Racial identification gaffe reopens debate on Brazil’s university quota system

Alisson dos Santos Rodrigues, an 18-year-old student from the countryside São Paulo town of Cerqueira César, was set to be the first person in his family to study in Brazil’s prestigious public university system.

After passing a state-wide entrance exam, he was accepted to the medical school of the University of São Paulo (USP), receiving one of the places reserved for black, multiracial, and indigenous applicants as part of Brazil’s racial quota system.

But at the end of February, after traveling five hours to São Paulo on what was to be his first day of classes, he found out that his enrollment had been canceled. The university’s judging committee ruled that Alisson, who has always self-identified as multiracial, was not in fact black or multiracial.

A similar thing happened to 17-year-old Glauco Dalalio de Livramento, who lost his place in USP’s law program this year when another judging committee disagreed with his self-identification as multiracial.

The families of both students took the university to court. In Alisson’s case, a court in his home city gave USP a period of five days to explain why the 18-year-old was disqualified. Meanwhile, a state court issued an injunction to reinstate Glauco’s enrollment, which the school can appeal.

Racial quotas have existed in Brazilian public universities since 2002, designed as a way to help even out the country’s long-standing inequalities in access to higher education. However, the cases of Alisson and Glauco — two teenagers whose self-identification as multiracial appear appropriate — have sparked a nationwide debate about how quotas are allocated and the fairness of the system as a whole.

“The first stage of the racial quotas policy is self-declaration, when a person understands that they may be victims of some form of racial discrimination due to not being white,” explains Luiz Augusto Campos, a sociology and political science professor at the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ) and an expert in race and affirmative action. 

“Then, you combine this with an external classification that seeks to simulate the eyes of society and validate that self-declaration.”

Both Alisson and Glauco earned their places at USP by way of the so-called Provão Paulista, a new form of entrance exam for public universities in São Paulo state. For students who qualify for university spots by way of the Provão and under the racial quota system, the external classification of their racial identity is carried out virtually, with an examination board analyzing each candidate in turn.

The need for quotas

Paid-for private facilities have a low admission bar — accepting almost any and all students, provided they can pay the often eye-watering monthly tuition fees, Brazil’s public universities are free of charge and offer some of the best education the country has to offer. As such, their entrance exams are highly competitive, and wealthy students whose families can afford private secondary schooling are given a clear advantage from the outset.

“[Before racial quotas], public higher education was a machine that reproduced and furthered Brazil’s inequalities … When you bring in affirmative action, you allow individuals from public schools, who are black, to access public universities,” Mr. Campos tells The Brazilian Report. “In fact, you justify the very existence of public higher education.”

Currently, quotas laws state that 50 percent of students admitted to public universities must come from public schools. Within that half, the spots must obey minimum percentages of black, multiracial, and indigenous applicants, in accordance with state-level demographics from the national census.

According to data from the 2022 census, just over ten percent of Brazilians identify as black, while 45 percent — more than any other group — declare as pardo, or multiracial.

Taken literally, the term parda refers to a shade of brown, and is used in Brazil to refer to people of mixed indigenous, European, and, above all, African ancestry.

“The largest contingent of pardos are of African descent. Pardos and blacks are much closer in terms of chances of social mobility than pardos and whites, so their inclusion in racial quotas is fundamental,” explains Mr. Campos.

In the mid-1990s, only a tiny fraction of Brazil’s university students were black. By 2018, sixteen years after the introduction of racial quotas, more than half of university students were non-white. “The quotas changed the face of higher education in Brazil,” Mr. Campos adds.

External racial classification

For almost two decades, the importance and validity of quotas in public universities caused much controversy in Brazil. It is telling, therefore, that the public outcry regarding the cases of Alisson and Glauco has been less about the existence of racial quotas, and more about specific aspects of their implementation — namely external racial classification, a system used to avoid white students unduly taking advantage of affirmative action.

For Mr. Campos, solutions to the problem will never be easy, as race itself is a social construct. 

“People are the ones who see race; they have subjective ideas that make them classify others in different ways, be that based on skin color or other characteristics. There’s so much variation within that because it’s all subjective and always will be. There will never be an algorithm that tells us if people are black or not, because race is not biologically objective.”

In response to the public uproar at the cancellation of the enrollment of Alisson and Glauco, USP issued a statement in which it explains the criteria used to identify whether applicants are black, multiracial, or indigenous. 

The school said that its analysis of race is “strictly phenotypical,” using characteristics such as “skin color, hair, and the shape of [candidates’] mouths and nose.”

While many experts in favor of racial quotas acknowledge the need for a system in place to discourage fraud, such physical criteria do not sit comfortably in a country that struggles with widespread racism. “The minute you make a list with nose size and whathaveyou, you give the impression that race is an objective classification,” Mr. Campos warns.

Social quotas?

Roberta Fragoso, a lawyer and prosecutor in Brazil’s Federal District, is not against entrance quotas for public Brazilian universities per se, but argues that they should adhere to social and economic criteria instead of race.

“Seventy-five percent of poor people in Brazil are black, so if you go ahead with social quotas you can have objective criteria, such as household income,” she tells The Brazilian Report. “You can offer access to university to poor black people without the burden of going through these ‘race tribunals'” — as Ms. Fragoso describes external examination boards.

Social quotas based on income and public schooling, however, already exist in the Brazilian system, as 50 percent of places go to applicants who studied in the public high school system. Furthermore, the argument against such purely socio-economic quotas is that they ignore the racism that exists independent of class. While racial inequality in Brazil runs very close to income inequality, it is not an exact correlation.

“When you control for socio-economic class, you still see a strictly racial inequality [in Brazil],” points out Mr. Campos. “If you compare the chances of social mobility of a poor black person, it will be half that of a poor white person.”

Ms. Fragoso’s argument, however, is not to deny the racism that exists in Brazil independent of socio-economic class — she argues, in fact, that racism “undeniably exists in all levels of Brazilian society — but it is an attempt to bypass cases such as those of Alisson and Glauco, where their self-identification is multiracial is not accepted.

“Today in Brazil, a woman can go into a registry office and self-declare as a man. Self-declaration suffices in quotas for transgender people, for instance. Brazil should either adopt a policy in which it accepts racial self-declaration and potential cases of fraud are identified and punished, or adopt social quotas which will still help the poor black people who need them.”

The future of university quotas

As The Brazilian Report showed in a 2022 article, there is consensus among experts that racial quotas brought a hitherto unknown reach to the lower social classes, made up mostly by people of color. Research has also shown that the entry of “quota students” did not significantly alter the entrance grade of universities, nor the quality of courses or student performance.

“We did a survey a few years ago and found that in around 15 percent of public undergraduate courses, the quota students had higher entrance grades than the others,” Mr. Campos tells The Brazilian Report. “So, in these 15 percent of courses, the quotas were no longer necessary. If they are successful, they will eventually cancel themselves out.”

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