USP cancels registration of medicine quota holder on the 1st day – 02/29/2024 – Education

USP canceled the enrollment of a successful medical student after a committee rejected his racial self-declaration in which he identified as mixed race. A former public school student, the young man discovered that he lost his place on the first day of school, on Monday (26).

Alison dos Santos Rodrigues, 18, is from Cerqueira César, in the interior of São Paulo. She passed medicine, the most competitive course at USP, with places reserved for candidates coming from public schools and self-declared PPIs (black, mixed race and indigenous).

The student claims that he has always been identified as brown and says he was surprised when he found out that the hetero-identification panel had rejected his racial self-declaration. This verification system was created in June 2022 and used for the first time at the university last year, with the aim of preventing fraud in the quota policy.

Alison was approved in the first call by Provão Paulista, a serial entrance exam created last year exclusively for public school students under the Tarcísio de Freitas (Republican) government. In addition to being the first in his family to be admitted to a public university, he is also the first from his school to pass medicine.

The teachers at the school where he studied even put up a billboard at the entrance to the city to celebrate the approval. “It was such a source of pride for our family, for the school, for the whole city”, says Laise Mendes dos Santos, 35, the young man’s aunt.

After being approved, Alison pre-registered virtually at USP, but, as she had applied through the quotas, she needed to prove that she met the conditions.

“We never imagined that he could suffer violence like this, of having his color, his identity questioned. He was approved at four public universities and in all of them he competed for the places reserved for PPIs. Because that’s how he always understood himself, as a brown boy”, says the aunt.

When contacted by the report, USP states that there are no longer any institutional resources available. Alison’s family contacted the Public Prosecutor’s Office this Wednesday (28) and is seeking a security order to ensure her permanence on the course.

During the enrollment process, he sent documents proving that he studied at a public school and two photographs. He received an email warning that the commission “was unable to confirm his self-declaration of race/color” and was asked to participate in a virtual meeting for a new assessment.

According to Alison, the meeting lasted just over a minute. The young man was not asked any questions and he only had to read his self-declaration. The next day, he learned that the commission had rejected him once again.

“The video call didn’t last at all, they didn’t ask any questions. They scheduled the meeting at 5pm, but they only called him at 7pm, when it was already dark, and they still complained about the quality of the connection”, says the aunt.

Alison filed an appeal. The institution’s response only arrived late last Monday morning, after he had participated in freshmen reception activities — he had received emails from the undergraduate office with instructions for the first class.

“We traveled all night, with money we raised from a fundraiser made by friends and neighbors, so that he could participate in the first day of school. He was happy in the activity, meeting his new classmates”, says Laise.

Alison’s mother is a general services assistant at a children’s shelter. She supports Alison and his younger sister on her own. She identifies as brown, while Alison’s father identifies as white.

“Genetically, I am the result of the mixture of a black mother and a white father and, having a white father, since I was a child it has always been very clear to me that I cannot be classified as white, since the color of my skin, the features of my nose and of my lips and the type of my hair are characteristics that never left me in doubt that I look much more like my mother and my maternal grandparents, visibly black”, wrote Alison in the appeal she presented to the university.

In the document, he also says that his younger sister has lighter skin and that this difference has caused him to experience racist situations. “A black boy, accompanied by a younger white girl, arouses distrust,” he wrote.

He further argued that the country’s legal understanding and used by IBGE is that brown people are people who “declare themselves brown and have a mixture of races with a predominance of black features”.

With the appeal denied, Alison still tried to meet in person with the panel, but the request was denied. “They said he wasn’t special enough to have a second evaluation,” says Laise.

In a note to SheetUSP said that the analysis of candidates’ photographs is carried out by two panels of five people and is based only on phenotypic factors — that is, physical characteristics.

“If the photo is not approved by one of the panels (by a simple majority), it is automatically sent to the other panel. No panel knows whether the photo is being analyzed for the first or second time, which guarantees a double blind analysis of the photographs At the end of the process, if two panels do not approve the photo by a simple majority, the candidate is automatically called for a face-to-face hearing”, says the note.

According to the university, Alison was not called to a face-to-face meeting because it was approved by Provão Paulista. “For Enem and Provão Paulista candidates, virtual hearings were held, because many of these candidates live in very distant places.”