Who Are the Morenas?

That Brazilians hold a different conception of race from Americans has become quite clear to analysts both in Brazil and in the However, Brazilians do understand the nuances of how race is defined in their own country much better than they understand conceptions of race, just as would be expected of Americans in understanding versus Brazilian conceptions of race. Nonetheless, Harris et al. (1993) claim that their findings expose the error of imposing upon the rest of the hemisphere rigid dichotomous (white/nonwhite) or trichotomous (white/mixed/black) categories deemed appropriate for establishing racial identity in the U.S. (451). They recommend that color self-identification in the Brazilian Census allow respondents to use the more popular morenalo term rather than (or in addition to) pardalo, which is the term used by the Brazilian Census. However, I am concerned that because the term morenalo is an ambiguous referent to race, its use greatly mystifies racial distinctions in Brazil. Also, generalizing results from one small town to a socially and economically diverse and mostly urban country seems risky at best. The authors imply that officials and analysts of the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE), the federal agency responsible for carrying out the Census of Brazil, do not understand Brazilian conceptions of race or color and therefore parody racial categories. The IBGE continues to use the categories of white (branca), parda/o and black (preto) because they believe that these categories best capture a salient hierarchy of racial distinctions across a large heterogeneous country where the scores of racial labels, like morena/o, are often ambiguous and may vary regionally. The use of the popular term morena/o would likely include persons at nearly all points in the color continuum the exception of white persons light hair color (loira/o). While Harris and associates collected extensive data on both objective and subjective indicators of race, I am struck by the fact that the authors do not examine the extent to which racial self-identification is linked to actual phenotype. Why haven't the authors told us who are the whites (under alternative categorizations)? Who are the morenas? What do they look like? The first author's own evidence, like that of many others, suggests that morena/o is an ambiguous racial category. Harris (1970) observed that Brazilians seem to define almost any combination of facial features by the term morenalo with a high but unpatterned frequency (12). Earlier, Harris (1956) defined