On April 9, 2019, Duke undergraduates and “Cost of Opportunity” project members Vanessa Aguedelo and Joseph Beck presented data that suggested that Brazilian education remains both extremely difficult to access and more crucial to employment than in its developed counterparts. Joe Beck gave an overview of Brazilian education politics noting “most [university] students were wealthy and white likely due to implicit biases in the application process as well as the lifetime costly preparation that’s involved for the Brazilian version of the SAT.”  Aguedelo acknowledged critics who see a tenuous relationship between higher education completion and employment prospects but countered that though Brazil’s graduation rate remains below that of other OECD countries, employment rates for university graduates are higher in Brazil than in OECD countries. On the whole, noted Aguedelo, Brazilians university graduates earn 157 percent more than their high-school graduate counterparts. This contradiction echoes the US educational dilemma, where graduation becomes more costly but also crucial to accessing 9 of 10 US jobs.

Despite these historic difficulties, affirmative action processes implemented at the university and state levels since 2003 and the national level since 2012 have proven effective in increasing the percentage of Black and mixed raced Brazilians in higher education.

Despite these gains, Brazilian affirmative action’s main mechanism-reserving spots for Afro-Brazilian and indigenous students within slots already designated for graduates of Brazil’s public school system-has highlighted racial-ethnic tensions through its quota verification commissions. Joe Beck specifically highlighted the case of Matheus Moros-who as a self-identified mixed race Brazilian university applicant, accused a “a commission of six white people” of annulling his self-identification

While some self-classified  pardo applicants base their identity in family ancestry, the commissions use a combination of phenotype and racial consciousness to validate self-reported categories. While the University of Brasilia suspended such commissions amid controversy in 2007, they returned among reports of widespread quota fraud and then-interim president Michel Temer´s Planning Ministry expanded them to federal job quotas in August  2016. Though at the time the policies received criticisms- from the right and left– the college-prep and Black Movement organization EDUCAFRO boasted that such policies have prevented 1500 fraudulent quota enrollments in Brazil´s universities. In a televised 2018 debate on the Federal University of Goias’ UFG-TV,  Goias Federal Institute (IFG) professor Janira Sodre Miranda recognized the difficult balance between maintaining the internationally recognized right of self-identification and the necessity to weed out “false information” from those who-wittingly or unwittingly-presented themselves as mixed-race or Black without having suffered “the effects of the Brazilian racial operational system.”

These long-standing controversies continue while Brazil’s new president Jair Bolsonaro has promised to reverse the country’s affirmative action policies and the PT governments’ educational initiatives more broadly. But  Black Movements in the last month and a half have also received  good news backed by robust results.Black news outlet Alma Preta reported the Brazilian Lower Chamber’s president Rodrigo Maia told Black movement leaders in a March meeting that while he supported exclusively class-based quotas he acknowledged the “positive results” of racial affirmative action policies which boosted Black university participation from 2.2 percent in 2000 to 9.3 percent in 2017 (in 2011 the number peaked around 11 percent). Recent results from Maia’s home state of Rio de Janeiro- reported by center-right traditional media giant O Globo- suggest those coming admitted through quotas-despite facing initial suspicion and cultural barriers- drop out far less than those from the regular admissions processes(24.6 percent to 34.6 percent) and even maintain  a slight edge (4.65 to 5.88 percent) in Brazil’s most prestigious programs ( such as engineering, law, medicine degrees).

Maia  reiterated “now is not the time to reverse direction” on the policies, which come up for renewal or termination in 2022. While such assurances may merely emerge from the legislative leader’s rocky relationship with Bolsonaro’s administration, the stance falls in line with his socially conciliatory legislative style on hot button cultural issues even as he pushes deregulatory economic and budgetary “reforms.” Quotas look to survive in law, even if  truncated and underfunded.

Putting the legislative politics and economics aside, Agueledo and Beck ended by questioning whether we should even rely on employment and graduation rates to evaluate quota values. They asked listeners to also value  university accesses’ intangible benefits such as a student’s discovery of their own racial identity during their college years.

Readers can see Aguedelo and Beck’s full five-minute talk below:

By Joe Beck

I was not sure what to expect when I stepped off the plane in Rio de Janeiro.  It had been about ten years since I was last in Brazil when I visited São Paulo with family and in drastically different circumstances.  I understood that we were scheduled to stay in a historically stigmatized place called the Baixada Fluminense, but beyond that, I had no idea what day-to-day activities would entail other than the outline of what the Cost of Opportunity team did last year.

Because I have not taken part in a research trip before, I was not sure what work I was qualified to do.  Regardless of what my workload would be, I was glad that I could practice Portuguese and visit the country of my ancestors.  I did not anticipate all I was going to learn. First of all, I saw firsthand the stark contrasts between the wealthy, vibrant, tourist-mecca Rio de Janeiro and the vilified, branded, surrounding region, which is known as the Baixada Fluminense.  The airport staff member’s shocked expression when I told him where I would be spending my time in Brazil revealed exactly how the Baixada is perceived – a place to be ashamed of and forgotten.

The Baixada was significantly poorer than Rio, which largely results from the legacy of slavery.  It is composed of a high proportion of people of African descent as opposed to the well-known neighborhoods of Rio like Copacabana and Ipanema, which are majority white.  That contrast led to discussions  about race, which taught me aspects of Brazil I had never known.  For example, in Brazil, the conception of race is much more fluid than in the United States.  Racial identity is more of a color gradient as opposed to distinct categories of White or Black.  A person in Brazil can identify as either Pardo (of partial African descent) or Preto (of primarily African descent), whereas in the United States a person would largely be regarded as Black or White, and typically not much in between.  Although some dedicate their lives in revealing racial injustice, many Brazilians problematically either believe that racism is not a problem in Brazil or is not a problem that they themselves espouse.  The reality, however, is that people of a darker skin color face far more prejudice than others, and many people, wittingly or not, perpetuate the discrimination.

Prior to the trip, I thought of myself as informed about Brazilian affairs, including topics such as race.  I was surprised by how ignorant I actually was.  My Brazilian grandmother practically lives at home with me, I speak Portuguese at home, and we watch O Globo (a Brazilian news network).  As far as I was concerned, Brazil was a model on which the United States ought to emulate in order to eliminate racial bigotry and hostility.  However, I knew little about the true nature of how lighter-skinned Brazilians systematically oppress other, darker-skinned individuals.

Another aspect of the trip that left a large impression on me was the impact the Cost of Opportunity’s work had upon others in the Baixada, and in particular the work by community educator and rapper Dudu as well as Stephanie Reist.  We went to various locations to screen the film that Dudu and Stephanie produced last year.  The film detailed barriers to upper education that many people who attend the newly opened university face every day.  And now that this recently afforded right is being attacked by the Temer administration, people in the community are responding ferociously and emotionally.  Many people to whom we had shown the film cried because they felt so poignantly attacked by the federal government upon their right afforded by the Brazilian constitution to a quality upper education.  Many times I found myself with a lump in my throat when watching the effect of the film upon high school students in the community as they talked about their own struggles that come with living in the Baixada and ultimately trying to better their lives through higher education.

Seeing the importance of the work that the Cost of Opportunity team is doing made me reflect upon how I want to contribute to the project in the future.  I am interested in analyzing the data that would assist in revealing the university’s economic impacts on the Baixada.  What became clear by the end of my two weeks in Brazil was that the work we were doing was larger in magnitude than mere academic research, and in fact transcended the academic sphere.  It appeared that the Brazilian counterpart of the research team would use many of the findings we work on at Duke as part of a larger political operation.  I hope that what I contribute to the group in terms of academic results can be used as evidence of the beneficial effects of universities in the fight for increased access to education.