There’s an interesting article in Monday’s Washington Post about the debate raging in Brazil over the government’s introduction of racial preferences. That debate sounds very familiar to Americans, which is the point of the article.
I think it is significant that the article uses the term “affirmative action” to mean clear and overt and fixed racial quotas, although the author mistakenly believes that has always been the term “since President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced affirmative action at the pinnacle of the civil rights movement nearly 40 years ago.”
This assertion is wrong on two counts, one relatively trivial and the other important. First, the term “affirmative action” in this context was first used not by Lyndon Johnson but by John F. Kennedy in Executive Order 10925 in March 1961. That order require government contractors to
take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. (Emphasis added0
This same meaning was also contained in Executive Order 11246 issued by President Johnson in September 1965: federal contractors must
take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin
In other words, “affirmative action” meant taking pro-active steps to insure that no preferences were granted based on race. This should not be forgotten or ignored, as it too often is.
But returning to Brazil, here’s my favorite quote from the article:
“The biggest advantage of this quota system,” said Paulo Fabio Salgueiro, the admissions director at the State University [of Rio de Janeiro], “is that it has broken this myth of a nonracial society. Brazilians have by and large always believed there are no white Brazilians or black Brazilians, just Brazilians. But the debate over quotas has forced everyone to confront the fact that racism, discrimination and social exclusion are alive and well here.”
The author was apparently so taken with this point that he returned to it at the end of the article, quoting Zozimo Bulbul, a 65-year-old black filmmaker:
Bulbul, the black filmmaker, acknowledges that the quotas are an imperfect tool, and that the solution really is to expand education opportunities to accommodate people like Fracescutti [a rejected white] and poorer Brazilians, both black and white.
“But we have to start somewhere, and this is one beginning that is long overdue,” Bulbul said. “Whatever happens with quotas, Brazilians are talking about the issue of race and discrimination and there’s no going back.
So, the government launches a new program of racial discrimination in the form of hard quotas, but this is good because it leads people to discuss discrimination?
