attached to this notion of racial democracy, and everyone in Brazil, all should understand that Brazil is not a racial democracy, that prejudice and discrimination exist. So many of the rejections of Freyre is to try and say he's wrong on racial democracy, but they're not really questioning whether he's wrong on this issue of mixing.So intellectuals begin to look around and say it's impossible to have a single national identity, this doesn't exist, you begin to have afro-Brazilian groups who are challenging and saying Freyre's wrong.  So I'd say, in that sense, there are important challenges to that narrative and so if you ask Brazilians and certainly the number of people who would describe themselves that way does begin to decline by the 1990s but it's still overwhelming the dominant narrative of who Brazilians are, even if all Brazilians don't believe this. ERIC VAN BEMMEL But what does it mean if it is declining? Does it matter? MARSHALL EAKIN It's interesting.  The heart of the debate in Brazil today is really over this issue of is there such a thing as racial identity? In the 1990s and in the last decade, Brazil has moved towards policies of affirmative action that are somewhat like the United States.  But to have affirmative action, you have to say, in fact, there is a separate group, a racial group that we can identify.  And this has provoked an intense debate in Brazil that is at the very core of identity.  Because if you