{"id":53253,"date":"2017-04-06T00:55:23","date_gmt":"2017-04-06T00:55:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=53253"},"modified":"2022-03-21T01:43:46","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T01:43:46","slug":"brazils-new-problem-with-blackness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=53253","title":{"rendered":"Brazil\u2019s New Problem With Blackness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brazil\u2019s New Problem With Blackness<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Foreign Policy<\/a>
\n2017-04-05<\/p>\n

Cleuci de Oliveira<\/strong><\/a>
\nBras\u00edlia, Brazil<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

As the proudly mixed-race country grapples with its legacy of slavery, affirmative-action race tribunals are measuring skull shape and nose width to determine who counts as disadvantaged.<\/em><\/p>\n

PELOTAS, Brazil<\/a> \u2013 Late last year Fernando received news he had dreaded for months: he and 23 of his classmates had been kicked out of college. The expulsion became national news in Brazil<\/a>. Fernando and his classmates may not have been publicly named (\u201cFernando,\u201d in fact, is a pseudonym), but they were roundly vilified as a group. The headline run by weekly magazine CartaCapital<\/em> \u2014 \u201cWhite Students Expelled from University for Defrauding Affirmative Action System\u201d \u2014 makes it clear why.<\/p>\n

But the headline clashes with how Fernando sees himself. He identifies as\u00a0pardo<\/em>, or brown: a mixed-race person with black ancestry. His family has struggled with discrimination ever since his white grandfather married his black grandmother, he told me. \u201cMy grandfather was accused of soiling the family blood,\u201d he said, and was subsequently cut out of an inheritance. So when he applied to a prestigious medical program at the Federal University of Pelotas, in the southern tip of Brazil, he took advantage of recent legislation that set aside places for black, brown, and indigenous students across the country\u2019s public institutions.<\/p>\n

While affirmative action policies were introduced to U.S. universities in the 1970s, Brazil didn\u2019t begin experimenting with the concept until 2001, in part because affirmative action collided head-on with a defining feature of Brazilian identity. For much of the twentieth century, intellectual and political leaders promoted the idea that Brazil was a \u201cracial democracy,\u201d whose history favorably contrasted with the state-enforced segregation and violence of Jim Crow America<\/a> and apartheid South Africa<\/a>. \u201cRacial democracy<\/a>,\u201d a term popularized by anthropologists in the 1940s, has long been a source of pride among Brazilians…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the proudly mixed-race country grapples with its legacy of slavery, affirmative-action race tribunals are measuring skull shape and nose width to determine who counts as disadvantaged.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,83,2895,21,1467,8,26],"tags":[22731,26788,26787],"class_list":["post-53253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-brazil","category-campus-life","category-latincarib","category-law","category-media-archive","category-politics","tag-affirmative-action","tag-cleuci-de-oliveira","tag-foreign-policy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53253"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63479,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53253\/revisions\/63479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}