Technologies of Redistribution, Regimes of Visibility: Race and Pandemic Assistance in Brazil and Colombia

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  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative-Historical Roundtable 4

Abstract

This paper analyzes the socio-technical conditions under which states “see” race and how these ways of seeing shape redistribution in times of crisis. Over the past decades, Brazil and Colombia have expanded the official visibility of race through census reform, multicultural legislation, and affirmative action. Yet when COVID-19 struck, this heightened racial legibility did not translate into race-conscious emergency policy. Drawing on archival research and 50 interviews with bureaucrats, we show that eligibility relied on pre-existing databases built for other purposes: income-based registries in Brazil and territorially structured systems in Colombia. These infrastructures enacted specific problem definitions. Income, employment status, gender, and territory became visible and governable, while race—though statistically documented and publicly debated—remained largely absent from the datasets used to distribute aid. Bureaucrats justified avoiding racial targeting in three ways: by portraying race as administratively invisible within administrative datasets; by invoking race-blind universalism; and by framing racial targeting as politically controversial compared to categories such as single motherhood. The pandemic thus reveals a disjuncture between discursive recognition and material redistribution. Redistribution occurred—and in some cases reduced ethnoracial disparities—but through ostensibly color-blind mechanisms. By foregrounding the heterogeneity of state data practices, the paper argues that race-conscious governance depends on how racial categories are embedded in everyday bureaucratic tools.

Authors

• Luciana de Souza Leao, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Graziella Moraes D. Silva, Geneva Graduate Institute IHEID

• Margarita Maria Rodriguez Morales, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor