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 Recently a young black man asked me if I saw a relationship between race and competency. If I thought that university admission should be through entrance exam, testing the competency of all; or through quotas, privileging black applicants.
I responded that there is no correlation between race and competency but that there is one between income to pay for a good K-12 education and competency and between income and race because in Brazil the poor are, above all, Afro-Brazilian. Consequently there is a strong inequality between whites and blacks when it comes to university admissions. Endeavoring to correct this structural inequality justifies the use of quotas for black university applicants as a way to change the face of a country with the color of Africa whose elite have the color of Europe. But we must recognize that this is just another jeitinho, another little effort à la Brazil. And that it benefits only those young Afro-Brazilians who succeed in finishing high school, many of them probably already in the middle class. It is a quota within the quota: it benefits some black youths only after having excluded two-thirds of the poor youth. It is, in other words, the monotonous repetition of an historical Brazilian habit: that of guaranteeing the disadvantaged small gains, instead of promoting their emancipation. Brazil fears emancipation; this is why for centuries it has employed quotas. They bring incontestable, though timid, advances without structural changes. Small advances that avoid large leaps. Brazilian abolition only came after decades of delays. The 1850 prohibition of the slave traffic was the quota to forbid importing new slaves into the country. The 1871 Lei do Ventre Livre, the Law of the Free Womb, was the quota to free the children of slaves who came of age. The 1885 Lei dos Sexagenários, the Law of the Sixty-Year-Olds, was the quota to free the old slaves lacking the strength to work. Only when almost all the slaves were free did the Lei Áurea, the Golden Law, come along in 1888 to abolish slavery completely. But the quotas did not end. The low salaries paid brought the quota of the vale-transporte, the vale-alimentação e vale-gás, voucher programs to guarantee food and transportation. The unemployment and the low salaries that impeded millions of rural workers' Social Security contributions created the minimum-wage pension, an admission quota that brought the immense deficit of the Social Security system. Now, more than a century after its tardy 1888 abolition, Brazil still is trying to correct its social injustices with quotas that give a jeitinho but do not bring solutions. It is impossible to be against the jeitinhos since they bring a certain form of advance; but it is necessary to understand that they delay emancipation. No abolitionist would be against the prohibition of slave trafficking, even though it maintained in slavery those already in Brazil. Nor would an abolitionist oppose the Law of the Free Womb, even though it only liberated the slave's offspring at 21 years of age and only if no member of the family had tried to flee. Likewise, an abolitionist would not oppose the Law of the Sixty-Year-Olds. But all the abolitionists continued to fight for full abolition, for emancipation. It is therefore surprising that so many people are satisfied with the university quotas for Afro-Brazilian students, dismissing the idea of the emancipation of quality K-12 basic education for all. When this quality education exists, quotas will no longer be necessary, just as the Golden Law dispensed with all the previous quotas. Quotas are part of a struggle but the true struggle is to render them unnecessary. This demands the transformation of basic education into a national obligation, assuring that all children stay in school until their high-school graduation and assuring all Brazilian schools a minimum standard of quality. Like the abolitionists, the defenders of quotas must not be satisfied with the small jeitinhos; they must struggle for the definitive leap of full emancipation. Cristovam Buarque has a Ph.D. in economics. He is a PDT senator for the Federal District and was Governor of the Federal District (1995-98) and Minister of Education (2003-04). You can visit his homepage - www.cristovam.com.br - and write to him at
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. Translated from the Portuguese by Linda Jerome -
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