What makes a white man white? Definitions teetering between color and class among white men in Rio de Janeiro

This paper discusses how whiteness is perceived and described by upper-middle class men self-identifying as white in Rio de Janeiro. In part one I present a brief history of the role played by whiteness in the formation of Brazil as a nation and the specific characteristics of the relationship between class and color. In part two I explore the main methodological problems related to the study of whiteness within the framework of Brazilian research on whiteness and French sociological analysis of the upper-middle class.