Brazilian color terms signal virtue rather than describe actual skin tone

Evidence

Another way of looking at this color flexibility is to tie it less to the “actual” color of a person, whatever that might mean or however it might be fixed, and more to a rhetorics of social characterization racially understood. Thus lighter terms mark the referent in the speaker’s eyes (even when it is self-characterizing) as appealing or virtuous, and terms that are characteristically associated with darkness mark their target as the opposite. Sansone reports that his visibly darker survey respondents often referred to parents and partners by way of terms indicating lighter colors than appearance seemed to suggest. And those who are wealthier would more likely be designated by lighter color terms than those who are not. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1193

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the moral coding of ‘light’ versus ‘dark’ across cultures found in many cosmologies and literary traditions.
• DEFINE: Defines how ‘moreno’ and related terms function as a rhetoric of social characterization rather than objective description.