Abstract
From 1995 to 2012, Brazilian academia and the movimento negro engaged in sometimes bitter polemics about the best ways to increase the paltry proportion of blacks among the student population in public universities. The reality of racial discrimination was not in dispute, but the acceptability of official recognition of racial classification and the efficacy of setting aside quotas in admissions for black students was. In the end, the Supreme Court supported the principle and Congress passed a law imposing a combination of race-based and socio-economic quotas on all federal universities. This chapter discusses the arguments in detail, the way in which the academic politics developed, and the social context in which the demands grew up both within the university and among the black middle class. It also examines affirmative action in the light of contemporary concepts of social justice and pointing out the very prominent role of for-profit higher education in Brazil.
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