BRAZIL: University Racial Quotas Bogged Down in Congress

IPS
By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 28 (IPS) - Claudio Fernández is able to study law thanks to affirmative action quotas at the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ). But a draft law to expand race quotas to all public institutions of higher education is stalled in the Senate."The quotas helped me overcome a situation in which the son of a domestic employee with five children – my case – cannot even imagine making it to a public university, not to mention a career in law," Fernández told IPS. The UERJ law student is poor, just like 67 percent of blacks in Brazil. Public primary and secondary schools in Brazil do not tend to provide a solid educational foundation for continuing on to tertiary level studies. In addition, private courses for the university entrance exam are costly. Most of the students who make it into the country’s prestigious public universities come from middle and upper socioeconomic strata and studied at private schools. Brazil’s tuition-free federal universities provide the best higher education in the country. The draft law that would reserve quotas for black and indigenous students in public universities and vocational-technical institutes, introduced by the leftwing government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is aimed at overcoming these imbalances, which are later reflected in the labour market. The initiative would reserve 50 percent of spots in the federal university system for students from public schools, half of whom must come from families with a maximum income of 1.5 minimum monthly salaries – equivalent to 313 dollars. The racial quotas, meanwhile, would be set according to the proportion of blacks and indigenous people in any given state, based on census information from the Brazilian Institute of Statistics. For example, in a state like Bahía in the northeast, where a majority of the population is black, the proportion would be higher, while it would be lower in the southern state of Santa Catarina. But the draft law, approved by the Chamber of Deputies on Nov. 20 - National Black Awareness Day – is bogged down in the Senate constitution and justice committee. In a telephone interview from the capital Brasilia, where a protest was held last week outside the Senate to demand passage of the law, Daniel Cara, coordinator of the National Campaign for the Right to Education, told IPS that "the approval process has been slow, given the importance of this draft law."

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