Affirmative Action, Brazilian-Style

The Chronicle of Higher Education
October 11, 2009

By Marion Lloyd
Six years after Brazilian universities began embracing affirmative action, higher education in Brazil is no longer the domain of a mostly white elite.
Since 2003 more than 1,300 institutions of higher education have adopted quotas for Afro-Brazilians and graduates of public high schools. The government has also created 10 public universities and dozens of new campuses in poor areas in an effort to expand access to higher education for the underprivileged.
But the debate over the quota system—racial quotas in particular—continues to inflame passions in a country that has long considered itself a racial democracy.
Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888. Today the descendants of slaves officially make up nearly half of the country's 190 million people, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, the government census bureau. Proponents of quotas for Afro-Brazilians argue that only Nigeria has a larger black population. But centuries of racial intermixing, which was initially encouraged by Portuguese colonizers seeking to whiten the population, have made it famously hard to classify Brazilians by race.
Take the case of Alan and Alex Texeira, identical male twins who applied for admission to the federal University of Brasilia in 2007 under the racial quotas. After analyzing photos of the brothers—a required step for accessing the university's quota system—separate "race boards" determined that one was black and one was white.
Opponents of the racial quotas argue that poverty, not race, is the main obstacle to getting a university education in Brazil. The country's more than 130 public universities are free, and competition at most of them, particularly the 55 federal universities, is brutal. Private universities enroll about 80 percent of the 4.5 million students in the higher-education system. But in a nation where per capita income is just $7,350 a year, and the distribution of wealth is among the world's most unequal, most families cannot afford to send their children to private universities.

Full Story: http://chronicle.com/article/Affirmative-Action/48734/