Racial terminology in Brazil is flexible but not detached from color assumptions

Evidence

Here the syntax of racial terms effects a semantic field the significance of which is more in their meaning-making than in any claim to the reductive objectivity of their referentiality. And by casting this as a tendency, I am not suggesting that racial reference in Brazil has come completely unglued from color assumptions about referents, only that these connections are not as fast and fixed as racial characterization traditionally (pre)tends to presume. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1194

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to Goldberg’s closing distinction between tendency and fixity in racial categories.