Toward a global understanding of affirmative action: Lessons from Brazil

• In Event: Impact of the global university

Proposal

Purpose
The purpose of this study is to better understand affirmative action policy within the international higher education landscape. The driving question is - To what extent does Brazil’s recent implementation of affirmative action policy offer lessons for the United States and other countries about the utility of race-conscious admissions in universities? Ultimately, I make the case for using a global lens to examine affirmative action while highlighting the potential benefits for creating a policy discourse that is more receptive to scholarship and experiences from the Global South.

Many countries are grappling with issues of access and equity in post-secondary education. Although approaches in dealing with these issues may differ, a number of decision makers have relied upon affirmative action (or some form of it) as a solution. India represents one of the first systems to use reservations to assist students belonging to lower social castes (Moses, 2010; Pazich & Teranishi, 2012). France and South Africa provide other examples of affirmative action policy implementation in university admissions (Moses, 2010). One of the most recent cases of affirmative action has occurred in the Brazilian system of higher education through the use of quotas or reserved spaces based on specific criteria such as race, disability or public school attendance (Johnson & Heringer, 2015; Somers, Morosini, Pan, & Cofer, 2013).

Here, the Brazilian case is singled out to highlight areas that could provide insight to the United States and other nations. This comes at a particularly poignant time when Brazil is beginning to reap the effects of its aggressive use of quotas at the beginning of the 21st century (Penha-Lopes, 2017); whereas the U.S. is simultaneously experiencing another bout of staunch opposition toward race-conscious admissions reflected in contemporary court cases (Moses, Maeda & Paguyo, 2018).

Theoretical Framework
This study looks to Yanow’s (2009) concept of local knowledge as a framework for highlighting the value of less understood modes of interpretation. It advances the belief that knowledge and power are intimately bound together. This is reflected in the policy arena where certain ways of knowing are privileged, validated, and serve as the standard to which other ways of thinking are measured (Yanow, 2003, 2009).

Local knowledge provides an important lens for viewing international contexts because it addresses unequal power dynamics created by centuries of colonialism and makes a conscious effort to bring in to focus the perspective of marginalized actors. By centering local knowledge production, this study validates the higher education access and equity experiences of the Global South as valuable contributions to mainstream policy discourse. Furthermore, the framework of local knowledge is rooted in the field of critical policy studies and is less often applied to education scholarship. As such, it is used here to illustrate the interdisciplinary nature of the study and provides one avenue for bridging these two disciplines.

Methodology
This research is based on critical ethnographic fieldwork (Anderson, 1989; Carspecken, 1996; Madison, 2011) conducted between 2016 and 2017 in São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The fieldwork included 120 hours of participant observation, 39 semi-structured interviews with students, informal conversations with faculty and administrators, and document analysis of policy briefs, the Ministry of Education website, and institutional level documentation. Collected data was stored and organized using MAXQDA, a qualitative data analysis software (Maxwell, 2013; Merriam, 2009). Lastly, data was analyzed using an iterative process of memoing, open coding and axial coding to develop themes that help to explain particular points of interest in the analysis (Bogdan & Bilken, 2003; Glaser & Straus, 1967; Maxwell, 2013).

Findings & Conclusion
The paper discusses the higher education context of Brazil and the United States; their individual histories, interpretations, and approaches to using affirmative action; and the present-day policy climate within each country. It then examines four learning points that are unique to Brazil and provide an alternative perspective on race and policy to the larger global community in general and to the U.S. more specifically. These learning points are:

1. Racial fluidity – Race as a non-fixed category is woven into how Brazilians understand skin color and self-identification due to a history of less social separation between groups and high rates of miscegenation. In the U.S., Americans tend to perceive race in binary terms (e.g. one-drop rule). This is problematic in that it almost always ignores the grey area of multi-racial, multi-ethnic realities that are becoming more prevalent in 21st century society.

2. Student involvement – Since students knowingly apply for specific quota spaces, they bring insightful perspectives to affirmative action. U.S. students do not have the same experience in the application process and may not be as informed about the policy.

3. The role of the satellite campus – High quality public universities that have branch campuses in areas outside of the city center in lower socioeconomic neighborhoods offer access to higher education that otherwise would not be available. Institutional location boasts the efforts of affirmative action and is a method that has the potential for replication across borders.

4. Bottom-up approach – Quotas would not have been legislated without the Black activists who were instrumental in fighting racial injustice and pushing for increased post-secondary opportunities. Grassroots efforts have been integral for amplifying anti-oppression and anti-racist messages. Brazil offers one example of what could happen when leaders listen and act with these efforts in mind.

By introducing these four learning points, this study calls into question affirmative action as a sustainable policy for addressing post-secondary inequality around the world. As globalization increases and the role of the university continues to evolve, we must consider how the global community can benefit from the rich diversity of the international landscape while also keeping in mind the unique aspect of each individual country’s context. One way to support this line of thinking is to disrupt the dominant flow of knowledge production from the Global North and pay attention to the valuable lessons originating from the Global South.

Author

• Jeana E. Morrison, Boston University