Pardo suffers discrimination, but is left without public policy – 03/04/2024 – Education

USP’s decision to withdraw the places of students approved in racial quotas for denying that they are mixed race could have a demobilizing effect on the country’s black population. This is the assessment of lawyer and researcher Alessandra Devulsky, a specialist in colorism.

“Denying the brown identification of these young men is extremely demobilizing for a population [parda] who is now beginning to develop his racial literacy and understand his place in the world”, Alessandra told Sheet.

For her, understanding herself as brown in a country like Brazil can be even more difficult than understanding herself as black.

“Admitting to being a non-white person is not a decision-making process. No one wakes up and decides to declare themselves brown. It is a process, it is an understanding of having experienced racist situations throughout their lives. Declaring themselves brown is the end of the line of a process painful, of interpreting your place in the world. It is recognizing that you have those characteristics that are belittled and devalued by the racist society in which we live”, he says.

She also assesses that the university’s decision could have a perverse effect, including on future candidates, who may be afraid of declaring themselves brown.

“These boys not only lost the place they fought hard for, but they are also seen as possible fraudsters of the system. This will certainly leave a trauma, because it is a very violent process. It is an invisibilization of what they are, it is the removal of their identity.”

The latest IBGE Census revealed that, for the first time since 1991, the majority of the country’s population declares themselves mixed race. Mixed race people account for 92.1 million inhabitants, which represents 45.3% of all Brazilians.

“And then, these people, who live in a society that puts a racist gaze on them, at the moment they can have access to a policy that brings benefits, that recognizes the stigmas they have carried throughout their lives, a commission comes and says that they’re not black enough.”

“The message is: you are black enough to be discriminated against, but not black enough to benefit from certain policies”, he adds.

For Alessandra, the denial of self-declaration by young people is contrary to what the country defined when it decided to include brown people in the black population (which, according to some classifications, is made up of black and brown people).

Brazil lives in the context of colorism, with nuances inherited from the colonial period and the process of miscegenation experienced in the country during its formation. And the consequences of this phenomenon are part of the lives of racialized people regardless of social mobility, says Alessandra.

“It is evident that within a racist society, in which Brazil was produced, brown people may have some more facilities than black people. But they also do not enjoy all the rights and opportunities that white people do. Therefore, brown people are included in the black population and have the right to quotas.”

“Some brown people will suffer a type of discrimination that, when compared to black people, can be smaller and much more subtle. But we made this social choice, to create and design public policies to integrate brown people within the black and indigenous population” , he states.

Alessandra recognizes the importance of the role of hetero-identification committees in preventing fraud in quota policies, but argues that USP, like other universities, needs to make the criteria for phenotypic assessment clearer. She also says that it is necessary to improve analysis processes to avoid embarrassing situations like those experienced by young people in this case.

“I believe that the panels have much more right than wrong, but every process that results from a human evaluation is subject to failure. Therefore, I believe that these hearings need to allow more resources in cases of doubt.”

“Because if these boys are not black, not indigenous, not white, what are they? It’s almost a non-existence, it’s almost saying that they don’t exist”, he argues.