Demographic data from the United States suggest that the methods used to classify the population into racial categories have not kept pace with changes in the ways people identify themselves.
In the last Census, last year, the number of people who checked the “multiracial” option, for example, rose 276%. As the American survey allows you to choose more than one option of racial declaration, another phenomenon that caught the attention of demographers was the 129% growth among those who marked the option “some other race”.
According to the Census results, 15.1% of the US population is in this category, which would make it the second largest racial group in the country, behind only the portion of Americans who declare themselves white and ahead of those who identify themselves as blacks or African Americans.
Considering that the classification was created with the intention of covering only those who do not identify with the existing categories, such a significant increase indicates that most Americans may be reassessing their racial identity.
For Denilde Holzhacker, coordinator of the ESPM’s Americas Studies Center, at least two hypotheses can explain the high percentages of variation. The first is the debate about the inclusion of Latinos in the US demographic picture. “This group is very ethnically diverse; there are white, black, second generation, and [no Censo] there is a deficit in rankings to encompass all this diversity.”
Another argument concerns African Americans and the greater social acceptance of interracial marriages. “The legal barriers fell [que criminalizavam a prática durante os perÃodos de segregação], but there was little tolerance for unions between whites and blacks,” he says. The commissions that organize the Censuses, according to the expert, have been looking for more ways to contemplate this trend in the surveys.
With regard to the way you see your own race, a similar phenomenon occurs with the population that declares itself black in Brazil. According to the most recent data from the PNAD (National Household Sample Survey), by the IBGE, Brazilians who identify themselves as black or brown represent 54.2% of the population.
This numerical majority, however, has been influenced by reflection on the concept of racial identity. This is what a study carried out by Josimar Gonçalves de Jesus, PhD in applied economics from Esalq/USP, points out. By analyzing demographic data from 1995 to 2015 using a mathematical model, the economist inferred that 90.9% of the increase in the proportion of blacks in the total Brazilian population was due to the change in the way people see themselves —their identity racial.
“Brazil is not becoming black, it is recognizing itself as such”, says Jesus. According to him, although there is still a long way to go, the strong articulation of the black movements has been making people realize more and more that there is no shame in asserting themselves as belonging to this group.
The resignification of racial identity has lasted for centuries, referring to colonial Brazil. At that time, it was of interest to white elites that different social groups understand the concept of race as a negotiable factor. “This idea of ​​racial fluidity brought with it the ideology of whitening. If the individual was not so dark-skinned, for example, and was going through some movement towards social ascendancy, he could be read as ‘less black’ by society”, explains.
At the same time, according to retired IBGE researcher José Luis Petruccelli, it is natural that racial classifications are periodically reassessed and questioned, since the concept of race is the result of social, not biological, constructions.
“Nobody has a characteristic that defines him once and for all, from his birth to the day of his death, as a qualifying element in relation to his race”, he says. “The concept is dynamic, changes with time, place and the individual.”
Organizer of the publication that explains and establishes the foundations of the racial classifications used by the IBGE, Petruccelli explains that the methodology applied in the different census surveys plays a fundamental role in the construction of identities — and can help to understand the demographic phenomena observed around the world.
The 1976 Pnad, for example, chose to ask open questions about racial declaration, without presenting pre-established options. The result was the collection of 136 racial classifications, with categories such as “coffee with milk”, “lush white”, “dirty white”, “dark white” and “donkey when it runs away”.
In the US, until the 1960s, census takers determined the racial classification of respondents — what, in demographic jargon, is called hetero-attribution. This methodology tended to be particularly harmful and prejudiced against blacks and Latinos. Mexicans, for example, needed to be declared as white if they wanted to file a naturalization application. In practice, only white people could be called American.
In Argentina, the category “Afro-descendant” appeared for the first time in the Census in 2010. Postponed by the pandemic, the next survey, in 2022, will still bring the possibility of declaring oneself “black” — although there are criticisms of the use of the term, frequently used of pejorative form among Argentines. In Chile, people who, when asked to which indigenous people they belong, specified in the category “other” that they were of African descent are counted as black.
France, the main destination for a large number of immigrants from African and Caribbean countries, does not collect demographic data based on racial classifications. More than that: in the country, the topic is taboo and this type of survey can be considered illegal.
Germany, with its dismal record of racially motivated hate crimes, limits information on race to possible “migrant origins”. There are also sectors that propose removing the term “race” from the Constitution, in part because the word, as in Portuguese, can also be used to refer to animals.
For Petruccelli, even though some countries choose to include racial categories treated as equivalent to “Blacks” or “Afro-descendants”, this methodological choice may represent an attempt to, if not mask, at least postpone structural debates. “It also expresses the desire to present itself as a society with the racial homogeneity that no country has. We are all mixed and all descended from diverse populations throughout our history.”
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