Endogenous Race in Brazil: Affirmative Action and the Construction of Racial Identity among Young Adults

Andrew M. Francis and Maria Tannuri-Pianto

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2013, vol. 61, issue 4, 731 - 753

Abstract: In this article, we study the construction of racial identity among students at a university that recently adopted racial quotas in admissions. Using data collected by the authors, we find that parents' race, family socioeconomic status, gender, and racial quotas have a significant effect on self-reported race. The evidence indicates that students in mixed-race families are systematically more likely to identify with their mother's race than with their father's. Conditional on skin tone quintile, higher socioeconomic status is associated with lighter racial self-classification, and lower socioeconomic status with darker racial self-classification. Additionally, the results demonstrate that being male is associated with lighter racial self-classification, and being female with darker self-classification. Policy changes may also affect racial identity. After the adoption of racial quotas, students in the darkest two quintiles were less likely to self-identify as branco, those in the fourth quintile were more likely to self-identify as pardo, and those in the darkest quintile were more likely to self-identify as preto.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/670375 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/670375 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/670375

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().