Public Policy, Affirmative Actions, National Congress – 06/30/2023 – Sou Ciência

Brazilian public universities were for a long time elitist and attended by the middle and upper classes, white and urban, as a way of perpetuating the power of the dominant classes. Almost all of them were born from projects of their regional elites, for the formation of their children and technical and political cadres to continue leading the country. Even though they were financed by the State, they were an instrument of class domination and an uncontested social and racial marker. Although public, they served private interests and development models that continued to concentrate income. They were also the spearhead for importing foreign fads, cultural models and consumption patterns. The turnaround that the public higher education system has suffered in Brazil is recent, thanks to social mobilization and progressive governments, making it more plural and democratic. This turnaround occurred thanks to the combination of some factors that generated synergies among themselves and reconfigured the system: the expansion of public vacancies; campuses in new, previously deprived regions (such as border areas, semi-arid regions, the Amazon, urban outskirts); new courses, curricula, and decolonial and public perspectives; and the quota policy, which we will discuss here.

Law 12,711/2012, better known as the Law of Quotas for admission to Federal Institutions of Higher Education (IFES), completed 10 years and has been waiting since August last year for its evaluation and revision.

The Law established the reservation of 50% of vacancies in Universities and Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology to public school graduates, with half of these vacancies distributed to candidates with per capita family income equal to or less than 1.5 minimum wages and, in them, subaccounts for blacks, browns and indigenous people and, in 2016, it also added for people with disabilities.

In 10 years, this affirmative policy started a silent revolution in society, promoting diversity in public Universities, more quality in the education of their students, as we have already shown here. The quota policy has been helping to combat structural racism and all sorts of historical and persistent prejudices in Brazilian society.

Considering that the political moment for the revision of this Law was not at all favorable, under the constant attacks of the past government on public education institutions and their academic community, a considerable part of educators, students and the population in general became apprehensive with the revision process of law.

Now, after the elections, the context is different. However, it is impossible not to consider the composition of Congress (Chamber of Deputies and Senate), which are more conservative and on the right in the political spectrum. This, unfortunately, does not seem to contribute to a frank and progressive debate about the Act.

According to a survey carried out by the Brazilian Association of Black Researchers in cooperation with SoU_Ciência, there are 77 bills (PL) pending in the legislature that seek changes in the Quota Law. In general terms, it is possible to classify these bills into three distinct categories, when we take the point of view of a country whose project is based on the fight against racism:

1) Projects that propose broad changes to the rights of black people, foreseeing, for example, an increase in the percentage of quotas for this population, or student aid for the most vulnerable, from the moment they enter the undergraduate course;

2) Projects that propose restrictive changes to blacks, even defending the elimination of racial criteria from the vacancy reservation system or the prohibition of hetero-identification commissions to validate the self-declaration of color and race, understanding that it is not possible to accurately define who is black in Brazil due to miscegenation. According to several ABPN intellectuals and researchers, this is not true, since racism in the country is linked to the phenotype of the population, so, to define the public of politics, it is only necessary to pay attention to those who experience it. racism in Brazil; It is

3) Projects that do not exactly focus on the racial issue, but depending on how they are carried out, may increase or decrease the vacancies offered to black people in institutions.

In the last legislature, it was possible to perceive that the projects with restrictive characteristics moved faster than the projects with broad characteristics, mainly those that aimed to remove the racial criterion from the quotas, leaving only the so-called social reserve.

It is possible to perceive, therefore, that there is not exactly resistance to the Quota Law, being well accepted reservations for public school graduates, for people with low income or disability. The attack has not been on quotas, but on the racial criterion contained therein and on the policy that controls the guarantee of black people about to enter universities. This clearly expresses the racism that seeks to hide the enormous advances for the black population with the establishment of Law 12,711 – or as the black intellectual Lélia Gonzales would say, thus maintaining the theater of racial democracy in the country.

There are Bills that, within the scope of the 50% of reserved places established in Law 12,711, propose an increase in the percentage of quotas for people with disabilities, or even seek to establish a share of them for the native population of the State where the IFES is located or for high-performance athletes. These are examples that end up affecting the percentage reserved for blacks.

We are clearly in favor of affirmative policies for all. However, it is necessary to protect and expand the law to enhance the inclusion of black people in universities. It is necessary to combat the setbacks proposed by some Bills that aim to modify the Quota Law and not encourage harmful disputes between the holders of the right to university spaces.

In addition, it is necessary to expand the policy, guaranteeing people who enter Universities material conditions of permanence, such as aid and scholarships.

Brazilian society needs to continue following this debate and the movement in the legislative houses closely, because, as we have already shown, social quotas alone are not enough to combat structural racism and promote and value the diversity of our Brazil.