The Promotion of Racial Equality in Higher Education: Challenges for Lula’s Administration
Rubia Valente is a Research Fellow of the Washington Brazil Office. She is assistant professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College – City University of New York and a member of the executive committee of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA). Rosana Heringer is a Research Fellow of the Washington Brazil Office. She is associate professor at the College of Education at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (FE/UFRJ) and coordinates the Laboratory of Studies and Research in Higher Education (LEPES/UFRJ). This text was originally written for issue 76 of the WBO Newsletter, published on July 21, 2023. Fill in the form at the bottom of the text to access and subscribe to the WBO weekly newsletter in English.
From May 30 to June 2, 2023, the United Nations held the second permanent Forum for Afro-descendants in New York. This forum aims to promote and advance the rights of the Black population; present their concerns, recommendations, challenges; and share best practices in an international assembly gathering experts from around the world. Many Brazilian representatives were in attendance, including Minister of Racial Equality Anielle Franco, who led the Brazilian delegation. Minister Franco gave a passionate speech highlighting the many challenges still faced by Afro descendants in Brazil and underscored how Brazil, the largest Black nation outside of Africa, still has an arduous path to promote the rights that its population deserves.
The implementation of affirmative action policies in Brazil was an important step in this direction—the lack of accessibility to higher education creates an intergenerational cycle that particularly harms Afro-descendants who have been disproportionately situated at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Although a lot of progress has been made since the implementation of racial quotas in institutions of higher education in Brazil, the previous administration worked tirelessly to dismantle academic institutions, restrict inclusion programs, reduce financial resources for federal universities and programs like the National Policy for Student Support (PNAES). This was a trend in Bolsonaro’s electoral campaign and in his administration, that deprioritized investments in academic and scientific research and in policies for promotion of racial equality, and openly criticized quota legislation.
It is reassuring that the new government is committed to providing support to institutions of higher education and to democratizing Brazil’s universities. Yet, recent studies show that there is still a need to improve, protect, and strengthen affirmative action policies aimed at combatting racism and promoting the rights of Black Brazilians. The study “Evaluation of Affirmative Action Policies in Higher Education in Brazil: Results and Future Challenges”, led by the Laboratory of Studies and Research in Higher Education of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Lepes/UFRJ) and by the organization Educational Action (Ação Educativa), highlighted some challenges that the new administration will face fighting racism in higher education.
A key challenge is that, despite affirmative action policies, the growth in the number of university graduates has occurred with the context of the maintenance of racial inequalities. The increase in college graduates is significant for the white population, but the advances are much smaller for Blacks.
“There is still a need to improve, protect, and strengthen affirmative action policies aimed at combatting racism and promoting the rights of Black Brazilians”
This research also found that many universities in Brazil do not have programs to monitor the performance and trajectory of quota students—there’s a lack of pedagogical support, and not much attention given to their daily experiences. In the few cases where universities possess institutional bodies aimed at monitoring Black, Brown, and Indigenous students, there is a lack of human and financial resources to adequately support them. Concurrently, the study shows that at the institutional level, there’s little information being collected by the universities on the profile of quota students, their academic history, performance, and challenges.
This study introduces a series of recommendations designed to strengthen affirmative action policies in Brazilian higher education. For example, one of the proposals is to articulate affirmative action policies with those that promote diversity and anti-racist, anti-discriminatory education, including full implementation of the National Curricular Guidelines (DCNs) for the education of ethnic-racial relations and for the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and African history and culture. It also suggests the implementation of “epistemic quotas,” which entails an intersectional curricular diversification in the perspective of Afro-Brazilian, African, and Indigenous matrices, among others. There is also an urgent need to increase the apport of resources for student retention and financial support, especially for quota students, to afford them the opportunity to dedicate full time to their studies.
Affirmative action policies are an important component of public policies towards racial equality in Brazil. They should integrate other important social, economic, and cultural agendas developed by the Brazilian government to address the issue of racism and race inequalities in Brazil in its different expressions. The Lula administration has a timely opportunity to strengthen anti-racist policies at the national, regional, and global levels, and the UN Forum was an important space for discussing these policies and supporting their full implementation in Brazil. As part of the forum, the Brazilian government has recommended the expansion of data collection on race and ethnicity in administrative databases and the development of anti-violence policies particularly focused on Black urban youth. These are critical steps towards the implementation of an anti-racist agenda that will help shape a more equitable future for the Brazilian Black population.
