Racial Silence in the Face of Crisis: Bureaucratic Choices in Latin America’s Pandemic Assistance

Luciana de Souza Leao, University of Michigan
Graziella Moraes Dias da Silva, Geneva Graduate Institute
Margarita Rodriguez, University of Michigan

This paper seeks to better understand how states' decisions to acknowledge race and address racial inequalities are translated (or not) into race-targeted policies. We approach these debates from the perspective of policymakers who needed to decide whether to target beneficiary populations by race when formulating pandemic cash transfer programs in Brazil and Colombia during the COVID-19 crisis. In these two countries, federal governments launched massive cash transfer programs to combat the short-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, despite the widespread and official acknowledgement of racial inequalities in the two countries, the Brazilian and Colombian federal governments did not explicitly mention race (or racial groups) in their official communication about the pandemic transfers. Such a specific scenario provides a particularly good case to examine the nuances of colorblind policies, since bureaucrats had to make quick decisions about who and how to distribute cash assistance (more or less two weeks in both contexts). Through official documents and interviews with bureaucrats involved in the design and implementation of COVID-19 pandemic transfers in Brazil and Colombia, we found a mix of defenses of colorblind universalism, a resistance to race, and an idea that a focus on considering that socioeconomic vulnerability could be racially consequential. More conceptually, we argue that the dichotomy between race-conscious policies as racially redistributive and race-blind policies as racially regressive should be nuanced. Following Wade (2024), being racially aware does not necessarily mean adopting racially targeted policies.

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 Presented in Session 177. Social Science Histories of Expertise (1): Selected Histories of Knowledge and Ignorance