conversation about race in Brazil became closely intertwined with conversations about poverty and class. Though there were no laws directly targeting those of African descent on the basis of race, there were laws that put in place that created inequality between whites and blacks. For example, when Brazil first became a republic in 1889, voting was restricted to only literate men, which barred the majority of the black population from voting since there were large inequities in education after the abolition of slavery. In addition to this, there was a redefining of crime that criminalized many aspects of African culture. Eugenics In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fear began to spur among the elite classes about how Brazil's early history of miscegenation would affect its development. This fear in combination with the growing popularity of using pseudoscience to explain racial differences led to the growth of different forms of pseudoscientific racism and, particularly, eugenics in Brazil. European critics had long criticized Brazil's racially diverse society for its lack of “racial purity.” Eugenics of the time suggested that blacks were inferior, and mulattoes were “degenerate,” putting Brazil's large black and mixed populations in question. Further, it was thought that tropical climates, like Brazil's, hindered a country's development. One French eugenicist, Count Arthur de Gobineau, attacked Brazil saying that racial mixing in the country had affected every stratosphere of class making the entire country “lazy, ugly and infertile.” These thoughts began to spark fear among Brazil's elite who sought to use ideas of eugenics to better the country's economic standing. One anthropologist who adopted eugenic thought, Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, began to become concerned with the racial mixing occurring in Brazil. He conducted a ‘study’ on people of African origin in Brazil and found that the ethnic group was “unequivocally inferior.” He advocated for separate criminal laws by race and that blacks be subject to separate laws because they were not free to choose crime because of their diminished capacities. However, Rodrigues himself was mixed race and expressed confusion about the status of mixed race individuals in the racial hierarchy. To counter this, he proposed the creation of several categories to express the spectrum of mixed people going from superior to ordinary, to degenerate. In the end, eugenics in Brazil never took on as strong as it did in Europe or North America. Some attribute the pseudoscience's limited success to the