A new wave of pissed off minorities are being taught that AA is the way to get ahead, when, in reality, it is a blanket form of reverse discrimination.

Some may take the view, “I’ll take what I can get,” but others may cringe from having to mark their ethnicity on any application.

For much of the 20th century, Brazil claimed to be a “racial democracy.” Compared to the history of race relations in the US, Brazil had some justification for the claim. Brazil never developed juridically enshrined forms of segregation nor did it evince a violent history of lynchings or other extreme forms of hate crimes. Socioeconomic indicators that correlated race and poverty were written off as evidence of simple class prejudice. A history of racial miscegenation, most famously celebrated by Gilberto Freyre in The Masters and the Slaves, was put forth to explain the impossibility of drawing a color line in Brazil. Even African-Americans in the US looked towards Brazil as a model of racial harmony.

However, this notion came under increased academic scrutiny in Brazil and the US alike beginning in the 1960s. Scholars reformulated their understanding of race relations, basically positing that the reason forms of discrimination BY LAW never developed in Brazil was because they were unnecessary. In short, “the black knew his place.” Socially-constituted racism was much trickier to pin down than the obvious signs of segregated water fountains and the KKK. In Brazil, social clubs and upscale restaurants and hotels would turn blacks away with plausible excuses rather than voice race-based objections. (see Carl Degler, Neither Black nor White and George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo).

Under the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a sociologist with a Marxist scholarly bent who claimed to have one foot “in the kitchen,” that is, implied admission of partial African descent, Brazil implemented some limited affirmative action, particularly with respect to university admissions. Brazil’s federal universities are the best in the nation and they also offer free tuition but to get in you have to take a rigorous entrance exam. Obviously, those that can afford private schooling have an advantage. Additionally, high school graduates that can afford to do so take year long preparatory courses at private academies to give them an edge. So these coveted spots are awarded primarily to the upper middle class and above, who, not uncoincidentally, are white or nearly so.

Not surprisingly, as these policies were implemented, elite aspirants suddenly began to claim that they were not white on their applications, hoping to secure one of the spots reserved for Afro-descendant or indigenous students. As racial categories are somewhat malleable (in a crudely reductionist sense, “money whitens”), one could get away with this, presuming that some other census data were not available that previously classified the applicant as white. So despite good intentions to address socially constructed racism with institutionalize remedies, the relatively privileged could still work the system to their advantage.

The above diatribe, however, deals primarily with politics and not your remarks about valuing diversity for its own sake. On the second point, from my perspective, there are so many ways to define diversity that the obvious gender, racial, and identity-based categories are grossly insufficient. I am reminded of a recent conversation with one of the applicants for the position of A&S dean at my university, a history department chair from South Carolina. He spoke of how he had increased the diversity of his department during his tenure, achieving gender equity and hiring three African American faculty. To which a colleague quipped, “and how many Northerners have you recruited?” He didn’t have a ready answer but it begs the question, how is diversity to be measured? Class? Where you were born and raised? Your religion or lack thereof? Birth order? Whether or not you were beaten as a child? Your body weight? The list could go on and on, but to assume, for example, that an upper middle class Hispanic male is somehow uniquely qualitatively different or “other” than an upper middle class white male is essentialist to the point of possibly being insulting. The same could be said of men and women of otherwise similar class or racial backgrounds. I could go on but it would belabor the obvious. Ultimately, our identities and intellects are constituted from so many different influences that we are all diverse. Singling out specific gender or racial categories for favored status in specific contexts may address past injustices that deserve redress. I don’t have a problem with that politically, and on balance, I support it. However, on intellectual grounds, it’s essentialist and reductionist to a fault.