ABSTRACT
I am a scholar of comparative politics who consciously includes the United States in my study. This is not surprising. I study racial politics, and American experiences often serve as explicit or, more often, implicit referents for assessments about the nature of racial politics in other countries. In my first book, Shades of Citizenship (2000), I analyzed how Brazilians compared racial politics in the two countries and judged, until very recently, Brazil more favorably. However, the central focus of that book was the ideological and political origins of racial categories and the production of demographic data over time. In my research, I use qualitative methods, largely based in history. While I recognize the utility and power of statistical data and methods, I am much more interested in the origins of data. In many instances, statistics conceal as much as they purport to illuminate.
