One Policy, Two Contexts: Characteristics and Particularities of Brazilian Affirmative Action

For many decades Brazil was thought of by various American anti-racist militants as a kind of racial paradise or racial democracy. Although he never actually visited the country, Fredrick Douglass once declared that Brazil was an infinitely better country for a black person to live in rather than the US, despite the fact that both nations still widely utilized slave labor. In "The Brazilians," Douglass writes, "the social state of the population [was] not marked by the distinction of colour, so operative elsewhere in the production of classes, but only by that of freedom and servitude." In addition, despite the persistence of slavery in Brazil, he continues affirming that "the white race and the black meet on terms of perfect equality in the social intercourse, and intermarry without scruple." Almost a century after Douglass, American black sociologist Franklin Frazier still considered the effects of racial discrimination marginal in Brazilian society in his essay "Some Aspects of Race Relations in Brazil."

Although this mythical image of Brazilian race relations has occasionally been criticized in the United States, it has only recently been challenged, albeit timidly. Hence the surprise on the part of US intellectuals regarding the adoption of race-based affirmative action by Brazilian universities at the beginning of the 21st century. Some of them have even assumed the stance of Brazilian scholars who accused proponents of the policy of "importing" US solutions to fight Brazilian racial inequalities, thus missing the different patterns of racial and interethnic relations in each country.

These critics often miss the fact that the model of affirmative action adopted in Brazil is substantially different from the one that has been implemented in American universities. Most Brazilian universities use racial quotas in admissions—a policy model banned in the US by the Bakke v. Regents of the University of California Supreme Court ruling—and combine them with socioeconomic criteria. The higher education systems in each country are also profoundly distinct, as are their socioeconomic structures and the place of racial discrimination within them. The recent history of affirmative actions in Brazil and the debates surrounding these policies can sort out these differences and rectify misperceptions. Even if it is still hard to isolate its effects on the structure of opportunities in Brazilian society due to lack of data, affirmative action has already destabilized consolidated beliefs about the relations between racial groups in the country.

To understand the advent of these policies at the beginning of the 2000s, one must go back in time. As Guimarães in "Classes, raças e democracia" makes clear, for most of the twentieth century, Brazil was imagined by its political and intellectual elites as a combination of racial democracy and strong socioeconomic hierarchies. Along this line of thought, all racial groups were in fact mixed and maintained friendly and horizontal relations with each other, despite the strong class inequalities prevailing in the country—as suggested by Telles in Race in Another America. The idea of racial democracy was concocted in the 1930s and became the official national ideology during Vargas's Estado Novo (1937–1945). From then on it was diffused into popular culture and the media and became the chief element of the country's self-image. Those who adopted racial democracy as a philosophy had a noted aversion to conflict well understood by the military dictatorship (1964–1985). The government at the time found this aversion to conflict a useful means of alienating black militants and intellectuals who rejected this highly idealistic reading of Brazilian race relations. For many reasons, the majority of left intellectuals who resisted the military take-over and rule was also insensitive to the realities of racial inequality and discrimination in the country. The racial democracy narrative favorably contrasted Brazil with the US, the geopolitical power that backed the military coup, thus by affirming racial democracy one would be indirectly criticizing the US, which the left held up as the epitome of racial discrimination and segregation. (Racial discrimination did not fit well into the leftist understanding of social...