Affirmative Action and the Brazilian Presidential Election of 2022 by Vânia Penha-Lopes, Ph.D. - 03/11/22

On August 7, 2012, thirteen years since it had first been presented to the Congress, the Brazilian Senate approved the university quotas bill with only one abstention. A few days later, President Dilma Rousseff signed Law no. 12711/12, which reserves half of the university slots to Black, Brown, and Indigenous Brazilians and to economically deprived students. Called the “Law of Social Quotas,” it guarantees the constitutionality of quotas as an affirmative action policy. The news made it to the cover of The New York Times.

The road to the federal quotas law was filled with extremely polarized debates. On the one hand, opponents claimed that the quotas were a “high-risk social policy”: unconstitutional and anti-meritocratic, for facilitating the entrance of supposedly poorly prepared persons into the privileged space of universities; alien, an imported U.S. problem because, they claimed, Brazil is not a racist country; and the source of an ethical “earthquake,” for negating the color gradation that has been recognized for a century.

On the other hand, sympathizers saw quotas as a way of repairing racial inequality in Brazil, which is so deep that it overcomes economic inequality, and the most expedient way of opening and maintaining spaces historically occupied primarily by better-off Whites. Since a college diploma increases the chance of upward mobility, the expectation was for the proportion of Brazilian negros in the higher classes to increase in the long run, thus establishing conditions for the creation of an Afro-Brazilian elite.

Over a decade before university quotas policies became a federal law, the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and the State University of Northern Rio de Janeiro pioneered the admission of quota students in Brazil. My 2006-7 study of the first graduating quota students at UERJ showed that their cumulative academic performance was equal to or above that of universal students in a number of the 48 majors on the credit system, and that the quotas policies have led to a greater inclusion of non-White and lower-income students in elite majors. Quota students have also tended to have lower attrition rates than universal students, as data from several Brazilian universities have shown.

The image of university quotas in Brazil as a complete policy failure does not correspond to the evidence. According to national data by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), only 4% of 18 to 24 year old university students were Black and Brown in 1997; between 2010 and 2019, they grew to nearly 40%. The Indigenous contingent, as well as the number of students from the lowest economic quintile, have also gone up.

Quotas policies, which now also apply to the civil service, are the most solid recognition from the government that the country has a debt to the descendants of enslaved persons. However, quotas have increasingly expanded beyond Afro-Brazilians, who fought for them in the first place. Currently, university quotas encompass the physically disabled, the economically deprived, transgendered persons, refugees, and, in the case of Rio de Janeiro, children of police officers killed in the line of duty. The difference is that the racial quotas have been attacked the most.

The quotas law is up for review in 2022. In February 2022, Zumbi dos Palmares University, the first and only private institution in Latin America whose primary mission is to include Black and lower income persons in higher education, sponsored a meeting to discuss the review, which included a request for the extension of the law for another 50 years, an idea put forth by three congresspersons from the Workers’ Party. That was the party that supported affirmative action during four presidential tenures, first with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-11), and then with Dilma Rousseff (2011-16).

The year of 2022 is also when Brazilians decide whether to reelect President Jair Bolsonaro or to oust him. Following a campaign during which he denied the existence of racism in Brazil while making racist remarks, his tenure has been characterized by an anti-science stance visible both in his dismissal of the covid-19 pandemic and in the cutting of funds for education to the point where research is seriously at risk and federal universities are struggling to stay afloat. Moreover, Bolsonaro has consistently opposed university quotas. His direct opponent is Lula, who remains ahead of him in the polls. Still, former president Lula’s camp must be mindful of the significant voter absenteeism which helped elect Bolsonaro in 2018--a sign of lack of interest in the candidates and a reaction to the expansion of rights to minority groups in the previous administrations. In a country notorious for its negation of racism, where public opinion favors policies that take socioeconomic status over racial inequality, affirmative action may continue to be challenged.

Vânia Penha-Lopes is Professor of Sociology at Bloomfield College and co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Brazil. She is the author of The Presidential Elections of Trump and Bolsonaro, Whiteness, and the Nation (2022) and of Confronting Affirmative Action in Brazil: University Quota Students and the Quest for Racial Justice (2017).

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