Colonial legacies and comparative racial identification in the Americas

What accounts for variation in racial identification in the Americas? An influential first generation of race scholarship attributed contemporary racial schemas to the cultural legacies of different colonizers, whereas a second generation has emphasized varying national ideologies like mestizaje. Seeking to adjudicate between these perspectives, the author theorizes the process linking colonial legacies to national racial ideologies and, in turn, contemporary patterns of racial identification. He tests this theory using data from 27 countries and 25 states in Brazil. He finds that colonial demography, not colonizer cultural legacies, best accounts for contemporary racial schemas. As such, he concludes that the importance of colonizer identity to racial formation has been overstated and that national racial ideologies are best understood as the endogenous product of differences in colonial European settlement. By bridging comparative-historical sociology and comparative race and ethnicity, this article helps resolve the discordant arguments of two influential generations of race scholarship.