Posted: Wed 06 Aug 2008 18:36 Post subject: Brazil Tries Quotas to Get Racial Equality
The World; Brazil Tries Quotas to Get Racial Equality; Although almost half of its population are descendants of African blacks, people with lighter skin have most of the wealth and power. –
Los Angeles Times: Archives
The World; Brazil Tries Quotas to Get Racial Equality; Although almost
half of its population are descendants of African blacks, people with
lighter skin have most of the wealth and power.
[BULLDOG EDITION]
Black activists are trying a new weapon in their quest for racial equality in deeply divided Brazil: little white flowers. The white camellia has become a seal of approval that the Center for Articulation of Marginalized Peoples will award to stores, companies and schools that hire, promote and enroll black people. "We're going to show that no one profits from racism," said the group's leader, Ivanir dos Santos. "In a country with a big black population like Brazil, this will be an important factor." Nearly half of Brazil's 178 million people are descendants of blacks from Africa. If they can be encouraged to start speaking with their pocketbooks, they will be hard to ignore, activists say. Racial unity has long been elusive in Brazil.
Although the country projects an image of tolerance and equality, people with lighter skin hold the bulk of the nation's wealth and power. Only over the last decade has a small but increasingly vocal black movement begun demanding benefits such as racial quotas for universities, contracts, employment and even television and films, where blacks rarely appear.
Public policies to accommodate those demands are newer still. Last year, three state universities began implementing a system of racial quotas and several more are following suit this year.
Even in their limited form, quotas have stirred up a fuss, challenging the oft-stated belief that Brazil is a "racial democracy." "Before the quotas, nobody even talked about discrimination. The quotas open the question up so society can see what's really happening," said Joao Gilberto de Sa Jesus, 21, a premed student admitted to Rio de Janeiro State University under the quota system.
On the other side, the quotas have brought a slew of lawsuits from white students claiming discrimination. Paulo Fabio Salgueiro, director of admissions at Rio de Janeiro State University, argues that quotas have had little practical effect beyond stirring up racial tension. The university set aside 40% of last year's freshman class for black or mulatto students. But only 243 out of a class 4,970 benefited, Salgueiro said, meaning that only around 5% of the class owed their admission to quotas.
"The blacks who got in were mostly those who would have gotten in anyway because of their test scores," Salgueiro said. "They were the ones who had enough money to pay for private high schools." Addressing that issue, state legislators are now requiring quota- benefiting students to prove that their families earn no more than about $100 a month.
But Salgueiro worries that the quotas may be doing more harm than good. "The quotas are trying to create a Brazilian middle class and that's good," he said. "On the other hand, could it be that we're importing a solution to a strident racism that never existed here?"
Complicating matters, in Brazil, it's not always clear who is black and who is not. Michely Wada, 21, was admitted to the state university's premed program after declaring that she was mulatto, but her long straight hair and her eyes owe more to her mother's Japanese descent than anything else. "When I was a kid, my nickname was 'little monkey' because my father is black. That's just the way Brazil is," Wada says, justifying her decision to list herself as mulatto on her application.
Still, Salgueiro says, about 14% of the students who listed themselves as black or mulatto before quotas were introduced changed their racial designation to white so as not to qualify, apparently believing that they would be stigmatized by being admitted to college under quotas.
Brazil's schizophrenia on race goes back to the colonial era. Unlike the English, Portuguese settlers generally did not bring women with them and the offspring that resulted from their mating with indigenous women and slaves from Africa created the rich tapestry of skin tones
visible in Brazil today.
"In the United States, you have the one-drop rule. If you have one drop of black blood, you are black. Here it's the opposite," dos Santos said. "If you have one drop of white blood, you're anything but black."
Because of this, census takers have documented about 300 separate racial classification ranging from "sour milk" to "bamboo brown" to "blue." Only 6.2% of Brazilians consider themselves "black," although that is up from 5% a decade ago.
This racial mixing led to the oft-stated belief among Brazilians that if every one is mixed, there can be no racism. But in Brazil, poverty and blackness usually go hand in hand. Although 46% of the population are officially black or mulatto, they account for 65% of the poor. (So the other 35% is what exactly? And if they are white, what sort of programs are there out there to address their poverty?...Just a thought)
Just 22% of employers are black or mulatto and, at companies with more than five employees, the figure is 12%. Only 2.9% of Brazilians with university degrees are of African descent.
A study conducted by Marcelo Paixao, an economics professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said that by the standards of the U.N. Human Development Index, white Brazilians live in one of the most developed countries in Latin America, while blacks live in the poorest "This contradicts the idea that Brazil doesn't have racism. Just because we didn't have segregation doesn't mean there is equality," Paixao said. "It shows how much we have to advance, and these issues are only being discussed publicly over the last five years."
Credit: Associated Press Writer
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
Gene Expression had a discussion about quotas in Brazilian public universities. I've can't find the link, but according to the site, there are people who've been admitted under quotas that are failing. Can't find the link to that topic on that site though.
Quote:
Brazil Separates Into a World of Black and White
By Gregory Rodriguez, New America Foundation
Los Angeles Times | September 3, 2006
A fractious debate over affirmative action has helped convince more Brazilians that their history of racial mixture did not erase color-based discrimination.
RIO DE JANEIRO -- Even as U.S. society struggles to move beyond its confining binary view of race -- white versus black with nothing in between -- Brazil, a country where the celebration of racial mixture has long been a central part of the national self-image, may be heading in the opposite direction.
Between the 16th and 19th centuries, this South American nation received more African slaves than any country in the Americas. But the shortage of white women, and a less rigid view of racial differences, led Portuguese settlers to mix more readily with nonwhite women than did their English counterparts in North America. The result was the creation of a large, racially mixed population. And unlike the Anglo Americans in the United States, who generally saw society in stark, bipolar racial terms and chose to deny the mixture that did occur, the Portuguese learned to view race on a continuum -- white and black with many shades in between.
This doesn’t mean that there was no racism. Indeed, the array of terms used in Brazil to describe different shades of skin color speaks to the existence of a long-standing racial hierarchy in which whites were deemed to be on top and unmixed blacks on the bottom. But despite that, the recognition of gradations of mixture made the idea of race more fluid than it is in the U.S., where social convention has held that anyone with one drop of "African blood" is black. In Brazil, degrees of whiteness -- and social acceptance -- could be achieved through selective mating.
Indeed, in the late 19th and early 20th century, Brazil’s immigration policy was largely based on an effort to "whiten" the population by adding more European immigrants to the mix. In 1912, Brazilian scientist João Batista de Lacerda predicted that by 2012, the ongoing process of mixture would produce a Brazilian population that was 80% white, 3% mixed race and 17% Indian.
In the 1930s, Brazil shifted direction slightly. It didn’t so much reject the practice of "whitening" as superimpose a companion national ideology that boasted of the benefits of racial and cultural mixture. Thanks largely to the work of Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, Brazilians came to view widespread mixture as a sign of their cultural superiority and their society’s lack of racism.
Both at home and abroad, Brazil came to be seen a model of racial tolerance. In 1942, prominent African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier argued that Brazil could teach the U.S. a thing or two about race relations.
But by the 1960s, a small but savvy Brazilian "black movement," inspired in part by the U.S. civil rights movement, began to challenge the national consensus on race. For the next generation, activists called for more research on racial inequality in Brazil, and though they were ultimately incapable of creating an effective mass movement, they successfully influenced the debate. By 2001, their controversial demand for affirmative action in public universities became a reality.
For the last five years, a growing number of universities have adopted and experimented with different types of affirmative action quotas designed primarily to aid blacks and the poor. On the one hand, the fractious debate over affirmative action has helped convince more Brazilians that their history of racial mixture did not erase color-based discrimination. On the other, the establishment of a quota system is obliging a society that has always had a fluid notion of race to begin to standardize, collapse and solidify racial categories in order to determine who exactly should benefit from this race-based entitlement.
As it happens, Batista de Lacerda’s prediction that "blacks" would "disappear" wasn’t that far off. What he did not foresee, however, was the persistence of the large intermediate category between black and white. According to the 2000 census, 53% of Brazilians consider themselves white, 39% pardo -- a broad, generic mixed-race category -- less than 1% indigenous and Asian and only 6% black.
Because the Brazilian black movement has traditionally had a dual mission -- the first to combat color discrimination, the second to forge a black consciousness -- it has long championed the adoption of a binary racial classification system in which there are only two choices: black and white. For the purposes of enforcing affirmative action, some universities have begun to do just that. Quotas are not limited to those who are preto (black) but also to mixed-race pardos. Hence, a new de facto black category has emerged, and it represents no less than 45% of the population.
But given the fluidity of race here, it isn’t always clear who is or is not black. Although most university affirmative action programs simply allow for self-classification, two of them require the submission of photos and have formed committees to verify the veracity of racial claims.
Civil rights attorney Humberto Adami told me that he thinks all this is a good thing. Now that blackness confers a benefit, he says, the whitening process will be reversed and more pardos will come to consider themselves fully black. "People are already bringing their [black] grandmothers out of the closets," he said.
Adami, who helped defend quota students against legal challenges, says universities are just the beginning. He supports the controversial Racial Equality Statute, which is stalled in Congress and is expected to remain there during this presidential election year. If passed, the seemingly innocuous yet far-reaching bill would require all employers to collect racial data from workers and establish quotas in a variety of economic sectors, both public and private. Critics fear that the law would divide society along "pseudo-racial" lines and foster the kind of overt racial tension with which Brazil is not familiar. Proponents argue that those divisions already exist.
Still others, such as Graziella Silva, a Harvard doctoral candidate and Rio native, believe that affirmative action will go through an assimilation process of its own and that it ultimately will be Brazilianized to recognize mixture. "We need to model our public policy on the reality of mixed people," she told me.
Perhaps because I come from a nation that is at long last beginning to acknowledge racial mixture and to move beyond dangerously rigid notions of race, I hope she’s right.
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