Opinion – Cida Bento: Combating setbacks in quotas

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“…When the public university opened its doors and expanded diversity, it improved”, says Angélica Minhoto, who was Unifesp’s Dean of Undergraduate Studies and participated in a study carried out with six federal universities and six private universities to get to know the impact of the quota system on student performance.

The study concluded that, after adopting affirmative actions, most institutions “had a gain in the average grade of the specific knowledge test”, according to the 2021 Technical Report of the Center for Studies Society, University and Science linked to the Federal University. from Sao Paulo.

Other studies show that university environments become more democratic, such as a 2019 study by Inep (Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais Anísio Teixeira), which points out that the Quota Law increased the presence of black and indigenous students by 39%. coming from public schools, in federal institutions, in the first four years of the program.

Despite these positive results, some intellectuals have reappeared in the mainstream media and, in their manifestations, attack policies aimed at combating racism and promoting racial equity, as well as attacking black leaders who stand out in this process of struggle for a society effectively democratic.

Several of them signed a manifesto against quotas, which had more than a hundred signatures and was published by Folha on May 30, 2006, in which arguments such as “we aim for a Brazil in which no one is discriminated against, positively or negatively, by your color […]”.

But there are no manifestos by these intellectuals against the absence of blacks and indigenous people in universities. They showed their disagreement when these spaces, previously monolithic, began to become more plural and the face of the Brazilian university began to have a little bit of the face of Brazil.

This happens precisely in 2022, when the law of quotas in higher education, sanctioned in August 2012, could be revised and in a period when projects proliferate in the two legislative houses proposing changes in the law, causing social movements to organize themselves to identify and prevent initiatives that lead to setbacks.

Anyway, this scenario reminds me of a text by Henry Giroux who argues that the expansion of the rights of the so-called “minorities” in the 1980s, in the United States, generated a strong reaction and fear of the loss of privileges of some white segments of the middle class that felt the target of reverse racial prejudice.

This sense of threat was capitalized on by the Republican Party, which began to aggressively attack affirmative action policies, proposing a reduction in social spending and the destruction of the welfare state.

This happened 40 years ago in another country, but it seems to be happening in Brazil today.

But in Brazil today, other manifestations are also growing, such as those of private organizations that, after the death of George Floyd, are pressured to make their financial investments focus on public, private and civil society organizations that take concrete measures to deal with racial injustice. and that strengthen organizations that fight for equity.

There is an opportunity for these organizations, including Folha, to publicly manifest for the maintenance of affirmative actions and quotas and support another future for black youth that is not the violent interruption of their lives, as happened with Moïse Kabagambe at the Tropicália kiosk , in Barra da Tijuca, when five “bullies” beat him savagely to death.

Source: Folha

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