A growing body of literature has focused on how different states continuously “make race” by legitimizing certain racial categories while invisibilizing others. Much less has been written on the actual processes of transforming race into a bureaucratic category when implementing antiracist public policies. This article focuses on the recent use of verification commissions to validate the racial self-identification of potential beneficiaries of racial quotas at federal higher education institutions in Brazil. We argue that through their choices, particularly through their definition of what race is, of who can see race, and of how to see race, these commissions are transforming not only understandings about affirmative action’s aims but also understandings of race. The study focuses on three potential consequences of commission practices for Brazilian racial boundaries: the disciplining of racial identifications, the decontextualization of race, and the individualization of racial injustice.

The social category “people of color” has been born twice from the mixing of peoples in the United States. This article seeks to explain the category’s emergence and varied boundaries in the late 1700s and early 1800s, its decline in the mid-1800s, and its re-emergence and spread in a related meaning of enlarged scope since the 1970s. In both phases, “people of color” has served as a bridging identity across racial lines for those not included among whites; both times it has served primarily as a term of respect, not abuse. The category’s revival has rested on a contested people-of-color equation—the equating of other minorities with Black people—and has come in four stages: 1) the advent of a new configuration of governmentally recognized minorities in the 1960s and 1970s; 2) the adoption of “people of color” as a collective identity for those groups, initially among Black, progressive, and feminist activists; 3) the polarized diffusion of “people of color” in the media; and 4) the emergence among activists of second thoughts about the category “people of color” as insufficiently specific. The article concludes with a brief discussion of whether the traditional color line is being redrawn as a people-of-color line.

Some scholars argue that Latina/os in the United States may soon become White, much like the supposed Whitening of Eastern European immigrant groups in the early twentieth century. High rates of White racial identification on surveys among Latina/os is one explanation provided for this assertion. However, personal identification is but one element of racial boundary maintenance. It is when personal identification is externally validated that it is most closely associated with group-based experiences. This article maps components of the White-Latino racial boundary that may be permeable to White expansion by examining conditions under which Latina/os self-identify as White and report that they are externally classified as White by other Americans. Employing novel data from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, this article shows that nearly 40% of Latina/os sometimes self-identify as White, yet a much smaller proportion—only 6%—report being externally classified as White by others. Moreover, logistic regression analyses suggest that for those with light phenotypical features and high levels of socioeconomic status, the odds of reported external Whitening are increased. Interestingly, phenotypically light Latina/os with low-socioeconomic-status levels have low probabilities of reporting external classification as White when compared to their phenotypically light and high-socioeconomic-status counterparts, suggesting that the combination of both skin color and class may be central to the White-Latino racial boundary. Results also indicate that many who report external Whitening do not prefer to self-identify as White. In sum, multidimensional measures of racial classification indicate that only a very small minority of Latina/os may be “becoming White” in ways that some previous researchers have predicted.

Race statistics and race policy have been intertwined in American history since its founding, starting with the infamous three-fifths clause, continuing with policies based on nineteenth-century race science, the restrictionist immigration at the turn of the century, the Jim Crow regime, and carrying into the civil rights era through such policy concepts as institutional racism, statistical proportionality, disparate impact, and affirmative action. Across this history, the policies and the statistics were about “race,” whether they punished or benefited, were racist or antiracist. But can there be policy that misuses race statistics, that is presented as about race when it should not be? Race statistics are a powerful policy hammer in American history, but not everything is, in fact, a nail. Today the census undercount is argued over as if it is about race; it isn't really. Posing far greater danger, census race categories have worked their way into genomic medicine. The nineteenth-century belief that “race is biological” lingers in the American mind. The use of census categories in genomic medicine risks re-biologizing race. Maybe we should not leave the hammer lying around.

The assessment of multiracial status in U.S. health research is fraught with challenges that limit our ability to enumerate and study this population. This paper reconceptualizes the assessment of multiracial status through the development of a model with three dimensions: mixed ancestry multiracial status, self-identified multiracial status, and socially assigned multiracial status. We present challenges to studying multiracial populations and provide recommendations for improving the assessment of multiracial status in health research.