Affirmative action in Brazil
Slavery's legacy
TO SUM up recent research
predicting a mixed-race future for humanity, biologist Stephen Stearns
of Yale University turns to an already intermingled nation. In a few
centuries, he says, we will all "look like Brazilians". Brazil shares
with the United States a population built from European immigrants,
their African slaves and the remnants of the Amerindian population they
displaced. But with many more free blacks during the era of slavery, no
"Jim Crow" laws or segregation after it ended in 1888 and no taboo on
interracial romance, colour in Brazil became not a binary variable but a
spectrum.
Even so, it still codes for health,
wealth and status. Light-skinned women strut São Paulo's upmarket
shopping malls in designer clothes; dark-skinned maids in uniform walk
behind with the bags and babies. Black and mixed-race Brazilians earn
three-fifths as much as white ones. They are twice as likely to be
illiterate or in prison, and less than half as likely to go to
university. They die six years younger—and the cause of death is more
than twice as likely to be murder.
Such stark racial
inequality is actually an improvement on the recent past (except for the
gap between homicide rates, which has grown with the spread of crack
cocaine). A strong jobs market, better-targeted government spending and
the universalisation of primary schooling have brought gains to poor
Brazilians, whatever their colour. Even so, Brazil's government is
turning to affirmative-action programmes to hurry change along—just as
the United States considers abandoning them.
During
the past decade several public universities have introduced racial
preferences piecemeal. Last April the supreme court decided that they
did not contravene constitutional equal-rights provisions—which was all
that the government had been waiting for. In August it passed a law
mandating quotas for entry to all of the country's 59 federal
universities and 38 federal technical schools. The first cotistas, as beneficiaries are known, started their courses this year.
By
2016 half of all places in federal institutions will be reserved for
state-schooled applicants. Of these, half must go to students from
families with incomes below 1017 reais ($503) a month per person—a
cut-off that is much higher than the Brazilian average. Each must
allocate quota places to black, mixed-race and Amerindian students in
proportion to their weight in the local population (80% in Bahia, a
state in Brazil's north-east; 16% in Santa Catarina in the country's
south). Some states are considering similar rules for their own
universities.
Brazil does not require private
universities to take race into account. Nor does it require private
companies to do so when hiring. A few states have racial quotas when
hiring civil servants, and there is talk of something similar at the
federal level. But the real action, for now, is in public universities.
Going
to university in Brazil is not a mass experience, as in the United
States. And only a quarter of places are in public institutions. Other
government education programmes, such as creche-building in poor
neighbourhoods, better literacy training for teachers and subsidies for
poor students who attend private universities, will improve the lives of
many more black Brazilians than the quota programme. But public
universities are more prestigious—and barred from charging fees by the
constitution. That their places have long gone disproportionately to the
12% of Brazilians who are privately educated, most of them rich and
white, is hard to swallow.
The supreme court decided
that quotas were an acceptable weapon in the fight against the legacy of
slavery. That view is now mainstream in Brazil. Just one congressman
voted against the new law, and a recent opinion poll found nearly
two-thirds of Brazilians supported racial preferences for university
admissions (though even more were keen on reserving places for the
state-schooled and poor with no regard for colour). But even supporters
worry that by encouraging Brazilians to choose sharp-edged racial
identities, quotas will create tensions where none existed before.
Brazilians'
notions of race are indeed changing, but only partly because of quotas,
and more subtly than the doom-mongers fear. The unthinking prejudice
expressed in common phrases such as "good appearance" (meaning
pale-skinned) and "good hair" (not frizzy) means many light-skinned
Brazilians have long preferred to think of themselves as "white",
whatever their parentage. But between 2000 and 2010 the self-described
"white" population fell by six percentage points, while the "black" and
"mixed-race" groups grew.
Researchers
think a growing pride in African ancestry is behind much of the shift.
But quotas also seem to affect how people label themselves. Andrew
Francis of Emory University and Maria Tannuri-Pianto of the University
of Brasília (UnB) found that some light-skinned mixed-race applicants to
UnB, which started using racial preferences in 2004, thought of
themselves as white but described themselves as mixed-race to increase
their chances of getting in. Some later reverted to a white identity.
But for quite a few the change was permanent.
Opponents
of quotas worry that ill-prepared students will gain entry to tough
courses and then struggle to cope. Such fears make sense: any sort of
affirmative action will bring more publicly educated youngsters into
university—and in Brazil, the difference between what they and their
privately educated counterparts have learnt is vast. In global education
studies, 15-year-olds in Brazil's private schools come slightly above
the rich-world average for all pupils. Most of those in its public
schools are functionally illiterate and innumerate.
Surprisingly, though, neither the State University of Rio de Janeiro nor UnB—the two earliest to adopt quotas—have found that cotistas did
much worse than their classmates. For some highly competitive courses,
such as medicine at UnB, the two groups had quite similar entrance
grades. And for some of the least selective courses, the overall
standard was not high. But even when the starting gaps were wide, most cotistas had nearly caught up by graduation.
One possible explanation is that cotistas with a given entrance grade were in fact more able than non-cotistas, since the latter were more likely to have had intensive coaching in test techniques. Another is that cotistas worked harder: both universities found they skipped fewer classes and were less likely to drop out. "Cotistas take
their studies much more seriously than those who thought a university
place was theirs by right," says Luiza Bairros, the state secretary for
policies to promote racial equality. "They know how important this
opportunity is, not just for them but for their whole family."
Brazil's
racial preferences differ from America's in that they are narrowly
aimed at preventing a tiny elite from scooping a grossly
disproportionate share of taxpayer-funded university places.
Privately-educated (ie, well-off) blacks do not get a leg-up in
university admissions. But since racial quotas are just starting in
Brazil, it is too early to say what their effects will be, and whether
they will make race relations better or worse.
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