The stir on the quotas for blacks in public universities placed, once more, the issue of race in the Brazilian public sphere. This is however only part of the implementation process of affirmative action that has been consolidated in the last decade. This article examines how racial categorizations are appropriated by different cognitive frameworks that provide a reading of collective identities and how their borders are perceived. In such repertoires, national, group and individual identities intersect allowing to organize the perception of ethnic and racial diversity as well as its public expression according to different frames. We distinguish three main repertoires of ethnic and racial categorization, namely social-fusionist, structural-categorical, dialogical categorical, that have implications for the ways how modalities of governance of diversity are conceived, the social force of collective identities and the perceived role of the State in distribution and recognition practices.

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