Suchergebnisse

Understanding racial attitudes -- Racial boundaries -- Race and culture -- Stratification beliefs -- The Black movement -- Affirmative action -- Racial sorting -- Making race in Black and White

AbstractBrazil has an "African-origin" population that is proportionally more than four times larger that of African Americans in the United States, but white Brazilians mostly dominate electoral politics. How do ordinary citizens explain this phenomenon? Drawing on a large-sample survey of public opinion in the state of Rio de Janeiro, this article explores perceived explanations for nonwhite underrepresentation in the political arena. It also examines attitudes toward a particular black candidate, Benedita da Silva, to discern the state ofnegroidentity politics. Most Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro cite racial prejudice to explain nonwhite exclusion, although whites do this less than nonwhites. Indicators of a racial undercurrent in political preferences suggest the importance of allegiances based on perceived common racial origins. Class is robustly associated with voting preferences, suggesting that, in contrast to the United States, class differences among nonwhites in Brazil could attenuate the success ofnegroidentity politics.

Group dominance perspectives contend that ideologies are central to the production and reproduction of racial oppression by their negative affect on attitudes toward antiracism initiatives. The Brazilian myth of racial democracy frequently is framed in this light, evoked as a racist ideology to explain an apparent lack of confrontation of racial inequality. Data from a 2000 probability sample of racial attitudes in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, contradict this long-held assertion, showing that most Brazilians in this state recognize racism as playing a role in Brazilian society, support the idea of affirmative action, and express interest in belonging to antiracism organizations. Moreover, opinions on affirmative action appear more strongly correlated with social class, as measured by education level, than race. As compared with results from the United States regarding opinions on similar selected affirmative action policies, the racial gap in Brazilian support for affirmative action is only moderate. Results also show that those who recognize the existence of racial discrimination in Brazil are more likely to support affirmative action. Implications for race theorizing from a group dominance perspective in Brazil as well as for antiracism strategies are addressed.

AbstractA growing body of sociological research has shown that racial identification is not only fluid, but crucially depends on other individual- and societal-level factors. When such factors are also associated with socioeconomic outcomes such as earnings, estimates of the disadvantage experienced by individuals because of how they identify racially obtained from standard regression models may be biased. We illustrate this potential bias using data from a large-scale survey conducted by the Mexican census bureau. This survey is the first by the government agency since the country's independence to include a question on black identification. We find evidence of a substantial bias in estimates of racial disadvantage. Results from our initial models treating racial self-identification as an exogenous predictor indicate that black men have higher earnings than non-black men. However, when we use an instrumental variables model that treats racial self-identification as endogenous, that is, as a function of the same unobserved characteristics as individuals' earnings, we find a significant negative effect of black identification on earnings. While previous studies have acknowledged the endogeneity of race, ours is the first to explicitly model racial self-identification as an endogenous predictor to obtain an unbiased estimate of its effect on individuals' socioeconomic conditions.

A growing body of sociological research has shown that racial identification is not only fluid, but crucially depends on other individual- and societal-level factors. When such factors are also associated with socioeconomic outcomes such as earnings, estimates of the disadvantage experienced by individuals because of how they identify racially obtained from standard regression models may be biased. We illustrate this potential bias using data from a large-scale survey conducted by the Mexican census bureau. This survey is the first by the government agency since the country's independence to include a question on black identification. We find evidence of a substantial bias in estimates of racial disadvantage. Results from our initial models treating racial self-identification as an exogenous predictor indicate that black men have higher earnings than non-black men. However, when we use an instrumental variables model that treats racial self-identification as endogenous, that is, as a function of the same unobserved characteristics as individuals' earnings, we find a significant negative effect of black identification on earnings. While previous studies have acknowledged the endogeneity of race, ours is the first to explicitly model racial self-identification as an endogenous predictor to obtain an unbiased estimate of its effect on individuals' socioeconomic conditions.

AbstractDozens of Brazilian universities recently adopted racial quotas for negros, read Afro‐Brazilians, in higher education. Anyone familiar with the Brazilian context will recognize this step as a paradigm shift in the state's approach to 'race'. State discourse in past decades touted a mixed‐race population not beset by overt discriminatory practices. In response to this new approach, two well‐defined clusters of professors in Brazil's universities authored several dueling manifestos supporting and opposing race‐based affirmative action. This article suggests a 'culture war' framing of the debate and delineates the contrasting historic ideologies of racialism and antiracialism that inform the divergent racial worldviews of each academic camp. It then explores four points of contention from the manifestos that characterize their conflicting perspectives. They differ in terms of (1) their images of the Brazilian nation, (2) their diagnoses of the mechanisms behind non‐white underrepresentation in Brazilian universities, (3) their prognoses for a remedy via racial quotas, and (4) their motivations for entering the debate. At the same time, the article locates some possible common ground.