The notions of nation and citizenship are by nature complex since what constitutes each of these communities is defined equally by sociopolitical, cultural, and historical values that cannot be separated from the legacies of struggles to assert ownership, freedom, and eligibility to share in the distribution of national resources and benefits. The zero-sum political scenario is particularly informative to understand societies and peoples that have been historically oppressed and marginalized, such as inhabitants of the former colonies and their shifting conditions from the enslaved to the “emancipated” or from the colonized to the “postcolonial.” As the above quote by Abdias do Nascimento and Elisa Nascimento affirms, the challenge for Brazil as a miscegenational society is less to ensure some form of participation by blacks in the society than to make “citizenship” an equitable right available to all those who participated in making Brazil a great nation through their travails, toils, and suffering over many years of enslavement.