by abolition; and improving Brazil's image in the international arena. While one of the government's first measures was to impose tighter control on the lower classes, dominated by black people, the most popular solution was to embrace miscegenation and make it work to the benefit of the nation. In order to eliminate arguments relating to the supposed biological inferiority of the majority of Brazilians, the government removed colour classifications from the census, which José Luis Petruccelli defends as a measure to address theories of racial hierarchy. Identification by colour was revived only in 1940 (Petruccelli and Sabóia, 2013).  
Medical doctor João Baptista de Lacerda, then director of the Museu Nacional, submitted a paper to the First Universal Races Congress, held in London in 1911, in which he declared that the 'question of the metis' in Brazil was being solved and the nation's black population was doomed to disappear through miscegenation. He then presented a short list of Brazilian 'mulattoes' who had become successful and respected men in politics, culture and society (Spiller, 1911). Such lists, presented by other intellectuals, were not proof of Brazilian acceptance of black and coloured individuals, the main idea behind the argument of the 'mulatto escape hatch' proposed by Carl N. Degler (1971). Rather, they were an affirmation of the exceptional fate of a small number of mulattoes; as Anthony Marx argued:  
Brazil constructed an informal racial order that was highly discriminatory against "blacks and browns", such that earlier patterns of inequality were maintained. Only a few mulattoes advanced - enough to encourage belief in mobility. Thus, continued popular belief in the mulatto escape hatch appears to be based less on material conditions than on an ideological project encouraging assimilation. Miscegenation in itself did not produce the myth of mobility, but this image did dilute potential conflict (Marx, 1996, p. 187).