Only five Latin American censuses allow African-descended self-classification.

Evidence

These two considerations – the historical seepage across the region of raceless racisms and conceptual proliferation – together challenge the possibilities of counting by race. Throughout Latin America just five state censuses, for instance, have enabled African-descended self-classification: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Ecuador. Others, such as the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, or Venezuela, all with at least recognizable African historical presence, do not count in racial terms at all. The case of the Racial Privacy Act in parts of the US, I argued earlier, reveals the debilitating implications of refusing to count by race in the face of extended structural restrictions imposed through race. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1231

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier Racial Privacy Act discussion in this book; also echoes national-park counting discussions in other curated texts about data refusal.