“Looking for more Brazilian solutions”: Rhetorical Strategies against Ethnic Quotas in Brazilian Higher Education

Abstract

Since the 1990s, Brazil has experienced a growing public debate about policies of ethnic affirmative action. The arguments invoked by the opponents of affirmative action quotas, expressed in scientific publications, the mass media and even manifestos, have been the subject of study in several research projects. In their analyses, these scholars have concluded that the the anti-quota arguments suffered from logical inconsistency, theoretical and methodological flaws or simple lack of empirical evidence. However, anti-quota rhetoric appears to persist seemingly unaffected by academic counter-arguments, if not in the academic debate, at least in public opinion. This paper argues that the persuasive power of anti-quota arguments derives from the strategic use of specific rhetorical strategies, based on time-proven classical speech imagery that foreground evidence and logic even where speculation and heuristics are the actual foundation. Using methods of Critical Discourse Analysis I will analyze a representative corpus of prominent public discourses against ethnic affirmative action quotas in order to demonstrate how rhetorical strategies are deployed in these texts, showing how they broadly mirror the proposition of a “Rhetoric of Reaction” (Hirschman 1991). These rhetorics, I argue, draw heavily on the myth of “racial democracy” combined with a long-standing national master-narrative of Brazilian exceptionalism, the combination of which masks racial animosity and defers policy action to support ethnic minorities.