Edward E. Telles's consideration of race in Brazil is a landmark study. It brings scholarly perspective, the careful application of quantitative data, systematic analysis, a thoughtful reading of contemporary conditions, and a deep familiarity with the subject to a frequently fragmented, contradictory, and anecdotal area of scholarship.

The book is a study of race. That is critical. The Another in the title points to one of the key reasons why. Telles states the condition explicitly: “Since DuBois the relation of blacks and whites in the United States has continued to serve as the paradigmatic case for the sociological understanding of race” (p. 2). He says that matters of race are assumed to be similar in places like Brazil: “But that is clearly not the case, as I will demonstrate in this book” (p. 6).

The study's focus on race is significant for Brazil where treatments of race are conflicting. Telles cites three tendencies: (1) There is little to no racial discrimination, (2) there is widespread but ephemeral racial discrimination, and (3) there is deep and structural racial discrimination (p. 6). He collapses the second and third categories into one, as both admit the existence of racial discrimination in Brazil. He thus confronts an international understanding of race based on a paradigm derived from conditions in the United States and challenges two dominant interpretations of race and its effects in Brazil: “Ultimately, I seek to reexamine the adequacy of race relations theories” (p. 15) To accomplish this, he undertakes a rigorous study of race there.

The author examines the two Brazilian traditions. One difference between them is generational. The nondiscriminatory school came first and is associated with Gilberto Freyere. The latter school is associated primarily with Florestan Fernandes and Carlos Hasenbalg. Telles sees the generational differences as ideological. Scholars understand race in Brazil as they do because their ideologies dispose them to see race in particular ways. Another difference centers around the geographical areas where the scholars did their research. The nondiscriminatory findings were largely derived from the Northeast. The discriminatory findings were from studies conducted mainly in the Southeast. Confounding a region with the nation is very likely to produce suspect results.

Telles reasons that the two sets of thinkers focus on different aspects of Brazilian race relations. He calls one of these aspects, the vertical dimension, the ways in which Brazilian society is stratified. He calls the other, the horizontal dimension, the nonstratified relations between people, how they get along as neighbors, friends, lovers, spouses, families, compatriots. The nondiscriminatory school emphasizes the horizontal dimension. The discriminatory school emphasizes the vertical. He claims that both dimensions are present. In order to understand race in Brazil, one must understand how they are present and the effects of their interaction.

Telles's correctives are to replace the databases and to develop substantial qualitative information. He discards northeastern and southeastern regional samples for national samples. His 1997–2000 posting as a Ford Foundation officer in the country gave him unprecedented access to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics and exposed him to the major political and social actors of the period. The institute calculated census tract data for him. He was able to examine the computer programs to ensure that formulas for computing indicators were correctly applied.

In Chapters 1 through 3, Telles lays the groundwork for his detailed presentation. In Chapter 4, he tackles the confounding enigma of racial classification in Brazil, setting forth an analysis that will be required reading for any serious student of Brazilian social life. He indeed shows another America, where 38% of “white” males indicate that they have some African ancestry. In Chapters 5 through 8, he characterizes Brazilian life in its vertical and horizontal dimensions. In Chapter 9 he discusses his findings and in Chapter 10 he examines how public policy can influence the situations he describes.

The strengths of this book greatly outweigh its weaknesses, but the latter require some attention. Reducing three tendencies among racial studies to two is misleading. The differences among all three are substantial. Within the collapsed set, the Fernandes group is comfortable with an understanding of the essentially nonracist character of Brazilians and with North American theories that industrial development will lead to the reduction of class barriers and racial distinctions. The Hasenbalg group is insistent on the deep, structural characteristics of racism in Brazil and that increased industrial and postindustrial development have the potential to worsen it. Yet even the nondiscriminatory and discriminatory schools are not antithetical. Most sympathizers of Fernandes and Hasenbalg know that Brazil has the horizontal dimensions Telles associates with the Freyere school. They do not suggest that race in Brazil is like race in the United States. They question whether a warmer, friendlier racial stratification does much for the great masses of black and brown Brazilians.

Telles assumes too uncritically the reliability of Brazilian census figures. In Shades of Citizenship (2000), Melissa Nobles undertakes a detailed, longitudinal comparison of the racial roles of the census in the United States and Brazil. She indicates on page 93 that often in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Brazil, the census was “unreliable.” Telles never raises the question of whether similar problems might exist in the dense and dangerous “peripheries” of contemporary Brazilian cities, even though it is a constant refrain of the black movement.

His explanations of vertical and horizontal dimensions are minimal. The concepts constitute a powerful shorthand, but it is the reader who must refine it.

Telles suffers from a failing common to students of African-descended peoples. He accuses black leaders of being less than perfect. He cites the achievements of the Brazilian black movement at length, then says, “Despite these gains, the black movement has not been able to achieve at least two … challenges it has laid out for itself: creating a mass movement and … constructing a popular negro identity” (p. 235). Given the entrenched and aggressive resistance to the Afro-Brazilian efforts at racial change that Telles has so ably documented, this characterization minimizes the context—and hence, the magnitude—of the accomplishment.

His use of sources for race in the United States is sometimes bewildering. Why on page 234 use Livio Sansome, a scholar of Afro-Brazilian life, as an authority on African continuities in the United States? On page 197, he cites a 1987 study by Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen, The Quality of Life and the Color Line in America, as indicating that in 1970, less than 40% of black people in the United States lived in the South. The U.S. census for that year lists 11,955,143 black people in the United States as residing in the South, out of a national black population of 22,530,362.

The most egregious weakness of Race in Another America is its proofreading. A press as distinguished as Princeton University Press, publishing a book of this importance, has done the author a disservice by the quality of its proofing. The first sentence of the first page contains an error in verb tense. The book is replete with questionable editorial decisions, such as repeating exact phrases throughout the text. Errors range from publication dates of sources to years that international events occurred.

The author's faults are minor. His achievement is monumental. His identification of hyperinequality, a discriminatory glass ceiling, and a racist culture as the three factors primarily responsible for racial inequalities in Brazil is realized by a remarkable tour de force. Telles understands the contextual character of most social science representations. He shows how empirical findings derive their meanings, not only from the quality of academic conceptualizations, data, and analysis but also from societal conceptions. Telles has produced a work of unusual richness and clarity. It sets a standard for the study of race in Brazil against which all future works on the subject will be measured.