16 - Affirmative Action: Brazil

Summary

Measures that address racial and ethnic inequalities have been an important subject of legal and political discussion in many countries over the last decades. The legal questions include the meanings and purposes of equality, adequate methods of legal interpretation, and the possible role of constitutional courts in promoting social transformation. Participants in this debate also raise issues such as the role of the state in a democracy, the changing nature of racism, the social meanings of race and its correlation with national identity. This broad range of questions reveals the immense relevance of this topic for comparative analysis. An adequate understanding of this complex subject requires an examination of how law and race interact in different jurisdictions to produce and legitimate particular social arrangements. This is the case of Brazil, a country that implemented large scale affirmative action policies in the last fifteen years, a process that generated an intense debate about the social importance of race in a country that has historically represented itself as a racial democracy.