This text seeks to reflect notions of racialization and classification processes of “pardos” subjects based on a search with the racial heteroidentification commission of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and with the academic community of the University. The material of this research is formed by a set of data related to the ethnographic process developed with the commission, interviews with UFBA students and members of the commissions, and virtual research with the UFBA group on Facebook. In Brazil, in 2022, the first decade of the “Lei de Quotas” was completed, a law that guaranteed the reservation of vacancies in universities and federal institutes for the black population and students from public schools. Racial heteroidentification commissions are relatively new mechanisms, incorporated into the selective processes for racial quotas at universities and public tenders, which seek to assess the racial self-declaration of quota candidates, in order to avoid fraud. The work of these commissions, however, has provoked strong dissent, marked by lawsuits that challenge their results and, frequently, newspaper headlines that talk about fraud perpetrated by white subjects who declared themselves black (quota holders) and, at the same time, disapproved black candidates unfairly by these commissions. To the extent that, according to Brazilian legislation, blacks and pardos make up the country's black population, recipients of affirmative action policies, we can understand that both fraud and injustice are, both, key to the plasticity of the category “pardos”. This category, “a bag of cats” (Schwarcz, 2012), denotes a mestizo group and has, in the historical transformations of their meanings, and in the political correlations of their respective times, conflicting uses. The challenge of properly framing this racial group is part of the struggle to guarantee rights for the black population in Brazil, and therein lies the importance of revisiting it at this time.
