Mixed Race Studies

Affirmative action backed in largely black Brazil

Associated Press
2012-05-04

Bradley Brooks

SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil’s top court has backed sweeping affirmative action programs used in more than 1,000 universities across this nation, which has more blacks than any country outside Africa yet where a severe gap in education equality between races persists.

The Supreme Court voted 7-1 late Thursday to uphold a federal program that has provided scholarships to hundreds of thousands of black and mixed-race students for university studies since 2005. Its constitutionality was challenged by a right of center party, The Democrats. Three justices abstained from the vote.

The court ruled last week in a separate case that it was constitutional for universities to use racial quotas in determining who is admitted.

“If I didn’t have the scholarship, I wouldn’t be here. It pays my entire tuition,” said 22-year-old student Felipe Nunes, taking a break between classes at the privately run Univerisdade Paulista in Sao Paulo.

Nunes, the mixed-race son of a mechanic, said he’s the first person in his family to attend university. He’s one of 919,000 recipients of a “ProUni” scholarship since 2005. The ProUni program funds studies in private universities for black, mixed race, indigenous and poor students whose primary education was in the public school system…

…Norma Odara, a 20-year-old journalism student at Mackenzie University in Sao Paulo, considers herself black, though her mother is white, and her youthful face embodies Brazil’s mixed heritage.

She’s not the recipient of any government scholarship and her university does not use any sort of quota system, something made clear by the fact Odara was one of the few black students in a sea of whites on Mackenzie’s leafy campus. Still, Odara said quotas and other such programs are only temporary fixes, and that what is needed is more government spending in public grade schools where most black Brazilians study, so that they are better prepared to enter universities on academic merit alone…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil’s top court backs racial quotas in universities

The Australian
2012-05-01

BRAZIL’s Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that racial quotas used in universities are constitutional and are meant to redress inequalities stemming from centuries of slavery.

The ruling issued by the 10-member court concerned the case of the University of Brasilia which in 2004 set up quotes to reserve 20 per cent of admissions to black, mixed-race and indigenous students…

…The court ruling followed an appeal lodged in 2009 by the right-wing DEM party which argued that the University of Brasilia quota policy ran counter to the principle of equality and fostered racism by creating privileges based on racial criteria.

But the judges countered that quotas were a legitimate method to redress slavery-derived inequalities and discrimination that still continues to affect Afro-Brazilians…

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Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil

Penn State University Press
2005-08-18
304 pages
6 x 9, 8 illustrations/5 maps
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-02693-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-271-02694-7

Elizabeth W. Kiddy, Associate Professor of History and Director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania

Blacks of the Rosary tells the story of the Afro-Brazilian communities that developed within lay religious brotherhoods dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary in Minas Gerais. It shows how these brotherhoods functioned as a social space in which Africans and their descendants could rebuild a communal identity based on a shared history of an African past and an ongoing devotional practice, thereby giving rise to enduring transnational cultures that have survived to the present day. In exploring this intersection of community, identity, and memory, the book probes the Portuguese and African contributions to the brotherhoods in Part One. Part Two traces the changes and continuities within the organizations from the early eighteenth century to the end of the Brazilian Empire, and the book concludes in Part Three with discussion of the twentieth-century brotherhoods and narratives of the participants in brotherhood festivals in the 1990s. In a larger sense, the book serves as a case study through which readers can examine the strategies that Afro-Brazilians used to create viable communities in order to confront the asymmetry of power inherent in the slave societies of the Americas and their economic and social marginalization in the twentieth century.

Gender and the manumission of slaves in colonial Brazil: The prospects for freedom in Sabará, Minas Gerais, 1710–1809

Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies
Volume 18, Issue 2, 1997
pages 1-29
DOI: 10.1080/01440399708575208

Kathleen J. Higgins

On 9 December 1735 Manoel da Costa Braga declared before the notary of Sabará, Minas Gerais, his decision to free from slavery his own children, Joseph, Marianna and Maria, and to recognize them as heirs to his estate. In this declaration Manoel da Costa Braga did not, however, choose to free the children’s mother, Magdalena, who presumably remained enslaved.

Fifty-five year later, on 10 February 1790. Senhora Maria Rodrigues Pereyra freed a child named Faustino in exchange for 40 drams of gold paid to her by the father, Sebastião Angola. The records do not show whether or not Faustino’s mother was ever set free.

These two manumissions, each typical of the time in which they were granted, reflect the transformation of Minas Gerais by its renowned eighteenth-century gold rush. Manoel da Costa Braga owned slaves in the first half of the eighteenth century when gold production was booming, slave prices were extraordinarily high, and the colonizers or Sabará were largely white men rarely accompanied by while women. In contrast, by the time Maria Rodrigues Pereyra owned slaves in Minas Gerais, the gold rush was long over and the importance of gold production to the overall economy had diminished significantly. The populations of both slave and free in Sabará were, nonetheless, much larger in Maria Rodrigues Pereyra’s day, and although white women were still outnumbered by white men, women slaveholders were by no means a novelty. Furthermore, by the end of the eighteenth century whites had long since ceased to be in the majority within the free population. In this slave society, manumission decisions had ultimately led to a population of free people (and slaveholders) that was both racially mixed and racially diverse (see Table 1).

Both the decline of gold mining and changes within the slaveholding population had a major impact on the manumission of slaves. Through a…

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The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality: Race and Regional Identity in Northeastern Brazil

University of Pittsburgh Press
March 2011
328 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 9780822961338

Stanley E. Blake, Assistant Professor of History
Ohio State University, Lima

The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality explores conceptualizations of regional identity and a distinct population group known as nordestinos in northeastern Brazil during a crucial historical period. Beginning with the abolition of slavery and ending with the demise of the Estado Novo under Getúlio Vargas, Stanley E. Blake offers original perspectives on the paradoxical concept of the nordestino and the importance of these debates to the process of state and nation building. Since colonial times, the Northeast has been an agricultural region based primarily on sugar production. The area’s population was composed of former slaves and free men of African descent, indigenous Indians, European whites, and mulattos. The image of the nordestino was, for many years, linked with the predominant ethnic group in the region, the Afro-Brazilian. For political reasons, however, the conception of the nordestino later changed to more closely resemble white Europeans. Blake delves deeply into local archives and determines that politicians, intellectuals, and other urban professionals formulated identities based on theories of science, biomedicine, race, and social Darwinism. While these ideas served political, social, and economic agendas, they also inspired debates over social justice and led to reforms for both the region and the people. Additionally, Blake shows how debates over northeastern identity and the concept of the nordestino shaped similar arguments about Brazilian national identity and “true” Brazilian people.

Contents

• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Nordeste and Nation
• 2. The Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Nordestino, 1850–1870
• 3. Racial Science in Pernambuco, 1870–1910
• 4. The Medicalization of Nordestinos, 1910–1925
• 5. Social Hygiene: The Science of Reform, 1925–1940
• 6. Mental Hygiene: The Science of Character, 1925–1940
• 7. Inventing the Homem de Nordeste: Race, Region, and the State, 1925–1940
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index

In 1921, a future Brazilian bureaucrat named Agamemnon Magalhães asserted in a thesis written for an academic appointment that the northeastern region of Brazil was “a distinct ‘habitat,’ characterized by the rigor of its ecological conditions. Nature is reflected in man, imprinting his features, sculpting his form, forming his spirit.” Magalhães wrote about the Northeast and nordestinos, as peoples of the region were called, as if they had long been thought of as a distinct political and geographic region and people. This was most certainly not the case. Just six years before, in 1915, Brazilian geographers had gathered in Recife, the capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, for the Fourth Brazilian Congress of Geography. In the official sessions and papers presented there, geographers referred only to the “states of the North,” the “problem of the North,” and the “droughts of the North.” Magalhães also employed climatic, geographic, and racial determinism to describe nordestinos, calling them the product of interaction between rugged terrain, a harsh climate, and European, Indian, and African cultural and racial influences. Furthermore, he considered the peoples of the region to be “the producers of Brazilian nationality.” In other words, for Magalhães, the mixed-race nordestino was the quintessential Brazilian. This notion ran contrary to conventional wisdom. During Brazil’s First Republic (1889–1930), intellectuals and politicians advanced new understandings of Brazilian national identity that idealized European immigration and racial whitening…

Read the Introduction here.

In Brazil I glimpsed a possible future in which there is only one race

The Guardian
2007-07-11

Timothy Garton Ash

By its own definition it is a mixed country, but extreme poverty and violence occur mainly at one end of the spectrum

Some time ago, Brazil’s census takers asked people to describe their skin colour. Brazilians came up with 134 terms, including alva-rosada (white with pink highlights), branca-sardenta (white with brown spots), café com leite (coffee with milk), morena-canelada (cinammon-like brunette), polaca (Polish), quase-negra (almost black) and tostada (toasted). This often lighthearted poetry of self-description reflects a reality you see with your own eyes, especially in the poorer parts of Brazil’s great cities.

Walking round the City of God, a poor housing estate just outside Rio de Janeiro—and the setting for the film of that name—I saw every possible tint and variety of facial feature, sometimes in the same household. Alba Zaluar, a distinguished anthropologist who has worked for years among the people of the district, told me they make jokes about it between themselves: “You little whitey”, “You little brownie”, and so on. And those features, with their diversity and admixture, are often beautiful.

Brazil is a country where people celebrate, as a national attribute, the richness of miscegenation, giving a positive meaning to what is, in its origins, an ugly North American misnomer. There is, however, a nasty underside to this story. “Racial democracy” is an established, early 20th-century Brazilian self-image, by contrast with a then still racially segregated United States. Yet the reality even today is that most non-whites are worse off economically, socially and educationally than most whites. And part of this inequality is due to racial discrimination…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Religion and Racial Identity in the Movimento Negro of the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil

Iliff School of Theology and The University of Denver (Colorado Seminary)
June 1995
302 pages

Alan Doyle Myatt

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculties of The Iliff School of Theology and The University of Denver (Colorado Seminary) In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

This project is a study of the interaction of religion with the process of racial identity construction in the black movement within the Brazilian Roman Catholic Church. The fundamental problem facing the movement is how to construct a viable black identity in the midst of a social situation filled with ambiguity and opposition. The process of this social construction of racial identity is the key problem explored in this dissertation.

The multi-racial polity of Brazilian society includes many racial designations for Brazilians of African descent. These identities are supported by the notions of Racial Democracy and whitening. Racial democracy is the idea that Brazilian society contains very little racial prejudice and discrimination. Whitening is the doctrine that the extensive racial mixing in Brazil has the effect of creating an increasingly whiter society. The social status of blacks may allegedly be improved through whitening. In this context very few Brazilians choose to identify themselves as blacks.

The study uses Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge and James Scott’s theory of the resistance of subordinate peoples to domination as its theoretical framework. The thesis argued is that the movimento negro is attempting to build a black identity by drawing on the history of black resistance that has been largely hidden, and constructing a new universe of meaning. The movement draws upon liberation theology, traditional Roman Catholicism, and Afro-Brazilian religions to achieve this. The research was based on field work in Brazil and focused on the analysis of interviews with movement activists as well as movement publications, documents, and videos. Long interviews were conducted according to a prepared guide, but in an open-ended fashion.

It was found that the notions of racial democracy and whitening are not plausible and that they act to inhibit blacks from overcoming problems due to racial discrimination. It was also determined that Afro-Brazilian religions, Catholicism, and liberation theology provide resources that enable movement activists to create a new racial identity, involving an essentialist notion of blackness, that did not previously exist. The conclusion that religion is an important resource in resistance to domination was supported.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• 1. RELIGION, RACIAL IDENTITY AND THE MOVIMENTO NEGRO: THEORY AND METHOD
• 2. THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT OF THE MOVIMENTO NEGRO: DEFINING THE BRAZILIAN RACIAL ETHOS
• 3. THE MOVIMENTO NEGRO IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH: ORIGINS AND ORGANIZATION
• 4. THE DAILY STRUGGLE: PERSPECTIVES FROM WITHIN THE MOVIMENTO
• 5. THE CONSTRUCTION OF RACIAL IDENTITY AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY
• 6. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX 1: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
• APPENDIX 2: EXCERPT FROM AGENTES DE PASTORAL NEGROS: ORIGEM, HISTÓRIA E ORGANIZAÇÃO

CHAPTER 1: RELIGION, RACIAL IDENTITY AND THE MOVIMENTO NEGRO: THEORY AND METHOD

The struggle for social justice has been the dominant theme of the various theologies of liberation originating in Latin America and now spread throughout the world. While liberation theology has traditionally focused on issues of economic justice defined in terms of class conflict, more recently liberation theology has been influential in the rise of feminist and black theologies in North America. This trend has also become apparent in Latin America where in 1984 a conference called “Conference on Black Culture and Theology in Latin America” was held by the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (ASETT). The proceedings were published under the title Identidade Negra e Religião: Consulta sobre Cultura Negra e Teologia na América Latina (Black Identity and Religion: Conference on Black Culture and Theology in Latin America- ASETT 1986). The conference and book provide an example of the activity of black theologians and lay  people wrestling with the racial situation in Latin America and the implications of liberation theology when this situation is considered.

The Conference on Black Culture and Theology in Latin America was held in São Paulo with about two-thirds of the participants being Brazilian (ASETT 1986, 13, 79-80). This was a natural location as São Paulo serves as the center of the movimento negro (black movement) that has developed in the Roman Catholic Church of Brazil since the late 1970s. This study will focus on the movimento negro in the Roman Catholic Church of Brazil, documenting its origins and discussing its struggle to sustain an agenda for black liberation…

…An outline of the ethical ethos of race relations in Brazil will provide an essential context for understanding the movimento negro in Brazilian Catholicism. An exposition of this ethos will be given in chapter two. Meanwhile the two central aspects of this ethos, “racial democracy” and “whitening,” must be introduced here as a necessary prelude to the theoretical and methodological considerations that form the bulk of this chapter.

Racial democracy is the notion that Brazilian society is relatively free from the racial prejudice, discrimination, and tension found historically in the United States, South Africa, and other western nations. Supporters of this view indicate as evidence in its favor Brazil’s alleged peaceful abolition of slavery, the supposed lack of racial violence, the prominence of blacks in Brazilian historical and literary works, the absence of “Jim Crow” or apartheid laws, and the pervasive miscegenation of Brazilian society (Freyre 1986, 1963a; Degler 1986; Freire-Maia 1987; Fiola 1990).

The presence of widespread miscegenation is itself fundamental to the notion of branqueamento or “whitening” (Marcos Silva 1990, 60ff; Skidmore 1993; Fiola 1990). It is alleged that through the mixing of the various peoples of Brazil, the population as a whole is becoming more white and so being “purified” (Skidmore 1985, 13-14). Beyond the idea of biological change in the composition of Brazilian society there are also notions of social whitening. In the social sense it is said that being white is more valued than being black, leading people to adopt white values and attempt to marry lighter skinned partners (Fiola 1990).

Numerous challenges to the racial democracy and whitening theses have been raised in recent years. As will be shown in a subsequent discussion, these notions can no longer be sustained under scholarly critique. However, black activists go a step further in contending that racial democracy and whitening theories have been deliberately perpetrated by Brazilian elites in order to preserve white superiority. I will argue that racial democracy and whitening are ideologies that are widespread in Brazil and may be said to form a socially constructed ethos of race relations that is still largely accepted by many Brazilians. This ethos forms the critical aspect of the context in which the black movement in Brazil has arisen…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Black Orpheus and the Merging of two Brazilian Nations

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Number 71, October 2001
pages 107-115

Myrian Sepúlveda dos Santos, Associate Professor of Sociology
State University of Rio de Janeiro

The second cinematic remake of the play ‘Orfeu da Conceição’ has sparked a new debate among filmmakers and social scientists, bringing out opposing views on major aspects of Brazilian nationhood, such as race relations, bodily practices and the meaning of Carnival. The Brazilian poet Vinícius de Moraes wrote the original play, which was presented for the first time in Rio de Janeiro in 1956. This play is about a tragic love affair between two black characters, Orpheus and Eurydice, posed against the background of carnival in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Orpheus is a gifted musician who meets Eurydice during carnival. It so happens that after falling in love with Orpheus, Eurydice is killed by a man who represents the devil. The desperate Orpheus descends into Hell to rescue her. When he comes back home with the corpse of Eurydice, Mira, who was his former lover, kills him. Central to the play is the defence of the eternity of art set against the tragic reality of life.

Two films were produced based on this same play, and both directors claim to reveal the universal meaning of art against the background of a carnival feast associated with the Brazilian black population. The films were produced in 1959 and 1998. The first, Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro) was directed by the French filmmaker Marcel Camus. It is mainly recognised for its utopian view in which love and passion, race relations and carnival are represented. The second film, entitled Orfeu, was directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Cacá Diegues, and has been praised for its commitment to the description of reality. In it, Diegues explored the commodification of bodies, racial conflicts, and the commercialisation of the carnival feast. This director previously belonged to the important movement of Brazilian filmmakers known as cinema novo, which tried to transform cinematic industrial productions into critical and artistic productions. He is also the director of acclaimed Brazilian films such as Bye Bye Brasil, Xica da Silva and Tieta. In his Orpheus film, Diegues used a set of sophisticated cinematic techniques in order to give the illusion of reality. While making the screenplay, he worked with an excellent group of intellectuals and cast many well-known celebrities of Rio’s cultural life rather than using professional actors.

As the latter production was not well received by international film critics, the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso wrote a challenging article in the New York Times defending the recent remake. Veloso criticised the former internationally acclaimed version of the play for depicting Brazilians as exotics using outrageously fanciful colours and the general ‘voodoo for tourists’ ambience (Veloso 2000). Indeed, the film directed by Marcel Camus did win the Oscar for the Best Foreign Film and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It was considered the Best Foreign Film and the Best Film, respectively, by the New York Film Critics’ Circle and by the British Academy. In 1960 it received the Golden Globe Award. The acclaimed version of Black Orpheus attempted to produce an ageless representation of art and it fascinated foreign audiences. According to Veloso, however, the film was not well considered by Brazilians.Veloso happened not only to be the author of the soundtrack of the second film, but he also appeared in a short scene in this film, and his wife was one of the producers.

Despite his involvement with the production of the film, Veloso is absolutely right as he points out that although the first production is capable of completely engaging a foreign audience, the ambience of fun and happiness among all the characters is not attractive to most citizens of Rio. For them any possibility of self-recognition in the story diminishes from the earliest scenes. For most Brazilians, the first production seems to be one more in a long list of those commodities that were made para inglês ver, that is, produced according to a foreign idealization of Brazilian customs and dress. Therefore, the musician called attention not only to the diversity of interpretations, but also to the power associated with the different forums that appraise and legitimate the meaning of art. However, to what extent is it possible to affirm that whereas the first film is a mere fairy tale, the second fulfils the task of depicting reality? In addition, how are we to understand the influence of two different historical contexts upon these two films?

In this paper, I will investigate the two cinematic productions, considering them as part of processes that took place within different historical periods. In particular, I will be examining the issues of race relations and bodily pleasures within carnival, as they appear to be overriding in both versions of the play. I will consider that although each film can be seen as part of its respective time, they both represent two one-sided versions of the meaning of carnival practices in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Whereas the first production was produced at the end of the 1950s when the Brazilian ideal of racial democracy was widely accepted, the second was produced at the end of the 1990s when mass media, violence and the rights of ethnic minorities constituted the political agenda of our times. In the second film, from the earliest scenes the focus is on poverty, shootings and injustice. The poor neighbourhood located on the hillsides of the city is continually invaded by brutal police forces, and Eurydice is senselessly killed by the leader of the drug trafficking gang. The decomposing corpses thrown at the edge of the hillside by drug dealers represented Hell…

…From Racial Democracy to Multiculturalism

On the subject of race relations in Brazil, the two cinematic productions of the Greek legend offer two dramatically different approaches. With its all-black cast, the first film brought about a remarkable revolution in the complex racial relations of Brazil. Even so, the cinematic images portray Rio’s natural beauty, the mesmerising sound of drums, and the festive manifestations of life, romanticising the conflict present among the poor and black population that inhabits the hillsides of the city. The film was produced at a time when the myth of racial democracy in Brazil was held, and it reinforced the myth. The more recent production is also very much a product of its time. It portrays racial conflict through the medium of racially radical rap lyrics as well through the images of a white man being executed by a group of predominantly black drug traffickers.

A series of studies developed in the 1970s completely transformed the contemporary approaches to race relations in Brazil as they showed that despite widespread miscegenation, race remained an important indicator of privilege in Brazilian society. Furthermore, they showed that blacks continue to occupy the lower rungs of the socio-economic scale (Hasenbalg 1979). This is a social and political issue that confronts citizens to this day. Based on these studies, many analyses of race relations concluded that the image of Brazil as a racially democratic nation is a fantasy essentially constructed either by the dominant classes or by the Brazilian elite. Based on the assertion that the myth of racial democracy obscures discrimination, many authors maintain that black people need to build their own identities separate from white values and beliefs. According to their analyses there would be an evolving process of ‘racialisation’ whereby Brazilian race relations would become more transparent (Guimarães 2000)…

Nevertheless, if it is true to say that, regardless of the social class to which black people belong, there is prejudice against them in Brazil, it is also true to say that to this day it is almost impossible to represent the majority of the Brazilian population in terms of a strict code of race. I would risk saying that, although the North-American dual model of race is beginning to be appropriated by some groups of the black movement in Brazil, the racial code, which would easily consider those to be of black or of African descent by either European or North American standards, is far from being recognised by the majority of the Brazilian population. Discrimination in Brazil does not occur according to the same mechanisms as it does in the United States. The idea of miscegenation is still widespread in Brazil. Although it involves exclusion of dark-skinned people and represents the mechanism by which racism operates, it also entails a wider acceptance of different cultures, values and beliefs. The Brazilian population defines itself according to more than three hundred terms that relate to race and colour. Although Brazilians are people who see themselves according to multiple definitions, including the opposition between blacks and whites, they are far from being limited to them.

It is also important to point out that the idea of miscegenation has been part of the idea of the nation since the 1930s. It is widely recognised that a new national identity was formulated during Getúlio Vargas’ populist government. This new identity promoted the image of a harmonious and homogeneous whole capable of including all citizens regardless of race, ethnic origins or colour. The imagery of the nation was constituted as the composite of diverse cultural elements such as samba, carnival, and feijoada, all of which are associated with the ‘Brazilian’ population. The Brazilian construction of nationalism conflated the ideas of miscegenation and nation, and this conflation can be considered as the result of a process of negotiation that has not yet been completely concluded.

Myths are not abstract constructions. They are continually manifested through the ways in which most Brazilians define themselves and interact with one another. Gilberto Freyre was one of the authors who first described in positive terms the process of widespread criss-crossing among different social and cultural populations. However, although Freyre has been praised for having pointed out that the blending process in Brazil was highly inclusive (Freyre 1930), he has not been sufficiently criticised for failing to call attention to the fact that the process of inclusion was often cynical and ambivalent. The process of inclusion did not include black people in the same way and in the same arenas as it did for white people. The recognition and positive values attributed to Brazilian miscegenation came with a series of other mythologies, such as the belief in the goodness of progressive whitening and the association between blacks and all sorts of hedonism. One should not overlook the resulting violence and inequalities that have occurred as a result of those contexts…

Read the entire article here.

The “Americanization” of Racial Identity in Brazil: Recent Experiments with Affirmative Action in a “Racial Democracy”

Journal of International Policy Solutions
Volume 5 (Spring 2006)
pages 5-25

Ana Pagano

In 2001, the Brazilian Ministry of Agrarian Development surprised the international community by implementing an affirmative action program. The program, which was the first of its kind to exist in Brazil, mandated an internal hiring quota of twenty percent black (negro) employees. The Ministries of Justice and Foreign Relations followed suit shortly thereafter by implementing similar hiring quotas. Several public universities, beginning with the state university system of Rio de Janeiro, subsequently adopted admissions quotas for black students. Affirmative action became a national priority in 2002 when President Fernando Henrique Cardoso created a program to research how more government agencies could implement percentage goals for blacks, women, and people of low socioeconomic status.

As 2005 drew to a close, the Brazilian Senate approved the most comprehensive piece of affirmative action legislation to date: the Statute of Racial Equality (Estatuto da Igualdade Racial). The Statute calls for increased racial quotas in the public service sector and the media, in addition to a vast array of non-quota based measures intended to counteract structural racism. In a few short years, affirmative action has become a common, though controversial, feature in many public universities and governmental organizations throughout Brazil. Much of its controversy stems from the perception that affirmative action imposes foreign racial distinctions and represents a mode of dealing with racial inequality that is usually associated with the United States.

International civil society played a crucial role in Brazil’s transition from supposed “racial democracy,” a moniker which implies the absence of racism, to a nation with affirmative action. As Telles observes, “the transnationalization of human rights provided new opportunities for social movements generally… the [Brazilian] black movement, often in cooperation with other human rights organizations… established ties with black movement organizations throughout Latin America, the United States, and South Africa.” The black movement formed strategic partnerships with these international organizations to exert pressure on the Brazilian government to introduce affirmative action. Working in tandem, they pushed for measures to bolster the relatively low representation of black Brazilians in higher education, the media, and privileged sectors of employment.

In this paper, I examine the contributions of three major actors to the production of affirmative action discourse and practice in Brazil: civil society, including the black movement and labor organizations; the state, and in particular former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso; and international organizations such as the United Nations and various philanthropic organizations. I show that a combination of circumstances involving the three actors created a political environment amenable to affirmative action in a nation popularly identified with harmonious race relations. In order to understand why affirmative action is such a polemical issue in Brazil, it is important to examine the ideological bases for its racial politics. To that end, I will first discuss Brazilian ideologies of race. Next, I will review the trajectory of events that led to the implementation of affirmative action quotas. Finally, I will analyze the contributions of civil society, the Brazilian government, and international organizations to the arrival of affirmative action in Brazil…

…Traditionally, Brazilians have rejected a bipolar (black-white) model of race, preferring instead a multipolar model with a spectrum of terms to describe skin color and physical features rather than supposed genetic makeup. Their preference for phenotypic description, rather than a system of racial classification based on ancestry, reflects the widespread belief that many Brazilians embody a racial mixture. This belief is evident in figures from the Brazilian Census of 2000: nearly 40% of Brazilians identified themselves as brown (pardo), meaning racially mixed. The other Census categories are branco (white), preto (black), indígena (indigenous), and amarelo (yellow/Asian).

In contrast to the U.S., many Brazilians have traditionally conceptualized racial identity as flexible and situational rather than fixed. The ethos of whitening (branqueamento) is one important way in which racial identity has been constructed as malleable in Brazil. “Whitening” refers both to a pseudoscientific theory and to a social practice. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, prominent scientists and intellectuals believed that the Brazilian population would grow progressively whiter over time as a result of miscegenation and the mass influx of European immigrants following the abolition of slavery. Although this belief was subsequently debunked, the ethos of whitening has continued to influence racialization practices in Brazil. In this sense, “whitening” refers to many Brazilians’ tendency to identify with the lightest racial category permitted by their skin color. Socioeconomic class plays an important role in social whitening. There is a popular saying in Brazil that “money whitens” (o dinheiro embranquece), meaning that higher socioeconomic status may allow an individual to be perceived as embodying a lighter race category than someone of similar appearance but lower socioeconomic status. Brazilians’ relatively flexible patterns of racialization are often contrasted with the U.S. practice of “hypodescent,” or the tendency to assign mixed-race individuals in the United States to the more socially subordinated racial group they embody, e.g., ““black”” instead of ““white.””…

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Room for Debate: Brazil’s Racial Identity Challenge

The New York Times
2012-03-30

Jerry Dávila, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor of Brazilian History
University of Illinois

Peter Fry, Anthropolgist

Melissa Nobles, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University

Yvonne Maggie, Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

João Jorge Santos Rodrigues, Lawyer and President
Olodum (cultural group that aims to combat racism in Brazil)

Marcelo Paixão, Professor of Economics and Sociology
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

As Rio de Janeiro prepares to host the 2016 Olympics and celebrate its newfound economic prowess as a player on the world stage, the connection between poverty and racial discrimination in Brazil is coming under scrutiny. Would Brazil benefit from U.S.-style affirmative action to counter its history of slavery? What are the challenges of implementing such programs?

Note from Steven F. Riley: See also: Stanley R. Bailey, “Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil,” American Journal of Sociology, Volume 114, Number 3 (November 2008): 577–614.

What Brazil Does Well (Dávila)

In the United States and Brazil, Jim Crow’s shadow has yielded divergent understandings of the nature of racial inequality and the role of race-conscious policies. In the U.S., placing “separate but equal” in the rearview mirror feeds legal challenges to affirmative action.

But in Brazil, the distance from Jim Crow shapes a growing recognition that racial discrimination and inequality are not legacies and are not just the fruit of segregation. To the contrary, they have a stubbornly viral ability to reproduce and renew themselves…

…These Brazilian policies are not meant to redress legacies of racism: instead, they recognize and counteract ongoing inequalities. Brazil, in turn, has drawn a lesson from the U.S. history with affirmative action: policies that promote inclusion are insufficient without policies that reduce exclusion.

Race Is Too Hard to Identify (Fry)

Racial quotas in universities are polemical. For a start, they can hardly be called “U.S. style” since they would be unconstitutional in the United States. Furthermore, unlike the U.S., the majority of Brazilians do not classify themselves neatly into blacks and whites. In Brazil, therefore, eligibility for racial quotas is always a problem…

Quotas Are Working in Brazil (Nobles)

In 2004, when state and federal universities began implementing affirmative action policies, Brazil closed one chapter of its history and began another.

Brazil’s once dominant “myth of racial democracy,” made the contemplation, let alone implementation, of such policies impossible for most of the 20th century. Unlike the United States, Brazil’s post-slavery experience had not included deeply entrenched legal and social barriers. Nor had it included rigid racial identifications. Affirmative action policies were not needed, or so the reasoning went…

…Today, debate turns on arguments about merit and racial identity. Some hold that the quota system violates meritocracy. But basing university admissions solely on high-stakes standardized tests, which significantly advantage test preparation, seems a dubious way of determining merit. Others argue that Brazil’s system of racial classification is too fluid and ambiguous: the problem of “who is black?”…

Brazil Sets an Example to Follow (Seigel)

Affirmative action programs in Brazil are widespread and growing. Based on state legal victories beginning in 2000 and directed to expand further by the far-reaching federal Racial Equality Statute passed in 2010, all but three of Brazil’s 26 states now have reparative quota systems. The widespread objection that Brazilian racial categories were too fluid to define “black” for policy purposes has not panned out. Candidates define their racial identity themselves; apparently the disincentives to proclaiming black identity in a society still shot through with racist presumptions are enough to stave off the flood of sneaky white candidates who opponents claimed would jam the system. Plus, Brazilian affirmative action is not solely racial; it is class-based as well, and implemented in intelligent ways. In most states, quota candidates’ families must meet a salary limit, and an equal number of slots are set aside for children who have attended Brazil’s challenged public school system as for black students. Since most families poor enough to meet the income ceiling will have sent their kids to public schools, this means most students who meet the income requirement can apply, regardless of color…

Looking to the U.S. Has Been a Mistake (Maggie)

The history of racial relations in Brazil, which is completely different from the American case, leads me to believe that no, Brazil would not benefit from U.S.-style affirmative action.

In Brazil, there was no legislation dividing the population into “races,” nor prohibiting marriage between people of different “races,” in the post-abolition period; we’ve had no “one drop of blood” rule. The result is a national society based on the idea of mixture. U.S. affirmative action seeks to unite and make equal what had been separated by law. To implement this in Brazil, we would have to create legal identities based on the opposition between whites and blacks or African descendents.

Step in the Right Direction (Guimarães)

Brazil has already implemented some important affirmative action programs in higher education, and the balance is overall positive. Some 71 universities — with free tuition, linked to the federal system of higher education — as well as different state universities now have some kind of preferential system of entrance benefiting disadvantaged students (those coming from public high schools, those self-declared “pretos,” or blacks; “pardos,” or browns; “indigenous”; or those with low incomes).

The best thing is that those policies were taken one by one by different university boards trying to adapt the principles of social or racial justice to their regional reality. Available data on the school performance of those students show that they are doing pretty well and are not putting any kind of stress on the system. The real stress comes more from the huge expansion of slots than from the admission system.

Symbolically those policies are important in showing that being black (preto or pardo) in Brazil today is no longer a source of shame but rather one of pride. Descent from Africa is openly assumed and socially recognized. The policies also demonstrate that publicly financed universities must care for the quality of the education they offer without degrading the fairness of their admission when it becomes biased by class, race or color…

Read the entire debate here.