracing discrete racial statuses: the mixed-race term moreno has fallen out of favor in many spheres, and the racially affirmative term negro occupies center stage. Most significantly, state actors have implemented racial quotas across the country, perhaps most importantly in higher education. The motor behind these shifting dynamics appears to be the coming together of state and negro movement actors for strategizing a de jure turn. Importantly, public opinion research suggests that the majority of Brazilians support key elements of the State’s new racial politics. In the later part of the 20th-century, scholarship associated Brazil with a lack of racial consciousness; in the first decades of the 21st century, that association is untenable.