When the Brazilian government began considering affirmative action policies based on race, critics claimed they would be impossible to implement because of the ambiguity of the country’s racial categories. Given extensive mixing and fluid identities, how can the state determine just who is black? Yet supporters of affirmative action say the question of “who is black?” is disingenuous. Senator Paulo Paim, for example, says that people are happy to acknowledge race when they identify the large number of blacks who live in poverty or prison. But when discussing compensatory policies, they suddenly become ignorant. Their response, he says, is “‘how do we know who is black?’ That’s the first excuse they give. When we talk about the bad side, they identify blacks easily, but when we get to the issue of compensation, they don’t know who blacks are!”2
For advocates, the answer to “who is black?” is simple: self-identification. Activists joke that if this doesn’t work, “in the event of a doubt, call a policeman; they always know.”
This controversy incited by affirmative action policies suggests that the state is a major player in racial formation. Its policies, over time, have had the potential to trigger transformations in the significance and understanding of identity in society at large. Unlike the United States and South Africa, Brazil historically avoided state-sponsored segregation and has prided itself on being a multi-hued “racial democracy.” The racial democracy thesis insists that the absence of segregation, a history of race mixing and the social recognition of intermediate racial categories have upheld a unique, multi-tiered racial order. In the United States, by contrast, children born of white and black parents are generally classified as black—the “one-drop rule”—creating a bipolar racial system.
It is true that Brazilian culture celebrates racial ambiguity and that racial categories are fluid, but the country is nonetheless profoundly stratified by color. For decades, the state did nothing to alter the situation. On the contrary, it suppressed efforts to challenge the racial democracy myth and sought to whiten the population by encouraging European immigration. Over the past decade, however, that policy has changed radically. Under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the government admitted that Brazil is a racist country and endorsed an extreme form of affirmative action—quotas—to address racial inequality. The President created a national affirmative action program; three ministries introduced hiring quotas for blacks, women and handicapped people; the National Human Rights Program endorsed racial quotas; the foreign ministry introduced a program to increase the number of black diplomats; and three states approved laws reserving 40% of university admission slots for Afro-Brazilians. The state expanded these policies under the current government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Policymakers were motivated more by conviction than threats or material or electoral interests. Few believed that championing race issues would actually win votes.3 The changes occurred because greater numbers of people became convinced by an idea advanced for decades by Afro-Brazilian activists and social science researchers: racism is pervasive and will not disappear until something deliberate is done about it. Armed principally with arguments, critics of Brazil’s racial order appealed to reason and a sense of justice to advance their cause. In a country struggling to prove its liberal credentials to itself and to the world, claims about the connections among race, equality and democracy found receptive ears.
Beginning in 1995, the Cardoso Administration provided a context that nurtured a transformation of political action on race. Then, preparations for the 2001 World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa provoked national soul-searching on racial inequalities. By the time the conference actually occurred, the country was ready for a change in orientation. Pledges made at Durban served as the catalyst for affirmative action policies at home. Social mobilization and presidential initiative were thus framed within unfolding international events.
While affirmative action was new, Brazil had a long history of anti-discrimination policies. The country’s three constitutions in the 1930s and 1940s each proclaimed: “All are equal under the law.” In the 1960s, the military government reintroduced the prohibition of racial distinctions and made racism a punishable offense. While these early provisions were mostly symbolic, with the return to democracy in 1985 and the Constitution of 1988, the state began to take more significant action on issues of race.
The 1988 Constitution defined racism as a crime for which bail could not be posted and with no statute of limitations. It also affirmed a commitment to multiculturalism, including the protection of Afro-Brazilian cultural practices, and it granted land titles to surviving occupants of quilombos, communities established by runaway slaves prior to emancipation in 1888.
At the state level, there were some policy changes adopted mostly by governors elected in 1982. Opposition parties that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s vied for black support by assuming a role in the fight against racism. In the early 1990s, state governors of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo created government institutions and advisory groups to address issues of racism and to advocate on behalf of their black constituents. Though these agencies were small and underfunded, their creation implied that some institutions of the Brazilian state were beginning to reject the thesis that Brazil was a racial democracy.4
With the election of Cardoso in 1995, the federal government began to take more initiative with regard to race and for the first time contemplated affirmative action. Meanwhile, Brazil published its tenth report for the United Nations Human Rights Commission. The report, written by the Secretary of State for Human Rights, Paulo Sérgio Pinhiero, proclaimed that affirmative action was compatible with Brazilian legislation and committed the state “to take positive action to promote equality.”
The National Human Rights Program, launched in 1996, then proposed specific public policies aimed at black Brazilians, such as support for private businesses that hired them and measures to increase access to universities. The Human Rights Plan represented the first time that racial groups were officially recognized as targets of public policies.5
Following the 2001 World Conference on Racism, state agencies at all levels began announcing affirmative action policies. The ministries of Justice, Agrarian Development and Culture adopted 20% to 30% quotas for blacks. The Foreign Ministry also announced an affirmative action program. Historically, there have been almost no blacks in Brazil’s diplomatic corps. “We need a diplomatic corps that reflects our multicolored society, that will not present itself to the outside world as if it were a white society, because it isn’t,” proclaimed Cardoso. The Foreign Ministry’s affirmative action program, which began in early 2003, provides yearly scholarships to 20 black candidates to help them study for the public service entrance exam.
On releasing the 2002 Human Rights Program, Cardoso issued a decree that created the National Affirmative Action Program, charged with studying how government agencies could adopt “percentage goals” for blacks, women and the disabled in their own ranks and also in firms that contracted with the government. By the end of 2001, 14 different bills in Congress contemplated some form of racial quotas. On October 9, 2001, the state of Rio de Janeiro adopted a quota of 40% for blacks in its two state universities. The states of Bahia and Minas Gerais followed suit with similar programs.
These policies provoked lively exchanges on the street and in the press. Yet the debate about affirmative action was essentially reduced to a debate about quotas. To favor affirmative action was to endorse quotas; to oppose quotas was to condemn affirmative action in all forms. Quotas, however, are only one among several affirmative action measures both contemplated by official government commissions in the mid-1990s and actually implemented by municipal governments and nongovernmental organizations around Brazil. The full array of policies includes social programs targeted at black neighborhoods, job training programs, preparatory courses for university entrance exams and support for black-owned businesses.6
Simplifying the debate in this way served both advocates and opponents. Many activists aimed not only to lobby for new state policies, but also to initiate public discussions about race and to transform a culture that tacitly endorsed racial inequality. It was thus helpful to showcase an issue so provocative that no one could hide from it. Quotas—like abortion or the legalization of drugs—became an “absolutist” issue on which few people lacked a strong opinion. At the same time, aggregating a wider range of policy options into the signature example of quotas helped the cause of opponents. By focusing public attention on a blunt and controversial policy option, opponents could magnify the resistance to any type of affirmative action.
One of the most significant aspects of the government’s moves towards affirmative action, argues anthropologist Peter Fry, is that they constitute a dramatic break with the past. “For the first time since the abolition of slavery,” writes Fry, “the Brazilian government has not only recognized the existence and inequity of racism but has chosen to contemplate the passage of legislation that recognizes the existence and importance of distinct ‘racial communities’ in Brazil.” Even Cardoso publicly declared that Brazilians “lived wrapped in the illusion that this was a perfect racial democracy when it wasn’t, when even today it isn’t.”
The emergence of a race-based “issue network” marked a shift in social mobilization around race in Brazil. The concept of an “issue network” captures the range of engaged groups and individuals and the specificity of their objectives. Members of issue networks are linked primarily by their shared interest in a particular policy area, not a collective identity, occupational category, place of residence or ideological orientation.7
Race-based issue networks had roots in three decades of activism and scholarship around inequalities, particularly during the upsurge in black political mobilization in the 1970s and 1980s. The period saw an increase in identity-based “new social movements” organized around race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. Non-white Third World nationalist movements and the U.S. civil rights movement also influenced Brazilian activists. Yet many of these movements were culturally oriented and community-based. Influencing national policy was not their primary focus.8
By the 1990s the group of actors working on race issues had grown and diversified. Journalists, public intellectuals, state officials, economists from prestigious government research institutes, human rights groups, NGOs and members of Congress carried political action from Afro-Brazilian movements and the leftist academy into the social mainstream.
One of the decisive moments in this process came when the federal government’s Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA) entered the debate. Beginning in 2000, the IPEA released studies, widely publicized in the press, documenting the extent and persistence of racial inequalities in Brazil. The significance of these studies was not necessarily their content, but the fact that prestigious white economists working for the government were participating in such discussions. “It was the first time that the debate left the militancy of the black movement and went to an institution with an undeniable reputation,” commented Ricardo Henriques, author of one of the IPEA studies. “The issue had been taboo for academic economists on the one hand and the government on the other. When the IPEA published its studies, the government could no longer remain deaf to the [race] discussion.”9
A shift in priorities at the Ford Foundation was another important factor. Ford had funded academic centers and research on race in Brazil since the late 1970s. Beginning in the mid 1990s, however, Ford began to focus its support on organizations dedicated to combating racism. Ford initiated a “period of action” in order to “help people who wanted to intervene rather than just gather information,” says Nigel Brooke, Ford Foundation representative in Brazil. “We would come out of the closet with regard to our positive view of affirmative action, instead of just supporting research.”10 Edward Telles, a UCLA sociologist and expert on race relations in Brazil served as human rights program officer in Ford’s Brazil office between 1997 and 2000. Under his leadership Ford’s spending on race issues more than tripled. Ford helped fund Afro-Brazilian movements by endorsing public policy interventions like affirmative action, a network of black attorneys, academic research on race discrimination and policy remedies, and leadership training for black politicians.11
Meanwhile, black legislators from the Workers’ Party (PT) grew more successful in organizing a black caucus in Congress.12 The number of self-identified blacks in the Brazilian Congress has historically been low, never exceeding 3% of the total number of federal deputies and senators.13 But by 2003, nine black deputies from the PT and two other parties, forming a bancada negra (black caucus), were meeting on a regular basis with the objective of seeing that race and affirmative action were discussed in Congress and within political parties. There are more “blacks” in the legislature than those nine, but despite their dark skin, they choose not to identify with the caucus.14
Black feminists who cut their teeth on global gender politics played key roles in the issue network. Because of their double militancy in the feminist and the Afro-Brazilian movements, they transferred skills and lessons from one struggle to the other. Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, these women began to create autonomous spaces within the feminist movement, organizing national conferences, seminars and formulating their own demands.
Black women’s lobbies were active participants in Brazil’s preparation for the United Nations Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in 1994, and the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. They succeeded in influencing the reports presented by Brazil at both conferences. Through these experiences, black feminists learned how to articulate the local and the global, to speak policy language and to negotiate consensus positions among people of diverse backgrounds. These skills helped the Durban process and the affirmative action movement. As Ivair dos Santos recalled: “We men had barely traveled abroad. But the women had already been to several UN conferences and told us exactly what to do!”
In 1995, a new government sympathetic to an anti-racist agenda assumed power. Fernando Henrique Cardoso embodied cosmopolitan intellectual currents and their penetration into the state. Through personal declarations and appointments of individuals who wanted to take action, and by lending political support to their alliances for change, Cardoso began to change the state’s approach to race. The political opening offered by Cardoso created opportunities and incentives for greater civic mobilization, which empowered social actors and lead them to push for greater changes later in his presidency.
Cardoso’s interest in race can be traced back to the early days of his career as a sociologist.15 His dissertation explored race relations, as did his first published book and several of his scholarly articles in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the December 2001 speech in which he declared his support for affirmative action, he noted that for him the issue was very personal “because I spent several years of my life as a sociologist … studying blacks and racial discrimination among the poorest sectors of the country.”
Presidential initiative was crucial in orchestrating an opening for new policies. As Human Rights Secretary Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro has noted, “In Brazil, an authoritarian, racist and hierarchical country, you need the agreement of the President to advance on controversial causes.”16 Márcio Fortes, secretary general of Cardoso’s party, concurs. The quotas, he says, “resulted from the President’s determination, the idea being the construction of a more diverse and plural society for the future.”17 But individual presidential effort combined with a lack of partisan and legislative support means recent policies suffer from a fragile institutional architecture. According to Pinheiro, the issue of “fragile architecture” is a problem not just for race discrimination but also for human rights more generally.18
The Lula government has built upon the efforts of the previous administration. Lula created a Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality to oversee implementation of the federal government’s program, among other responsibilities. He also appointed a record number of blacks to senior posts (though their presence still lags far behind their numbers in society). A new law makes education in Afro-Brazilian history and culture obligatory in public schools. The health ministry now has a special program aimed specifically at black communities and two federal universities adopted admissions quotas. Meanwhile, Congress is currently debating a bill to mandate quotas in all public universities, government service, firms of more than 20 employees and television shows.
The final impetus to state action was the 2001 world Conference on Racism held in Durban. Anticipation of Durban provided an occasion for dialogue on race and a deadline to reach consensus on change. In order to produce an official report, the government convened a committee of state officials, academics and representatives of Afro-Brazilian movements. This committee held seminars and workshops around the country to solicit input, triggering more widespread civic mobilization.19 NGOs, trade unions and universities sponsored lectures and exchanges. The yearlong preparatory phase culminated in Brazil’s first national conference against racism and intolerance, held in Rio in July 2001 with some 1,700 participants from around the country and chaired by then-Vice Governor Benedita da Silva. The report eventually released by the preparatory committee adopted a vanguard position by endorsing quotas and other forms of affirmative action.
These preparations for Durban captured the interest of the Brazilian media. In the months leading up to the conference, newspapers, television and radio stations around the country began to report on racism and inequalities. Reports analyzed academic studies, proposals for quotas and affirmative action, the work of NGOs and debates about gay and indigenous rights. The op-ed pages of major newspapers carried debates over quotas waged by politicians, academics, journalists, Afro-Brazilian activists and government officials. Never before had race been such a big topic in the Brazilian press.
Later, the final document from Durban recommended affirmative action and other policies for victims of racism and called for adequate representation in politics and education, adding force to the positions adopted in Brazil’s national report. In much the same way that the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 lent international legitimacy to women’s demands for gender quotas in politics, the Durban conference backed Afro-Brazilian demands for special rights.20 As Brazil’s UN Ambassador Gelson Fonseca Jr. put it, “Durban was a positive experience for Brazil because it legitimized the debate on racism at the international level and recognized the need for remedial actions to benefit the victims of discrimination.” But the most significant change, said Fonseca, “occurred at the domestic level, for it mobilized civil society and public opinion against racism, and strengthened the political will for policies to combat discrimination and led to the first experiences in affirmative action for Afro-descendents.”21
Despite these gains, a systematic national affirmative action program—one that operates in all government agencies and for which enforcement mechanisms have been created—has yet to be established. Such a program, requiring profound institutional changes and budgetary outlays, would likely encounter greater resistance than the changes made up to this point. Ideas may compel people to change their minds and even certain aspects of their behavior, but alone they seldom build the political coalitions needed to back the allocation of money and changes in the rules. In Brazil’s world of pork-barrel politics, old habits die hard. Breaking these habits will likely require threats and incentives in addition to moral conviction.
Even weakly implemented, though, quotas compel people to talk about race. As Senator Paulo Paim noted, “even a law that works only partially is an advance. It generates debate, because then you can ask and force [political] parties to explain, why quotas aren’t filled…. Laws don’t always give the results that we expect, but they offer yet another instrument to do politics.”22 Proposing quotas exposes racism. In short, the appearance of quotas in public discourse prevents anyone from denying that race matters. Given Brazil’s myth of racial democracy, this is no small achievement.
The concept of race originated as an attempt by nineteenth-century biologists and anthropologists to rank and evaluate the supposedly inherited differences among human populations. It has long been understood that it has almost no basis in biology.23 Since it aids social discrimination, it would be desirable to move beyond the concept of “race.” But race has validity as a social category. Racial labels define human identities and structure social relations. How can public policy address these concerns while avoiding essentialism? There is a tension between trying to get beyond race on the one hand and forming practical strategies to combat racism on the other. Negotiating this tension—affirming the living practice of race while simultaneously denying its essence—is the challenge Brazil faces.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mala Htun is assistant professor of political science at the New School University and author of Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2003). A longer version of this article appeared in the Latin American Research Review.1
Notes
1. Mala Htun, “From Racial Democracy to Affirmative Action: Changing State Policy on Race in Brazil,” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2004.
2. Interview, Brasília, June 19, 2002.
3. Then-Deputy (now Senator) Paulo Paim, for example, is convinced that his disapproval rating in his home state of Rio Grande do Sul increased by 6% because he started to push the issue of race in Congress. Interview, Brasília, June 19, 2002. On the other hand, there is at least one deputy who gets elected by championing race issues. Deputy Gilmar Machado calls himself the “candidate of the race” and “100% black” in his campaign material, and dedicates at least half of his budgetary amendments to the black community in his state of Minas Gerais. Interview, Brasília, November 13, 2002.
4. George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
5. Rebecca Reichmann, “Introduction,” in Rebecca Reichmann, ed., Race in Contemporary Brazil: From Indifference to Inequality (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
6. Rosana Heringer, “Mapeamento de ações e discursos de combate às desigualdades raciais no Brasil,” Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2001).
7. “Issue networks” is a concept coined by Hugh Heclo in 1978 to describe “specialized subcultures of highly knowledgeable policy watchers.”
8. See Luiz Claudio Barcelos, “Struggling in Paradise: Racial Mobilization and the Contemporary Black Movement in Brazil,” in Rebecca Reichmann, ed., Race in Contemporary Brazil: From Indifference to Inequality (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). Also, Michael George Hanchard, Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
9. Interview with Ricardo Henriques, Rio de Janeiro, July 4, 2002.
10. Interview, Rio de Janeiro, July 3, 2002.
11. Telles recently published an excellent book, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
12. The PT has historically been committed to fighting against racial inequality and the party has a secretariat devoted to combating racism. Yet many in the party see race as subordinate to class. Believing that racism and racial inequality are largely a function of class inequality, they maintain that universal social policies will take care of the race problem. Thus, though party leaders lend support to anti-racist struggles, black activists see this as “support” (in rhetoric only). Interview with Deputy Paulo Paim, Brasília, June 19, 2002.
13. Ollie Johnson, “Racial Representation and Brazilian Politics: Black Members of the National Congress, 1983-1999,” Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Winter, 1998).
14. Interview with Deputy Luis Alberto, November 12, 2002.
15. Nonetheless, Cardoso’s decision to champion affirmative action, though consistent with his longstanding views, may also have stemmed from a desire to compensate for his inability to further a progressive social legacy in other areas. Unlike other social policies, affirmative action is relatively inexpensive and can be engineered by the executive branch without the need to broker deals with members of Congress.
16. Interview, Brasília, June 19, 2002.
17. Interview, Brasília, June 19, 2002.
18. At a Columbia University lecture on May 4, 2002, Pinheiro had similarly expressed his view of the importance of President Cardoso and the weakness of more pervasive institutional support for a human rights agenda. He exclaimed, “Everything we manage to do in this area is because of the personal support of the President. But it’s institutionally very fragile…. I have no political support. In Congress, there is benign neglect … no political party really cares.”
19. Gilberto Saboia and Alexandre José Vidal Porto, “The Durban World Conference and Brazil,” unpublished paper, 2002.
20. Mala Htun and Mark Jones, “Engendering the Right to Participate in Decisionmaking: Electoral Quotas and Women’s Leadership in Latin America,” in Nikki Craske and Maxine Molyneux eds., Gender and the Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin America (London: Palgrave, 2002).
21. Personal communication, October 30, 2002.
22. Interview, Brasília, June 19, 2002.
23. See Anthony Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” in Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, eds., Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1996); Joseph L. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).
