Book narrates dramas and victories of black quota holders – 01/30/2024 – Education

There was a party in the community, with a “congratulations” banner and everything, when Márcia Maria Cruz passed the entrance exam, in 1994. In Morro do Papagaio, in Belo Horizonte, as well as in any outskirts of Brazil, reaching higher education was something extraordinary , especially for black families like Márcia’s. And here, it is worth highlighting some of the meanings of “extraordinary” in the dictionary: that goes beyond the usual or expected, out of the ordinary, unbelievable, strange, that goes beyond what is established.

And what was established was that Brazilian universities, especially public universities, were aimed at rich, white students, students who graduated from private schools.

Graduated from a public school, Márcia has always been studious, and, by just half a point, she had not managed to get a place at UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais). She passed first place at a private university, UniBH, and had her first semester paid for by an Italian woman who didn’t even know her, a collaborator in social movements on the hill. To cover the rest, the young woman did two internships, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and, at night, she was also a monitor for the newspaper laboratory of her journalism course.

Márcia does not tell this story of hers in her new book, “Vidas Inteiras” (Crivo Editorial), about the ten years of the Quota Law, which determines the reservation of 50% of places in federal universities for students from public schools and, within this number, a percentage for blacks, browns and indigenous people. But, by reconstructing the obstacles caused by the inclusion of black people in Brazilian higher education, Márcia is talking about herself and all the black and poor people that the entrance exams left out.

At 47 years old, she has a doctorate in communications from the same Federal University of Minas Gerais that did not have a place for her as an undergraduate. In her master’s degree in political science, at the same institution, she passed first. “It was my revenge,” she says, good-naturedly.

She has been a professor at universities, including PUC de Minas, and has worked in the main periodicals in Minas Gerais. Until last year, she was coordinator of the Diversity Center at the newspaper Estado de Minas, a position she left to take on communications for state deputy Macaé Evaristo (PT-MG), cousin of writer Conceição Evaristo.

She is the co-founder of the Lena Santos collective, of black journalists from Minas Gerais – Lena was an anchor at TV Globo de Minas. Two other members of the collective co-authored the book with Márcia, and the age difference between each of the three authors is a decade. Each of them experienced a different moment in their search for space at universities.

Vinicius Luiz, 37, journalist and podcast producer, entered UFMG without quotas in 2005. At the time, the discussion about quotas was gaining momentum in the country, but there were still no reservations for places – the law would only be approved in 2012. Gabriel Araújo, 26, Interaction and Social Networks reporter at Sheet and film critic, he entered UFMG in 2015. He was, therefore, part of the first classes of quota holders, the ones that faced the most prejudice.

And the book brings stories of very harsh prejudice against black quota holders. A pedagogy student at Uerj (State University of Rio de Janeiro) says that, as he ate lunch at a popular restaurant and sat at a table with homeless people, he saw people at the university cleaning the door handle right after he touched it.

An engineering student at UFPA (Federal University of Pará) was stopped by colleagues in the corridors, who said that she didn’t belong there and pulled the dreadlocks from her hair until she fell to the floor. Teachers asked in classes, in the first years, who had entered through quotas, and students from different universities report that to this day they are often stopped by security guards, among white colleagues, and have to present their ID card to prove that they are students.

The student card becomes a passport, like a quota holder, a metaphor also for the journalist badge that Márcia could not let go of.

“In several situations, I would arrive to do an interview and they would ask me: ‘Where’s the reporter?’ Or they helped colleagues who were there and ignored me”, she says. “Other journalists didn’t need to introduce themselves and, for me, they asked for the badge”, he reports.

“People didn’t expect me, a black woman, to be a journalist, but rather a domestic worker,” she says. “And without any demerit, my grandmother was a maid. But I say it as a possibility of life. People had difficulty understanding that I was putting myself in the place of an intellectual woman.”

Throughout her career, there was no shortage of attempts to make her feel inferior for being a woman, black, for being born into a community.

“But I always thought that these characteristics, instead of making me inferior, made me stronger, because the possibility of writing from this place is very rich.”

She compares this experience to that of quota holders. “In the beginning, they wanted to impose on these students a feeling of inferiority, of a less meritocratic place, of a lesser ability”, says Márcia. “But there was a movement of affirmation, of looking at this place with pride, and that is the key to transformation.”

“Vidas Inteiras” narrates the transformation of the lives of quota students, their families, communities, and the university. “The entrance exam measures preparation for the test much more than knowledge”, assesses Márcia. “And people from the periphery have knowledge, important knowledge. And, when they go to public universities, there is a movement to question the knowledge produced by the university, to debate the extent to which other knowledge is taken into account in academic production.”

This, instead of reducing the quality of the university, as those against quotas fear, “increases quality, because it brings another repertoire”.

“Many of us who were the object of scientific production became its subjects, and this requires a change of perspective, an openness to other authors”, he highlights.

“The Brazilian university changes its appearance and becomes closer to the real Brazil”, he says. An extraordinary change, in a good way.