Citizenship, Racial Inequality And Affirmative Action Policies

Abstract

CITIZENSHIP, RACIAL INEQUALITY AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION POLICIES Angela Randolpho Paiva∗ Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro Introduction Modern citizenship in western democracies means in its very basis the effective fulfillment of human rights in the public sphere. Thus the building of citizenship in each of these societies should focus on how the conception of human rights became part of the political project of different states, and also what makes the public sphere more inclusive and more diverse. This demands the analysis of the complex equation between the promises of rights written in the constitutions of modern societies with the maintenance of an economic social order that generates increasing social inequality. From a sociological viewpoint, it is important to understand the revolutionary concept of social equality: If at first it meant an abstract ideal to be pursued, later it implied the quest for the material realization of social rights in several of the 20th century welfare states, when it turned out to be strong enough to be internalized as a “moral issue”, as Taylor (1989) would describe it, and resulted in actual change in the sociopolitical organizations of modern societies. Therefore, the analysis of the enlargement of the public sphere is crucial to understand the moment societies go in the direction of either being more diverse, as is the case of the inclusion of workers or women in the political process last century, when these segments were granted their political rights, or in the direction of keeping other segments outside. Although it is often assumed that more equality brings necessarily more inclusion, this can be a complex equation when other variables are considered, such as prejudice or discrimination. The segregation of blacks in the USA – a country that would praise equality as one of its foundation principle –is a good illustration of this false equation. When translated to Brazilian social conditions, the analysis of the equation between social equality and participation in the public sphere must begin with the structural inequality of its social order. Thus applying the framework of the modern conception of human rights in the Brazilian case is a difficult task – in a public sphere whose original trace is its inequality. Furthermore, as will be argued in the present study, social inequality and exclusion also have a color, as blacks have been systematically kept away ∗ I thank Edward Telles and Jerry Dávila for the reading of an early version of this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers for the suggestions made. C 2012 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 91 The Latin Americanist, December 2012 from the Brazilian public sphere and kept in this situation even at periods when the country experienced great economic growth. The objective of the present analysis is first to understand the considerable gap that remains between the extensive civil rights protections enshrined in the 1988 Constitution and the ability of social actors, particularly black Brazilians, to access them. This is based on long patterns of marginalization and exclusion which cannot be simply legislated out of existence. Drawing on a historical sociology, section 2 will show the main traits that prevailed in the Brazilian social formation, which made inequality not only inextricably bound to our conception of society, but also a natural phenomenon. In addition, it is important to analyze the place the black population occupied in this structural inequality. Although social inequality is not concentrated solely in the black population, one can say that blacks have had more difficulty than whites in climbing the social ladder since the end of slavery in 1888, though this never became a social issue, as we shall see below. Therefore, section 3 will highlight the elements that were present in the nation-building process that were not only powerful to obtain the consent of the blacks towards such unequal conditions for participation in the public sphere, but also did not allow the formation of a collective identity based on race. It will be emphasized that there were two powerful ideologies that reinforced or helped keep racial inequality devoid of any type of conflict in the public sphere: the ideology of a color blind society and the ideology of...