Cognitive thresholds hold back the advance of less affluent groups. After the spoken language, the written language is the strongest impediment to exerting one’s true citizenship. This text presents and analyses literacy rates among the Brazilian population. Censuses between 1940 and 2000 were used as data source. Whenever possible the information was disaggregated by race/skin color (race information was not part of the 1970 census questionnaire and it is not yet available for the 2000 census). What we can perceive is a picture of high discrepancies among races, diminishing with time, though, and bridging the gap at a faster pace for females. When considering the population as a whole, female literacy had surpassed male literacy by the 1991 census year. With respect literacy, there is a clear hierarchy among the different race/skin color categories used in the Brazilian censuses: Asians, Whites, Mixed race, Black.