Categorizations elicited from 100 Brazilian informants through the use of a standardized deck of facial drawings suggests that the cognitive domain of racial identity in Brazil is characterized by a high degree of referential ambiguity. The Brazilian calculus of racial identity departs from the model of other cognitive domains in which a finite shared code, complementary distribution, and intersubjectivity are assumed. Structurally adaptive consequences adhere to the maximization of noise and ambiguity as well as to the maximization of shared cognitive order.