Chapter 8 summarizes the book as a whole and discusses theoretical implications. I briefly review the argument and the evidence provided to substantiate its claims. I then assess the implications of these findings for the comparative study of ethnoracial and identity politics and the interdisciplinary study of race in Brazil and Latin America. For comparative political scientists studying ethnic and identity politics, I emphasize how my argument highlights an alternative role for the state in these processes: as a set of actors responsible for shaping citizenship rights and subjective experiences, which in turn shape the subjectivities and identities that citizens bring into the political arena. For interdisciplinary scholars interested in Brazil and Latin America, I emphasize the dynamic nature of the state of racial politics in Brazil, and suggest that future studies move beyond the well-trod characterization of the Brazilian case as the go-to example of the absence of racial politics. I conclude the book with discussion of the challenges ahead for Brazil's racialized democracy.

Chapter 5 rigorously tests the observable implications of the argument with longitudinal analysis. I conduct two panel analyses that isolate the effects of educational expansion from the “contaminating” effects of affirmative action policies. First, drawing on annual household surveys conducted by the census bureau, I construct a synthetic panel of birth cohorts to test the hypothesis that better-educated Brazilians situated in the lower classes are mostly likely to self-darken over time. The analysis supports this hypothesis and finds that this relationship holds across diverse cultural regions of Brazil. Next, I introduce an original panel dataset of Brazilian municipalities in 2000 and 2010 to explore whether spatial variation in educational expansion causes higher rates of reclassification within Brazil. Fixed-effects analysis again supports the hypothesis, showing that greater rates of high school and university attendance correlate with greater black identification. Additional analysis indicates that the hypothesized patterns are clearest in urban centers, and are not conditional on the presence of state-level affirmative action policies.

The introductory chapter (Chapter 1) introduces the empirical and theoretical puzzles that motivate this project and presents a brief overview of the book as a whole. I present and motivate the empirical puzzle at the heart of the book and situate the reclassification reversal as a case of identity change and politicization. I then provide an overview of the central argument and mechanisms, and discuss alternative explanations tied to affirmative action and other prevailing explanations that do not adequately explain the puzzle. Next, I discuss the research design, methods, and positionality. I conclude the chapter with an outline of what is to come.

Chapter 2 focuses on establishing and motivating the empirical puzzle that motivates this study. I present descriptive data to document that reclassification is indeed taking place, and to lay to rest simple explanations that might account for this change. I then shift to motivate the puzzle theoretically. I situate these patterns against the well-established expectations of anthropological and sociological literatures, which emphasize how discrimination and stigmatization have long incentivized whitening, or at least lightening. Zooming out further, I situate these patterns historically, arguing that the recent reclassification reversal should be understood as simply the latest development in the evolution of racial subjectivity and state policy that has spanned three centuries in Brazil.

Chapter 7 identifies and tests implications of the argument for contemporary Brazilian politics. Specifically, I test whether black identifiers with high levels of education exhibit distinct patterns of behavior, mainly in the electoral arena. I compile and analyze high-quality election survey data collected by reputable domestic firms between 2002 and 2018 and show that highly educated, black voters have become a loyal leftist constituency, rallying consistently around the leftist Workers’ Party since 2002. These voters are more ideologically leftist than either their lesser-educated black or better-educated white counterparts. This pattern holds even in the face of political instability stemming from major corruption scandals in 2005 and 2015, as well as the rise of far-right populist leader Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. This chapter illustrates the expectations of the policy feedback literature, showing that policy reforms “feed back” into the political process by altering the identities, interests, and behavior of citizens.

Chapter 4 focuses on illustrating and testing the microlevel pathways that I detail in Chapter 3. I present in-depth interview data with thirty-four Brazilians, which generates the hypothesis and illustrates how exactly education impacts political identity and racial subjectivity. I present firsthand accounts of each pathway of exposure (information, social networks, and the labor market), and show how subjective personal experiences altered racial subjectivities and racialized understandings of power relationships. After illustrating the plausibility of these pathways, I draw on survey data from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s to systematically test the mechanisms uncovered through inductive research. My analysis shows that the direction of the relationship between education and identification indeed changed over time as public education became more inclusive, and that education correlates positively with racial consciousness and black identification by the 2000s.

Chapter 6 turns to affirmative action. I begin with a discussion of two affirmative action-based hypotheses, one instrumental and the other symbolic. Both hypotheses point to these race-targeted policies as explanations for the reclassification reversal. I then test these hypotheses in several ways. First, I analyze priming and list experiments to probe for evidence of strategic manipulation in response to affirmative action. Second, I return to the municipal panel dataset and conduct a difference-in-difference analysis of state-level affirmative action on identification. And finally, I analyze an original panel dataset of university students, constructed from embargoed surveys held by the Ministry of Education in Brazil, to compute difference-in-difference estimates of the effects of affirmative action usage on the identifications of university applicants. Overall, evidence is mixed and inconsistent. Evidence suggests that, as part of the broader array of policies that expanded education, affirmative action does boost the effects of education. But the reclassification reversal cannot be reduced to, nor solely explained by, affirmative action policies.

Chapter 3 details the argument to explain the reclassification reversal and elaborates the causal mechanisms. I begin by defining the concept of “political identity” as I use it throughout this work, distinguishing it from related concepts like social identity. I then argue that institutional change in national-level social policies brought about unprecedented access to education for lower-class citizens (who are likely candidates for reclassification) and show the evolution in educational access from the 1980s to the 2010s. At the individual level, greater education increased the exposure of individuals to racial hierarchies and inequalities, leading them to develop racialized political identities and choose blackness. I identify three main causal pathways: greater exposure to (1) information, (2) social contacts and networks, and (3) labor market experiences and discrimination. I conclude by summarizing the novelty of the hypothesis and the observable implications I test empirically in the chapters that follow.