The "Pardo" As a Boundary: Racial Classification Commissions in Brazilian Bureaucracy

Once seen as a "racial democracy," Brazil now has the largest system of racial affirmative action in the world. Racial quotas are applied in a range of public policies, from university admissions to civil service selections. Despite these advances, defining the racial identity of Brazil’s non-white population remains highly contested. To address this, various government agencies have introduced racial heteroidentification commissions in charge of defining who qualifies for affirmative action benefits. Based on extensive qualitative and quantitative research with commission members, we explore how they make sense of these racial categories. We argue that these commissions face the complex challenge of addressing the liminal status of "pardos," the largest racial category in Brazil, which includes a wide variety of mixed-race groups. In their efforts to clearly distinguish between Afro-descendants and whites, the commissions often create new ambiguities, putting in a identity limbo a group that constitutes a significant portion of the country's population.