Standard accounts of Brazilian color-flexibility presuppose fixed racial reference

Evidence

Many analysts of the Brazilian racial lexicon – Sansone and Telles are two recently among a wide range – will comment that Brazilians use varying terms in differing circumstances to make polite reference to people often as lighter or, more occasionally in disparaging terms, as darker than they in fact are. This preference is usually taken to indicate a desire for what whiteness symbolically represents, if not for whiteness itself, not unlike that expressed by the young schoolchildren in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in the US context. But this way of characterizing the matter of course presupposes some objectivity, some fixity, to the racial palette. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1192

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the critique that colorblindness hides ongoing discrimination, connecting to Goldberg’s overall thesis throughout the book.