'Race fraud': how a college quota scandal exposed Brazil's historic racial tensions

"While affirmative action policies were introduced to US universities in the 1970s, Brazil didn’t begin experimenting with the concept until 2001, in part because affirmative action collided head-on with a defining feature of Brazilian identity.

For much of the 20th century, intellectual and political leaders promoted the idea that Brazil was a “racial democracy”, whose history favourably contrasted with the state-enforced segregation and violence of Jim Crow America and apartheid South Africa. “Racial democracy”, a term popularised by anthropologists in the 1940s, has long been a source of pride among Brazilians.

As the country’s black activist groups have argued for decades, it is also a myth. Brazil’s horrific history of slavery — 5.5 million Africans were forcibly transported to Brazil, in comparison with the just under 500,000 brought to America — and its present-day legacy demanded legal recognition, they said. And almost two decades ago, these activists started to get their way in the form of race-based quotas at universities.

For Brazil’s black activists, however, the breach of the country’s unofficial colour-blindness has also been accompanied by suspicion over race fraud: people taking advantage of affirmative action policies never meant for them in the first place."

read article by Cleuci de Oliveira

'Race fraud': how a college quota scandal exposed Brazil's historic racial tensions | Inequality | The Guardian