I am not a historian, but I can tell you that in Brazil there was a very different policy on racial identity, the focus being much more on your appearance than your background. Basically if you could "pass" for white you were considered white. If you couldn't really "pass" for white but you managed to be an important figure in society you would still be considered white. My background is in literature so I can give you two literary examples, one fictional another real. The famous writer and pro-slavery politician José de Alencar wrote a play called "Mãe (Mother)" where the drama is that the protagonist, a student of medicine, wants to marry his love, but her father can't allow it due to his crippling debt, wanting to marry her to more well-off suitor. To solve that our hero decides to sell his slave to pay off his "father-in-law's" debt, however we discover that the protagonist's (I forgot his name, sorry!) slave Joana, is actually his mother! A lot of back and forth occurs but two things of notice happen: 1 - When his "father-in-law" discovers that he is a slave's son he gets even more wary about the marriage. 2 - When Joana dies, having been sold and with his debt cleared the father-in-law is more than happy to accept the protagonist's proposal. Therefore, as long as your background is not apparent nobody cares where you come from.

The other example is of our greatest writer Machado de Assis. He too, was a the son of a slave, but through his mastery of his craft he was able to become known as the greatest writer of Brazil. Were he born in the United States I have no doubt he would be readily seen as black as you can clearly see from this [photograph](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_WSTgQ8kB85Y/S9I4PRiNt8I/AAAAAAAAAns/xixtGGcG5vU/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/machadodeassis1 .jpg), however his preeminent position in brazilian society, founding the Brazilian Academy of Letters and being its first chairman for example, pretty much erased his blackness for the longest time (let it be said that he was a shrewd man, and knew that that erasure was his ticket to a better life) to such a degree that even in this federal bank's ad (the title says "Machado de Assis turned white" which just to be clear is not the actual title of the ad) he was initially portrayed as white, eventually releasing another more historically accurate version of the same ad.

Edit: Words