The focus of the report was on the affirmative action mandate established as federal law in Brazil during 2014. This policy enacted a quota wherein 20% of students accepted to federal universities and 20% of all employees working civil service jobs must be black. By establishing benefits in the form of increased quality of education and financial security, NPR substantiated that the government of Brazil had provided the population with an incentive to (re)claim African heritage. And with such an extensive history of multiracial descendancy, it is difficult to visually determine whether an applicant is actually of African descent. Each individual who indicates black on these applications must be verified by the anti-fraud commission and determined to be black based upon facial features—a process which is informed by Brazilian society's tendency to prioritize appearance over heritage in terms of identity formulation. The colonial history of the United States has provided the basis for the nation's current race relations. As European colonial empires expanded in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, European constructions of race were spread globally. The concepts of race and racial hierarchies were developed as a means to justify emerging forms of exploitation during the colonial era. These emerging social constructs provided a framework for societies to categorize individuals and subsequently place them within a hierarchy—typically seen with what is defined as ‘white’ at the top and ‘black’ at the bottom. Professor of sociology, G. Reginald Daniel elaborates that these systems were ultimately constructed and employed as a means by which the practice of enslaving Africans could be defended. Slavery provided the context for the emergence of multiracial identities in colonial America as African slaves and European indentured servants formed interracial unions. But the multiracial children of these relationships were perceived as a threat to the purity of the white race, and anti-miscegenation laws were promptly passed in the 1660s to preserve distinct racial categories. Further means of legitimizing the construct of race in the United States emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through what was known as racial science or scientific racism. These ideologies were eventually disproven; however, at the time of their rise, they occupied a critical role in American scholarship's understanding and depiction of human beings. Racial sciences gained additional credibility due to the illustrious reputations of the scholars who conceptualized the field, such as Louis Agassiz a leading member of the American School of Ethnology from Harvard University. Eurocentric frameworks brought to the United State through colonial ties led to the emergence of a binary racial project wherein ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ are presented as opposite ends of a racial spectrum with no categories in between.