The literature on race relations in Brazil has experienced a strong revival in the past two decades, in large part as a reaction to radical changes in the Brazilian state’s discourse on racial affairs, which officially acknowledged severe racial inequalities in the country and implemented race-targeted policies to ameliorate them. The Politics of Blackness, by Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, is one of the most recent works to be added to this rapidly growing literature. The book uses a mixed-methods approach across its five chapters to examine Afro-Brazilians’ perceptions of important issues in political behavior, such as support for affirmative action, group identification and attachment, discrimination, and the political underrepresentation of blacks. It has two major goals: the first is to understand racial classification and group attachment among Afro-Brazilians, with a focus on adoption of the term negro, a nonofficial umbrella category of racial affirmation sponsored by black Brazilian political actors that encompasses all Brazilians with perceived African ancestry, usually those self-identified as either preto (black) or pardo (brown) in the census categories. The second is to explain how Afro-Brazilians explain racial political inequality (pp. 2–3).
Such an ambitious task is approached through the mobilization of qualitative and qualitative data. In 2012 the author and her research team conducted 76 in-depth interviews in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and São Paulo, the three largest Brazilian cities and important sites of black activism in the country. The author also analyzes original survey data from two surveys conducted in selected neighborhoods of Salvador and São Paulo in 2005–6 and 2008 (pp. 35–38), as well as data from the 2010 and 2012 AmericasBarometer. Although promising, the mixed-method approach produces unbalanced results, because the qualitative and quantitative data often either fail to appropriately support each other or do not align with the author’s aim in the analysis.
The first three chapters are largely based on the in-depth interviews, eventually mobilizing quantitative data. In these chapters, which cover some two-thirds of the book’s empirical analyses, the author provides a detailed portrait of the respondents and their perceptions of the political underrepresentation of Afro-Brazilians, racial identification, and group attachment and linked fate. The extensive qualitative data on such topics represent perhaps the volume’s most important contribution.
Chapter 1 examines the respondents’ perceptions of the political underrepresentation of nonwhites, which is primarily explained as a consequence of racial inequalities and discrimination. The open-ended question posed to respondents, however, starts with “Negros make up more than half the Brazilian population” (p. 67), which presumes that respondents shared the understanding that negro encompasses pardos and pretos, which is not necessarily the case. Some recent scholarship on racial classification suggests that, even though the popularly used term negro is on the rise, it has been adopted mostly by pretos, having gained little traction among pardos (S. R. Bailey and F. M. Fialho, “Shifting Racial Subjectivities and Ideologies in Brazil,” Socius, 4, 2018). If that is the frame of reference respondents had in mind, their answers might have focused on a population different from that implied by the question. No evidence on what respondents understand by negro is provided.
The author then turns to racial identification and group attachment. In Chapter 2, evidence from in-depth interviews shows that a large share of respondents self-identify as negros (60 of the 76 interviewees), and this choice of identification is mostly attributed to ancestry and physical characteristics. Only a tiny minority (six respondents) claimed negro identification as the result of political consciousness. Chapter 3 explores interviewees’ sense of group attachment and linked fate. A sizable share of respondents (32 of the 52 who answered the question) demonstrated a linked fate, with most of the responses addressing racial discrimination and social exclusion. An assessment of the responses clearly demonstrates the dramatic impact of discrimination and exclusion on the respondents’ lives. However, the evidence does not seem robust enough to sustain the claim of the existence of a shared “Afro-Brazilian” group identity, not to mention a linked-fate heuristic and group consciousness. Group consciousness and linked fate require the politicization of group identity, which is almost entirely absent in the responses. Results from Chapters 2 and 3—which suggest that respondents perceive their negritude (a Brazilian equivalent to blackness) as given and static, not a sociopolitical construction—could have important implications for scholarship on racial dynamics in Brazil: the use of negro, rather than being fostered by political consciousness, may be just another category adopted by dark-skinned individuals based on phenotype and ancestry, with the politicization of the term being a rather restricted phenomenon. However, little emphasis is given to such considerations.
In the remaining two chapters, the author deploys survey data to examine, respectively, the effects of linked fate on political attitudes and of perceived discrimination and skin color on support for affirmative action. Although those are important issues in ethnic and racial studies, especially considering the relative scarcity of works on such topics covering the Brazilian case, this exploration is the Achilles’ heel of the work. Analyses that could otherwise produce influential findings unfortunately often suffer from debatable modeling decisions. In this instance, we see a jump to regression results with no descriptive analysis, which could have facilitated an understanding of multivariate findings and avoided the misinterpretation of results. In Chapter 4, the author analyzes data from the 2005–6 survey and argues that linked fate is “a powerful predictor” (p. 193) of several indicators of political preferences. However, the author does not address the very meaning of what has been measured as linked fate (see the earlier discussion). Some results for other variables are “contradictory” (p. 193), but the absence of descriptive statistics makes it hard to evaluate such effects (or lack of them). Important variables such as skin color are coded in controversial ways (p. 180) and may raise a red flag concerning the results of regression models including those factors.
In the last chapter, which addresses support for affirmative action, the focus suddenly shifts from its original focus on Afro-Brazilians to “Afro-Latin Americans.” The author analyzes data from the 2012 AmericasBarometer for Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, and Nicaragua. This turn is hard to justify considering that Brazilian data account for the lion’s share of cases (80%) to the point that contributions to the analyses from other countries become secondary or unimportant (Bolivia, for instance, adds only five cases). The author notes that the 2012 AmericasBarometer frames affirmative action as a zero-sum policy and that such an understanding is not in line with black activists’ demands (p. 201), which could render it less than appropriate for testing support for affirmative action. Such an issue, however, is most probably the result of an unfortunate choice made by the author of the 2012 AmericasBarometer: the 2010 wave of the same survey uses a nonzero-sum wording (see S. R. Bailey et al, “Support for Race-Targeted Affirmative Action in Brazil,” Ethnicities, 18[6], 2018), making it perhaps more appropriate for the author’s argument. The analyses reported in Chapter 5 are sometimes flawed (see, for instance, the interpretation of odds ratios) and might lead to misleading inferences.
The Politics of Blackness achieves its aims in a partial manner. The book unfortunately has important flaws that negatively affect its potential contribution. It would had also benefited from closer proofreading to minimize typos and the potential misinterpretation of results. That said, it extensively documents important qualitative work on racial politics in Brazil, which is a significant contribution to the field.
