This book leverages a recent phenomenon of racial reclassification in Brazil to shed new light on the processes of identity formation and politicization. Specifically, I focus on documenting and explaining a newfound tendency for Brazilians to change their racial self-identifications—to reclassify—and adopt nonwhite identities. Traditionally, scholars have argued that racial fluidity and black stigmatization lead Brazilians to “self-whiten,” or at least lighten, when possible. But in recent years, Brazilians have come to exhibit an unmistakable tendency to adopt darker, and especially black, racial identities. Explaining this sudden shift in the status quo—what I refer to as the reclassification reversal—is the central focus of my book. This reversal is fascinating in its own right and demands explanation as a phenomenon that contradicts scholarly wisdom on Brazilian and Latin American ethnoracial dynamics. But these shifting patterns of identification also offer a rare opportunity to study identity change and politicization in a context where the phenomenon can be detected and analyzed empirically and systematically.

     I argue that the reclassification reversal is the consequence of expanded access to education, which has unintentionally reshaped racial subjectivities and led Brazilians to cross racial boundaries and choose blackness. More specifically, state-led efforts to better include lower-class sectors of the citizenry via social policy expansion have unleashed unprecedented waves of upward mobility for the lower classes, many of whom have options in their racial identifications and who are traditionally susceptible to practices known as whitening. Greater access to secondary and university education for these sectors, however, has increased the exposure of newly mobile citizens to information, social networks, and the labor market. In turn, this increased exposure has led many to come face-to-face with racial hierarchies and inequalities in their pursuit of upward mobility, altering the personal experiences that inform their racial identifications and political identities—the bases on which they make sense of power relationships. Brazilians are increasingly choosing and politicizing blackness, then, as an articulation of these newfound and racialized political identities.

     Over the book’s eight chapters, I develop this argument and its implications conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. After establishing the empirical puzzle and theoretical framework, two empirical chapters illustrate the causal argument with qualitative interview data and test it systematically with panel data. I then probe the major alternative argument centering on affirmative action policies, relying on survey experiments and panel data of municipalities and university students. And finally, I demonstrate the electoral consequences of the reclassification reversal by analyzing electoral behavior in general elections between 2002 and 2018. In the end, my account is developed from a wealth of qualitative and quantitative data, collected over 18 months of field research in Brazil. These data include: participant observation and ethnographic interview data with reclassifiers and non-reclassifiers; synthetic panel datasets of microlevel census data spanning 1976 and 2015; a multilevel panel dataset of 5,500 municipalities between 1991 and 2010; a panel dataset of university students constructed from embargoed Ministry of Education surveys; and public opinion and election surveys spanning 1986 and 2018.

     The account of identity politicization I put forward in this book emphasizes the ways in which citizenship institutions (the accessibility of education) interact with social structures (racial hierarchies and inequalities) to shape the microlevel processes of identity formation and politicization. I challenge the competing, knee-jerk explanations that center on the instrumental benefits of affirmative action. And I challenge the conventional wisdom on racial subjectivity and the political salience of racial difference in contemporary Brazilian politics. Instead, the book highlights identity politicization processes as a policy feedback effect – a new politics of identity generated by new social policies.