For many decades Brazil was thought of by various American anti-racist militants as a kind of racial paradise or racial democracy. Although this mythical image of Brazilian race relations has occasionally been criticized in the United States, only recently it has begun to be deconstructed, and yet timidly, by the adoption of racial affirmative actions in some Brazilian educational institutions. Today, most Brazilian universities use racial quotas in admissions – a policy model banned in the US by the Bakke v. Regents of the University of California Supreme Court ruling – and combine them with socioeconomic criteria. The higher education systems in each country are also profoundly distinct, as are their socioeconomic structures and the place of racial discrimination within them. This presentation aims that sorting out this set of differences and helping to rectify some misperceptions by reconstructing the recent history of affirmative actions in Brazil and the debates surrounding these policies. Even if it is still hard to isolate its effects on the structure of opportunities in Brazilian society due to lack of data, affirmative action have already contributed to destabilizing consolidated beliefs about the relations between racial groups in the country, as we intend to show.
