Paradoxically, the same genomic arguments about the nonexistence of biologically differentiated racial categories can work in a different way to re-racialize Brazilian society.

Paradoxically, the same genomic arguments about the nonexistence of biologically differentiated racial categories can work in a different way to re-racialize Brazilian society. The genetic data are used to argue that everyone is more or less mixed and that Brazil is a heterogeneously mestiço nation. But this argument easily resonates, in the wider public sphere, with a racialized conception of the nation, understood as a population that has been constituted by the mixture of three original racial stocks: the concept of ‘mestiço’ has great difficulty in shaking off its racialized genealogy (Young, 1995), even if the geneticists argue that race has no biological reality in general and specifically in Brazil. Thus, the re-geneticization of the social order makes more available new types of genetic data and idioms to think about social identities: the identity of mestiço, which is deeply racialized, is validated in genetic terms, even as race itself and racial differences are denied.

Peter Wade and Michael Kent, “Genetics against race: Science, politics and affirmative action in Brazil,” Social Studies of Science, Volume 45, Number 6 (December 2015): 831. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0306312715610217.

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