Interviews with several Brazilian candidates revealed a range of reasons for race changes — some said they or campaign officials had simply made a mistake while filling their candidacy form, some said their family background gave them a claim to multiple racial groups, and some said they had recently started to feel a sense of belonging in a new racial category.
Brazilian politicians do “have some latitude to fluctuate on how they present themselves” in order to connect with supporters, Andrew Janusz, a political scientist at the University of Florida who has studied the race changes of candidates extensively, told CNN. Nevertheless, “individuals don’t have total freedom of choice, so if someone is really fair-skinned, they might not be able to say that they are Black, for example,” he said.
Official demographic categories in Brazil have traditionally focused on what demographers call marca — each individual’s external appearance — rather than family origins, unlike the US.
The…