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From “Racial Democracy” to Affirmative Action: Changing State Policy on Race in Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Mala Htun
Mala Htun*
Affiliation:
New School University
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Abstract

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By analyzing the Brazilian government's surprise endorsement of affirmative action in 2001, this article explores how the state constructs race in society and how ideas drive policy change. After decades defending the myth of “racial democracy,” the state admitted to racism and endorsed an extreme form of affirmative action—quotas—for Afro-Brazilians in government service and higher education. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2002, this article explains the recent policy turnaround as a dialectic between social mobilization and presidential initiative framed within unfolding international events. The presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso nurtured a transformation in political action on race at the same time that the president himself initiated major shifts in official discourse; later, preparations for the World Conference on Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, provoked national soul-searching on racial inequalities. The conference itself provided an occasion, and a moment of reckoning, for Brazil to jettison past policies and embrace a new approach. I conclude that ideas emerging from social networks, made salient by presidential interest, and legitimized by international agreements may account for discursive policy change, but that implementation of affirmative action will require attention to material interests and electoral incentives.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , 2004 , pp. 60 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to John Comaroff, Jorge Domínguez, Tim Power, and three anonymous LARR reviewers for comments on this article; to Gelson Fonseca, Jr. for help setting up interviews in Brazil; and to the PROLEAD program of the Inter-American Development Bank for supporting my research. All translations from interviews and other material are my own.

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