Back to Black: Racial Reclassification and Political Identity Formation in Brazil

BACK TO BLACK: RACIAL RECLASSIFICATION AND POLITICAL IDENTITY FORMATION IN BRAZIL A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by David Andrew De Micheli August 2019 © 2019 David Andrew De Micheli BACK TO BLACK: RACIAL RECLASSIFICATION AND POLITICAL IDENTITY FORMATION IN BRAZIL David Andrew De Micheli, Ph. D. Cornell University 2019 This dissertation leverages a phenomenon of racial reclassification in Brazil to shed new light on the processes of identity politicization. Conventional wisdom tells us that the history of race mixture, fluid racial boundaries, and stigmatized blackness lead Brazilians to capitalize on racial fluidity and change their racial identifications—to reclassify—toward whiteness. In more recent years, however, Brazilians have demonstrated a marked and newfound tendency to reclassify towards blackness. I argue that this sudden reversal is the unintended consequence of expanded access to secondary and university education in recent decades, which has led many to develop a racialized political consciousness, what I refer to as political identity. State-led efforts to better include lower-class sectors of the citizenry through educational expansion have increased formerly marginal and newly mobile citizens’ exposure to information, social networks, and the labor market, while also endowing them with greater internal efficacy. Greater exposure and efficacy, in turn, have led many to challenge commonsense racial hierarchies and the national myth of racial unity as they have come face-to-face with racialized inequalities in their quests for upward mobility. Reclassification toward blackness, then, is an articulation of these newfound and racialized political identities. This theory is informed and developed through in-depth interviews with reclassifiers collected during more than 15 months of field research in two Brazilian cities. These insights are empirically and systematically tested with longitudinal cohort analysis of annual household data from the census bureau. Additionally, drawing on original survey experiments and an original panel dataset of public university students, I test and find inconsistent support for a rival instrumental hypothesis based on the implementation of race-targeted affirmative action, as well as the hypothesis that racial identification has been shaped by the state’s changing discourse toward race and the national myth of racial unity. Finally, analyzing an originally designed survey, I explore the consequences of these racialized political identities for political engagement and the exercise of citizenship. Ultimately, this dissertation contributes a novel account of identity politicization at the individual level and emphasizes the interaction between social structure and citizenship institutions in these processes. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The debts I incurred while writing and researching this dissertation, I am happy to report, inspire for me only joy and a profound sense of gratitude. Research can be an uncertain and at times a lonely process. But I am grateful to have been surrounded by generous and supportive friends and colleagues without whom I could not have completed this dissertation. First and foremost, I must thank my dissertation committee, Ken Roberts, Michael Jones-Correa, Gustavo Flores-Macías, and Jamila Michener. Each one helped give me confidence in pursuing this topic, even when I doubted whether it was “mainstream” enough. At the same time, each has provided healthy doses of skepticism and has pushed me to sharpen my arguments in ways that greatly improved the project. In particular, Ken Roberts has been an attentive, generous, and incredibly supportive mentor from the day I arrived to Cornell. As an adviser, he has been nothing short of a role model, and I am grateful to him for making my experience in grad school so rewarding and (reasonably) sane. Also in the Government Department at Cornell, I owe Bryce Corrigan a particular debt of gratitude for allowing five-minute meetings to become forty-five- minute meetings way too many times. I must also thank Adam Levine, who provided feedback on the design of my survey instrument and experiments, and Sergio Garcia- Rios, who has also provided generous and encouraging feedback at various stages. I am grateful to Chris Way and the participants of the dissertation colloquium for reading multiple drafts of papers and chapters, sitting through multiple practice talks, and always providing engaged and constructive feedback. And last but certainly not least, at every step of the way Tina Slater was an endless source of support, encouragement, and positivity in the department. v I must also thank Lori Leonard in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell. Following Lori’s sage advice to “let things happen” in the field is part of how I stumbled upon this project in the first place. I am also grateful to Cesar Zucco, who first introduced me to the patterns analyzed in this project during a meeting at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, though he may not remember it. Finally, this project benefitted greatly from generous feedback at the Mark Claster Mamolen workshop at Harvard University. Comments from Reid Andrews, Alejandro de la Fuente, Sidney Chalhoub, and other workshop participants helped me to better situate these patterns historically. In Brazil, I benefitted invaluably from the generous and warm support of friends and colleagues along the way. Antonio Guimarães at the University of São Paulo and Liana Lewis at the Federal University of Pernambuco helped me secure research affiliations that made this field research possible. In São Paulo, I owe a huge debt to Thiago Silva, who helped me really get my fieldwork rolling by providing access to important research sites, insight and information, space to conduct interviews, and many fruitful contacts. I also thank Frei David Santos, Cássio Nascimento, and Gilmar Camará, Priscila Rodrigues, and Milena Lopes, for providing contacts and/or facilitating access to hard-to-reach populations. In Recife, I also benefitted from excellent research assistance from students at UFPE, who transcribed interviews, helped pilot a survey instrument, and helped me navigate Recife. In particular, I thank Cláudia Brito, Jadson Freire, and Rutt Keles. In Brasília, Adriano Senkevics and Marco Pereira provided much-needed (and on-going) assistance at the Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Nacionais. For helpful discussions along the way, I thank Maria Tannuri-Pianto, Mathieu Turgeon, Sergei Soares, Rafael Osorio, and my friend Carlos Oliveira. And of course, I am most indebted to the many Brazilians who agreed to be interviewed by me over the course of this project, and the countless others not mentioned here but who vi helped shape this project, for generously donating their time and for tolerating my sotaque. None of this research would have been possible without the generous support of the organizations that provided funding for this research. The bulk of this fieldwork and original data collection was made possible by a Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship from the Fulbright-Hays Foundations, as well as a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (award number 1647203). This project has also counted on internal grants at Cornell from the Department of Government, the Graduate School, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Latin American Studies Program, and the Center for the Study of Inequality. I am very grateful for their support. Above all, I am not sure I could have so sanely completed this dissertation without the many friends I made in graduate school and in the field. Chief among them are Whitney Taylor, Michael Allen, and Liz Acorn, who have profoundly shaped a time in my life when my friends were my family. Natalie Letsa, Martha Wilfahrt, and Robert Braun were “the upper-classmen” when I entered the program, and have kindly and generously shared wisdom and good times along the way. Many others in the program have made the experience infinitely more enjoyable, including Cait Mastroe, Julius Lagodny, Jimena Valdez, Jake Swanson, and Aditi Sahasrabuddhe. In Recife, I am glad to have met Ben Junge, who has become a great friend and endless source of insight on Brazil. I am especially grateful for his tolerance of my açaí consumption and bad jokes about Recife. Through ups and downs, I have always been able to count on Donna and Billy Schroeder for love, support, and life advice. Last, I must thank Shannan Mattiace, my adviser at Allegheny College and friend, without whose encouragement and support I never could have considered pursuing a PhD. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ................................................................................................. page v List of Figures ................................................................................................................. x List of Tables ................................................................................................................ xii 1. Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1 The Argument ..................................................................................................... 4 Contributions ...................................................................................................... 7

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