Abstract
From 1995 to 2012, Brazilian academia and the movimento negro engaged in sometimes bitter polemics about the best ways to increase the paltry proportion of blacks among the student population in public universities. The reality of racial discrimination was not in dispute, but the acceptability of official recognition of racial classification and the efficacy of setting aside quotas in admissions for black students was. In the end, the Supreme Court supported the principle and Congress passed a law imposing a combination of race-based and socio-economic quotas on all federal universities. This chapter discusses the arguments in detail, the way in which the academic politics developed, and the social context in which the demands grew up both within the university and among the black middle class. It also examines affirmative action in the light of contemporary concepts of social justice and pointing out the very prominent role of for-profit higher education in Brazil.
I wish to thank A. Francis, Andrew Canessa, Luisa Schwartzman and Peter Fry for their help in writing this paper.
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Notes
- 1.
For readers familiar with Portuguese, I reproduce a sample: ‘verdes, roxos, cor de burro quando foge, cor de rosa, cor de ouro, laranja, chocolate, café com leite, encerada, enxofrada … ou até azul marinho. … Amarela, verde, azul e azul-marinho, branca, bem-branca ou branca-suja, café ou café com leite, chocolate, laranja, lilás, encerada, marrom, rosa e vermelha’ (Schwarcz 2012: 52).
- 2.
Datafolha is an survey research company belonging to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo.
- 3.
See pp. 80–81 in the Portuguese translation, posted on the internet on Telles’ Princeton website, as O significado da raça na sociedade brasileira. It is also published in Portuguese as Racismo à Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, Relume-Dumará 2003).
- 4.
A phrase originally coined by Carl Degler, the US historian, in comparing Brazil and the USA (Degler 1971).
- 5.
There is a longstanding finding that Brazilians tend to deny that they themselves are victims of racism even while recognizing that racism exists in the society (Sheriff 2001). It is confirmed by findings of the recent PERLA study Pigmentocracies, coordinated by Edward Telles (Telles 2014), which shows the disparity between people who have experienced discrimination and people who have witnessed it. Nevertheless, in their table, 30 % of black respondents had experienced it, compared to 43 % who only said they had witnessed it (Moraes Silva and Paixão 2014: 212).
- 6.
Examen Nacional de Ensino Medio.
- 7.
‘Os ativistas negros jamais afirmaram que é negro quem se declara negro, mas que os negros, vítimas do racismo, deveriam se declarar negros’.
- 8.
Segato is a prominent anthropologist who has taught and acted as consultant in numerous projects and initiatives concerning gender, violence and indigenous rights throughout Latin America.
- 9.
‘ retira a responsabilidade da pessoa que se apresenta e com isso despoliticiza o processo de afirmação de uma identidade negra no meio academico brasileiro’.
- 10.
The paper is posted on Schwartzman’s personal site at the University of Toronto.
- 11.
‘cognizant of the possibility of legal sanction’ would be the nearest translation. The phrase appears in the ‘Instruções específicas para os candidatos às vagas do sistema de cotas’ for 2008, in accordance with Rio de Janeiro State Law (Lei Estadual) n° 4151/2003.
- 12.
Espaços Afirmados (‘Spaces of Affirmation’—ESAF) provided a space set aside for black students, mentoring, funding for books, theatre and film workshops and the like. ESAF also encouraged them to develop political initiatives by, for example, funding a state-wide gathering of black students: ‘Encontro Estadual de Estudantes Negros’ (dos Santos 2006).
- 13.
See also Paulo Gabriel Pinto’s more explicit conference paper written with Paulo Eugênio Clemente Júnior: Políticas Públicas e Políticas Identitárias: uma etnografia da adoção das cotas na UERJ. http://arquivos.proderj.rj.gov.br/isp_imagens/Uploads/Artigo2005005.pdf
- 14.
The comment had been posted on a site called ‘Caros Amigos’ in July 2002.
- 15.
IPEA is the Institute for Applied Economic research and has a vast staff. It is not like a small NGO which needs to go to the UNDP for funding, so there must have been a special reason for the involvement of the UNDP. Later IPEA established a unit of its own monitoring affirmative action—the Coordenação de Igualdade Racial. Brazil’s participation in the Durban Conference, the preparation of the country’s position paper, and the sending of a large delegation of more than 300 people, mostly civil society figures, marked a turning point in the posture of the Brazilian state with respect to racial discrimination.
- 16.
The Foreign Ministry’s affirmative action programme consists of a competition to award scholarships to enable successful candidates to prepare for the highly competitive entrance exam to the Diplomatic Service. The scholarship pays a subsistence allowance plus the fees to follow a course set-up as a profit-making venture by retired diplomats.
- 17.
- 18.
The criticisms focused and still focus on Freyre’s idealization of the (predominantly sexual) racial mingling in the plantation society of the Northeast of Brazil, and also on his projection of the Northeast as representative of the country as a whole. Freyre’s classic work is The Masters and the Slaves (Freyre 1986, 2002).
- 19.
Since his PhD at University College London in the early 1970s, Peter Fry has lived and worked in Brazil and has been a very prominent figure in social anthropology there, holding leading positions in the Brazilian Anthropological Association (ABA). He also worked for the Ford Foundation office in Rio and in Southern Africa, based in Zimbabwe. It is worth stating that although I have heard extremely fierce attacks on his views on the issues discussed here, I have never, ever, heard anyone refer to his foreign origin. Yvonne Maggie has spent all her career in Brazil. Jose Jorge de Carvalho gained his PhD in Ethnomusicology from Queen’s University Belfast.
- 20.
It was so scandalous that one of the Journal’s own editors wrote a piece in the same issue immediately following the Bourdieu–Wacquant article ‘challenging a number of assumptions and generalizations in the article by Bourdieu and Wacquant’ and seeking ‘to encourage a debate towards establishing a more fruitful agenda for understanding the complex relays between identity, power, governance, globalization, capitalism’ (Venn 1999). Somehow, the editors managed to both decide to publish and simultaneously to be embarrassed by it.
- 21.
Almost all the articles reproduced in it appeared originally as opinion pieces in leading newspapers, especially O Globo, regarded by race activists and people of the left as ‘conservative’, and so the polemics are to be expected, João Feres’ analysis of coverage of the quotas debate in O Globo in fact show that despite its clear editorial hostility the newspaper gave quite substantial space to those in favour in its op-ed pages (Feres Junior 2013).
- 22.
Zumbi dos Palmares is the official icon of black activism: his name was taken by the government institution established by President Sarney to support black or African culture—Fundação Cultural Palmares—and the national Día da Conciencia Negra (Black Awareness Day), established as an official holiday, is the anniversary of his execution in 1695. He seems to have led something like an independent state in Northern Brazil, ‘ruling’ over an archipelago of communities and populations, which has been popularly reinterpreted as a fugitive slave community—João Reis casts a sceptical eye over the evidence in Reis (1995–96).
- 23.
The text is available on the website of GEMAA—Grupo de Estudos Multidisciplinar da Ação Afirmativa http://gemaa.iesp.uerj.br
- 24.
It is well known, of course, that not everyone today regards gender assignment as an impersonal ‘given’.
- 25.
The manifestoes can be read at the following sites: http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/educacao/ult305u18773.shtml and http://noracebr.blogspot.com/2009/10/famosa-carta-dos-113-intelectuais.html
- 26.
The University of São Paulo has been the most resistant of all Brazilian universities to the pressure for affirmative action, limiting itself to some outreach programmes in schools and financial support for students, but with no racial dimension (INCLUSP).
- 27.
USP was in 2012 on the verge of joining the top 200 world universities compiled by the London-based Times Higher, but remained outside that category in 2014. UNICAMP ranked between 301 and 350 but was 28th in the rankings of universities under 50 years old.
- 28.
‘discriminações baseadas no pressuposto de privilegios naturais para grupos e classes de pessoas … a naturalização das desigualdades raciais, a subsunção das pessoas a suas redes de relações, a subordinação dos direitos das pessoas ao direito de propiedade’ (ibid. 195).
- 29.
‘não podemos continuar a dispensar um tratamento formalmente igual; aos que, de fato, são tratados como pertenecentes a um estamento inferior’… (ibid. 195).
- 30.
Por isso, e só por isso, é preciso, em certos momentos, em algumas esferas sociais privilegiadas, que aceitemos tratar como privilegiados os desprivilegiados’ (ibid.).
- 31.
For example, the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and some business-oriented institutions like the Fundação Getulio Vargas and the recently created business school INSPER.
- 32.
According to Ricardo Paes de Barros, at that time a senior official in the government’s Secretariat for Strategic Affairs (and author of an important earlier study of Brazilian income distribution for the World Bank) the government after an extensive study of 30 different criteria, established three strata of the middle class, based on per capita family income: the lower middle class (R$ 291–441; the middle middle class (R$ 441–641) and the upper middle class (R$ 641–1019) (Announcement dated 24 July 2013). See also (Barros et al. 2010). As of writing the exchange rate was R$4 to the US dollar: in November 2014 the rate was R$2.5.
- 33.
A decree appeared in the official gazette prohibiting students in receipt of a full-fees PROUNI grant from simultaneously receiving a FIES loan or, if they were on a half-fees grant, from receiving a loan in a separate institution or separate course (Diario Oficial da União, 29 December 2014; Financial Times, 6 January 2015). The implication is surely that the programme provided opportunities for students to multiply their access to loans granted on very favourable terms by registering simultaneously for multiple institutions and courses. The share price of Kroton collapsed by one-third between early December and mid-January, and the other leading company in the sector, Estacio Participações, fell even further, as compared with a 10 % decline in the São Paulo stock index.
- 34.
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Appendix
Appendix
Expansion of the Brazilian Federal Higher Education System, 2002–2012.
Data from a report published in 2012 (MEC 2012)
Number of federal universities: 2003: 43; 2014: 63.
Number of campuses and units belonging to the Federal universities: 2003: 148; 2014: 321
Undergraduate Student vacancies for admission: 2003: 109,184; 2011: 231,530*
Undergraduate Students registered: 2003: 527,719; 2011: 842,606*
(* excludes distance courses and students)
Postgraduate student registrations: 2003: 52,000; 2011: 99,294
Full-time teaching staff (‘docentes efetivos’) 2003: 49,851; 2012: 71,637
Budget of Federal universities (in constant reais): 2003: R$ 10.3 billions; 2010: R$ 24.8 billion
Budget for Student Financial Support Programme (PNAES): 2008: R$ 126 m.; 2012: R$ 504 m.
Number of grants from PNAES: 2008: 198,000; 2012: 1.078,000**
(** Not necessarily the number of students benefitted since many may have derived support on several different occasions.)
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Lehmann, D. (2016). The Politics of Naming: Affirmative Action in Brazilian Higher Education. In: Lehmann, D. (eds) The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50958-1_7
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