We examine a vast, interdisciplinary, and increasingly global literature concerning skin color and colorism, which are related to status throughout the world. The vast majority of research has investigated Western societies, where color and colorism have been closely related to race and racism. In Latin America, the two sets of concepts have particularly overlapped. In the rest of the world, particularly in Asia, color and colorism have also been important but have evolved separately from the relatively new concepts of race and racism. In recent years, however, color consciousness and white supremacy appear to have been increasingly united, globalized, and commodified, as exemplified by the global multibillion-dollar skin-lightening industry. Finally, we document the growing methodological attention to measurements of skin color and social science data that incorporate skin color measures.

Previous studies of racial inequality have relied on official statistics that presumably use self-classification of race. Using novel data from a 1995 national survey in Brazil, we find that the estimates of racial income inequality based on self-classification are lower than those based on interviewer classification. After human capital and labor market controls, whites earn 26% more than browns with interviewer classification but earn only 17% more than browns with self-classification. Black-brown differences hardly change: Blacks earn 13% and 12% less than browns with interviewer classification and self-classification, respectively. We contend that interviewer classification of race is more appropriate because analysts of racial inequality are interested in the effects of racial discrimination, which depends on how others classify one's race.

R Ra ac ci ia al l AAm mb bi ig gu ui it ty y A Am mo on ng g t th he e B Br ra az zi il li ia an n P Po op pu ul la at ti io on n Edward E. Telles CCPR-012-01 May 2001California Center for Population Research On-Line Working Paper Series This is a revised version of a paper presented at a Brown University Sociology Department colloquium in September, 1998. National Science Foundation Grant SBR-9710366 supported the research. 2 RACIAL AMBIGUITY AMONG THE BRAZILIAN POPULATIONABSTRACT I investigate the extent of ambiguity in racial classification using a national representative survey of Brazilian urban areas. Ambiguity is operationalized as the lack of consistency between racial classification by interviewers (categorization) and respondents (identification) using the categories, white, brown, and black. Racial classifications are consistent in 79 percent of the study sample. However, persons at the light end of the color continuum tend to be consistently classified while ambiguity is especially great for those at the darker end. Using statistical estimation techniques, the findings also reveal that consistency varies from 20 to 100 percent depending on one's education, age, and sex and the racial composition of local urban areas. For example, only 20 percent of high educated females that self-classified as black were classified as black by interviewers while classification as white was nearly always consistent in predominately white urban areas.Also, the direction of the inconsistencies to lighter or darker categories depends on these variables and whether the reference is intervie wer or respondent classification. For example, interviewers "whitened" the classification of higher educated persons who identified themselves as brown, especially when such persons resided in mostly nonwhite cities. Finally, I discuss the role of the Brazilian state in constructing race, and understandings of race and racial groups and comparative studies of race relations.3 PATTERNS AND DIRECTIONS OF AMBIGUITY IN BRAZILIAN RACIAL CLASSIFICATIONAlthough racial differences in life chances depend largely on racial classification and discrimination by others, sociological studies that examine these phenomena often rely on censuses or surveys in which race data is based on self-classification, using predetermined categories. In Brazil, this is problematic because of the ambiguity known to exist in its racial classifications. The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) instructs interviewers to code race in the decennial Census of Brazil according to the respondent's declaration. However, interviewers sometimes respond themselves either because they assume they know the correct response category, they feel uncomfortable in asking about race, or they rush interviews and provide cursory responses to questions they feel are not critical (Rosemberg et al 1993, Pinto 1996. An earlier study showed that racial classification between interviewer and respondent is often inconsistent and racial inequality is high regardless of who ma...

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Comparative research on racial classification has often turned to Latin America, where race is thought to be particularly fluid. Using nationally representative data from the 2010 and 2012 America's Barometer survey, the authors examine patterns of self-identification in four countries. National differences in the relation between skin color, socioeconomic status, and race were found. Skin color predicts race closely in Panama but loosely in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, despite the dominant belief that money whitens, the authors discover that status polarizes ðBrazilÞ, mestizoizes ðColombiaÞ, darkens ðDomin-ican RepublicÞ, or has no effect ðPanamaÞ. The results show that race is both physical and cultural, with country variations in racial schema that reflect specific historical and political trajectories.Throughout the Americas, the idea of race has commonly been used to make social distinctions, especially regarding persons of African origin.

Latin America is one of the most ethnoracially heterogeneous regions of the world. Despite this, health disparities research in Latin America tends to focus on gender, class and regional health differences while downplaying ethnoracial differences. Few scholars have conducted studies of ethnoracial identification and health disparities in Latin America. Research that examines multiple measures of ethnoracial identification is rarer still. Official data on race/ethnicity in Latin America are based on self-identification which can differ from interviewer-ascribed or phenotypic classification based on skin color. We use data from Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru to examine associations of interviewer-ascribed skin color, interviewer-ascribed race/ethnicity, and self-reported race/ethnicity with self-rated health among Latin American adults (ages 18-65). We also examine associations of observer-ascribed skin color with three additional correlates of health – skin color discrimination, class discrimination, and socio-economic status. We find a significant gradient in self-rated health by skin color. Those with darker skin colors report poorer health. Darker skin color influences self-rated health primarily by increasing exposure to class discrimination and low socio-economic status.

No abstract

No abstract

How racial barriers play in the experiences of Mexican Americans has been hotly debated. Some consider Mexican Americans similar to European Americans of a century ago that arrived in the United States with modest backgrounds but were eventually able to participate fully in society. In contrast, others argue that Mexican Americans have been racialized throughout U.S. history and this limits their participation in society. The evidence of persistent educational disadvantages across generations and frequent reports of discrimination and stereotyping support the racialization argument. In this paper, we explore the ways in which race plays a role in the lives of Mexican Americans by examining how education, racial characteristics, social interactions, relate to racial outcomes. We use the Mexican American Study Project, a unique data set based on a 1965 survey of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio combined with surveys of the same respondents and their adult children in 2000, thereby creating a longitudinal and intergenerational data set. First, we found that darker Mexican Americans, therefore appearing more stereotypically Mexican, report more experiences of discrimination. Second, darker men report much more discrimination than lighter men and than women overall. Third, more educated Mexican Americans experience more stereotyping and discrimination than their less-educated counterparts, which is partly due to their greater contact with Whites. Lastly, having greater contact with Whites leads to experiencing more stereotyping and discrimination. Our results are indicative of the ways in which Mexican Americans are racialized in the United States.