The dominant narrative of Brazilian national identity has long been the proposition that Brazilians are hybrids, the result of centuries of racial and cultural mixing (mestiçagem). For decades, the Brazilian government promoted this narrative while also proclaiming the country a racial democracy free of racial prejudice, a nation defined by the ‘prejudice against prejudice’ (preconceito de não ter preconceito). The rise of a movimento negro in recent decades has challenged this narrative and the official story that there are no races in Brazil, just racially-mixed Brazilians. The movement pressed for affirmative action policies to confront the prejudice and discrimination in Brazil that social scientists have so carefully documented for decades. Affirmative actions (ações afirmativas, as the term goes in Portuguese), for its supporters, would force Brazilians to recognise the racial inequalities that have so long been denied, and begin to redress those inequalities, especially in education. Despite bitter debates over race, identity and quotas, affirmative action policies took shape in Brazil very quickly after the mid-1990s, especially in Brazilian universities.
The distinguished British sociologist David Lehmann began interviewing Brazilian academics, activists and policy makers (and a few non-Brazilians) about affirmative action more than ten years ago. The Prism of Race draws heavily on these interviews and many years of fieldwork in Brazil. Lehmann succinctly sums up the book ‘as a history of the campaign to introduce affirmative action in the form of quotas for black students in Brazil's public universities; as an engaged survey of the arguments for and against the principle of race-based quotas; and as an argument about social movements, civil society, and the state in Brazil and by extension in Latin America’ (p. 1). In his introductory chapter, Lehmann sets out his main arguments: that the Brazilian Congress passed the quotas law because politicians saw this as ‘an inexpensive way, to prevent Brazil from sliding toward confrontational and embittered race conflicts’ (p. 8); that the movimento negro focused on quotas for prestigious institutions of higher education because their main concern was access to the elite; and, ‘that substantial numbers of people’ (p. 9) who previously might not have seen themselves as black or brown began to imagine themselves in those categories as a result of the movement. Corporatism plays a central role for Lehmann in the relatively rapid achievements of the movement. The state, he argues, provided black activists with key resources that they sought, and brought them into state structures. For many black activists, this alliance with the state was key to their goal of achieving quotas in public universities. The movement's focus on leaders and access to the elite, however, meant that it did not mobilise a ‘vast potential following’ to build a mass base (p. 15).
The introduction and first chapter lay out the history of anti-discrimination legislation and the emergence of efforts to promote affirmative actions and quotas (the two terms are viewed as synonymous in Brazil). Chapter 2 traces policies and legislation after 2001 and also introduces the increasingly important private for-profit educational institutions that have not received a great deal of attention from scholars, but have found affirmative action to be very lucrative for their business. The struggles in Brazil over the ‘politics of naming’, what racial categories to employ, and who decides a person's category form the focus of Chapter 3. Lehmann brings in the important subject of gender noting how little the linkages between gender and racial classification have been studied in the discussions about quotas. Chapter 4, ‘Race, Class, and Education in the Search for Social Justice’, is a fascinating look at the bitter debates about quotas and modern liberal democracy. How does one pursue racial equality and social justice without violating the basic notion of equality before the law and liberal republican citizenship? Lehmann's tour through the debates among Brazilian intellectuals and academics highlights hard choices. He concludes that ‘policies either of race-based or mixed quotas are something of a wager and cannot be easily defended as carefully calibrated social engineering. To require such policies to live up to a high standard of precise effects is excessive: they are policies of reparatory justice and redistribution of state-controlled resources’ (p. 138).
The last two chapters turn to Lehmann's theorising about social movements. Taking on the oft-used distinction between state and civil society, he argues that the notion that civil society is independent of the state has only limited value for Latin America. The movimento negro lacks a centralised leadership and its strength is in its being a large number of groups with loose ties. It is, more precisely, a network with ‘the potential beneficiaries of their actions … elsewhere’ (p. 194). The movement's centre of gravity is in academia. It does not look like classic social movements with strong leadership combined with grassroots culture and support. Like many other recent movements, it forms part of larger transnational movements. (Lehmann also notes that the increasingly influential evangelical churches enjoy substantial autonomy from the state but have largely been ignored by political theorists.) He argues that the quotas campaign has been focused on specific institutions (universities) to prevent the exclusion of non-whites from societal elites. In the short term, he believes this strategy will ‘brown’ the university's student population, and perhaps, in the long term, the professoriate and the elite.
The Prism of Race is an excellent overview of the debates and developments around affirmative action in Brazil over the last quarter-century. Clearly written, deeply researched and judiciously argued, the book is a balanced analysis of contentious issues by a scholar with deep experience in Brazil and strong ties to Brazilian scholars on all sides of the debates about affirmative action.
