Gladys Mitchell-Walthour has written a welcome addition to a body of recent comparative research on racial politics and public policy in the Americas. The analysis is principally about African descendants in Brazil. Nevertheless, she also makes very important connections to the broader communities of African descendants in the USA and Latin America. This is a complex undertaking, notwithstanding the layers the author adds with a mixed methods quantitative–qualitative technique. The outcome is a nuanced, richly detailed accounting of the subject. If it is not always entirely successful in sustaining the hypotheses advanced, she remains clear-eyed about the flaws—some in the specificities of her methods, and others in the limits of the data universe. Yet, the imagination exhibited in the study provides deep insights into racial politics in Brazil and across the Americas; and, it raises new questions and points directions for additional research.

The purpose of the project, 11 years in the making, is to interrogate how the experience of racism by Afro-Brazilians affects their individual and group behavior: perception of status; identify formation; political decision-making; and policy preferences. The policy dimension focuses on affirmative action legislated in several statutes in 2003 and 2012. The author begins by showing that racial identity is distinct from racial experience; and, that the latter provides a deeper understanding of the behaviors she wishes to account for. Three of Brazil's cities with sizeable populations of Afro-Brazilians are the sites for exploration—Salvador, Rio, and Sao Paulo. The research is based on two major surveys developed by the author (2005–2006, and 2008), and data from the Latin American Political Opinion Project (LAPOP) surveys of 2010 and 2012. The personal survey data were accompanied by in-depth interviews in the cities in 2012. Alas, the two personal surveys (included as appendices) are not waves of the same instrument, which would have provided a perhaps stronger palette for analysis.

Mitchell-Walthour advances an equally complex theoretical approach, but one which has increasingly found favor among feminist scholars; and, among African descendant analysts imbued with a Pan-Africanist imagination. She terms the approach “intersectional analysis based on black feminism broadly (5).” But she also integrates theory from the broader world of African descendant scholarship by adapting the Dawson construct of “linked fate” (largely formulated with reference to the USA). The adaptation became a broad frame by which Mitchell-Walthour explores the racial environment and policy process in Brazil. This approach builds on a 50-year train of thought revisiting the Du Bois proposition auguring value in interrogating and building on the connections and similarities in the experiences of formerly enslaved Africans. Mitchell-Walthour's analysis expands that foundation, borrowing with dexterity from the best of its exponents as she moves from Brazil, to the USA, to Colombia, inter alia.

The first chapter provides a description of the under-representation landscape in Brazil and sets out the theory. The next three chapters make the case for how people of color in Brazil identify in the context of the racialized society; how that identity is experienced and its implications for group attachment; and, how group attachment may form a conception of linked fate. It is here where the elaboration of the quantitative and qualitative outcomes begins. Mitchell-Walthour largely confirms many of the things we already suspect about the environment for African descendants in Brazil. They have a qualitatively different experience than their white counterparts—widespread discrimination in employment, education, and social isolation in standardized “Black spaces,” etc. In the analysis of the expected differences between men and women, a surprising number of these wash out. Many of the logit regression analyses also do not confirm expected hypotheses. Some of this obviously is a product of the high-level of abstraction required by the technique. Other times, it is (as Mitchell-Walthour acknowledges) a product of misfocused survey questions (cf. LAPOP). And often times, it seems that a better strategy may have been to more effectively display the descriptive data, as a prelude to the deft qualitative analysis. Indeed, the flaws of the quantitative part make the textured analysis of the in-depth interviews all the more important for valuable, nuanced accountings of what the experience of racism actually means to Brazilian respondents (in-depth interviews). She is able to show, for example, how the important and comparative construct of linked fate does travel well; and, how the presumed complexity of racial classifications in Brazil travel well in the USA in ways often unexpected or discounted.

The book's fifth chapter is an effort to compare perceptions of discrimination and support for affirmative action in Brazil, to four other Latin American countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, and Nicaragua. In this case the results, entirely based on the LAPOP data, are confounding, to say the least. The quite reasonable hypothesis is not confirmed: that Afro descendants would support affirmative action (a variant of which exists in all of these countries), if they perceive personal discrimination. The descriptive results show little to no consistency with those in Brazil, where such a hypothesis is confirmed. Therefore, none of the regression models, hardly surprising, actually reveal very much. Mitchell-Walthour carefully explains the results as an artifact of the poor way in which the LAPOP question was framed. The execution of such a comparison, therefore, awaits another day.

The curiously titled “Conclusion” chapter is actually a new piece of analysis. It considers the interesting dynamic of how current events are racialized in society—casting doubt on any notion of Brazil's prospects for the long-imagined racial democracy. Here Mitchell-Walthour ruminates on a racial interpretation of the political status of former Presidents Lula and Rouseff. Nevertheless, this oddly-placed chapter does not seriously detract from a very nicely executed work, a challenging contribution that will inspire additional research in this field.