In 2001, on the heels of the United Nations Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, several Brazilian institutions established

race-based affirmative action for the first time ever in that country. Affirmative action represented a major step in Brazil s process of democratization and nation-building, which ran against Brazil s long-held ideology of racial democracy. Racial democracy was a belief since the 1930s that racism and racial discrimination were minimal or nonexistent in Brazilian society in contrast to the other multiracial societies in the world. By the 1990s, ideas of racial democracy were being slowly eroded as Brazil democratized and a small but active black movement denounced the popular idea of racial democracy, as it alleged that racism was widespread and pointed to official statistics showing Brazil s tremendous racial inequality. From the 16th through the 19th century, Brazil s economy was based on agriculture and mining, which depended on a large African-origin slave population. During more than 300 years of slavery, Brazil was the world s largest importer of African slaves, bringing in seven times as many African slaves to the country compared to the United States. In 1888, Brazil, with a mostly black and mixed-race or mulatto population, became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. Abolition in Brazil, though, did not create a rupture in the country s racial inequality or its beliefs about black people. Miscegenation and the fluidity of racial classification in Brazil throughout much of its history has largely been used as proof of its racial democracy. During slavery and colonialism, Brazil experienced greater miscegenation or race mixture than the United States, which resulted largely from a high sex ratio among its European settlers. In contrast to a family-based colonization in North America, Brazil s Portuguese settlers were primarily male. As a result they often sought out African, indigenous and mulatto females as mates, and thus miscegenation or race mixture was common. Throughout its history, there were no anti-miscegenation laws like those found in the United States or South Africa. Today, Brazilians often pride themselves on their history of miscegenation and they continue to have rates of intermarriage that are far greater than those of the United States. Relatedly, there were no classification laws nor was there racially-based violence. The absence of classificatory laws and a high rate of miscegenation resulted in a racial continuum with racial categories from black to white and going through intermediate colors that shaded into each other. Thus, the racial classification of some Brazilians is ambiguous, at times varying according to the classifier and the social context. Today, most Brazilians of all colors now acknowledge that there is racial prejudice and discrimination in their country, despite miscegenation and fluid racial classification. Based on statistical analysis of censuses and surveys along with other kinds of

evidence, we know that racial inequality is high and racial discrimination in the labor market and other spheres of Brazilian society are common. Nonwhites are the major victims of human rights abuses, including that from widespread police violence. On average, black and brown (mulatto or mixed race) Brazilians earn half of the income of white Brazilians. Moreover, television and advertising portray Brazilan society as one that is almost entirely white, even though nearly half of the population identifies itself as nonwhite. Despite the historical and contemporary absence of race-based laws and Brazilians historical denial of racism, Brazilians are not surprised when others make racist jokes or a racist comment. Most notably, the middle class and the elite is almost entirely white so that Brazil s well-known melting pot only exists at the working class and poor levels. The near absence of Afro-Brazilians in the middle class is closely related to their poor representation in Brazilian universities. Nonwhite Brazilians were rarely found in Brazil s top universities, until affirmative action began in 2001. Because of this, university admissions may be the most appropriate place for race-conscious affirmative action. By 2008, roughly 50 Brazilian universities have established some type of race-based affirmative action policy. Affirmative action has also led to a commonplace discussion of race and racism in Brazil, for the first time, whereas the racial democracy ideology treated any talk of race as racist itself. There was little formal discussion of race in Brazilian society, while other societies were thought to be obsessed with race and racial difference. Only explicit manifestations of racism or race-based laws were viewed as discriminatory and thus only countries like South Africa and the United States were seen as truly racist. Traditionally, Brazilian universities depended on a standardized test, known as the vestibular, as the only criteria for admission. Many leading universities are now mandated to admit a fixed percentage of nonwhite students while others use a point system that awards additional points to Afro-Brazilian students. Many of these universities also have quotas for indigenous people, for the disabled and those that attended the poorly funded public schools that the middle class tend to avoid, or award points based on these social disadvantages. Nevertheless, the focus of efforts to repeal affirmative action have been on the quotas for Afro-Brazilian students. Affirmative action policies represent a new stage in Brazil s effort to combat racial inequality and they are not without controversy as a backlash against them has been mounting. Detractors of these policies include much of the media, private school students, their parents and the schools themselves, scholars and artists who value the racial democracy ideal and even black students who believe in meritocracy. They claim,

among other things, that class-based policies and universal reforms such as improved public education would have the same effect without having to define Brazilians on the basis of race or color, that affirmative action violates Brazilian principles of meritocracy and universalism, that affirmative action admits unqualified students to the university, that high levels of miscegenation often make it impossible to distinguish blacks from whites, that affirmative action divides Brazilians into black and white for the first time and thus will create racial hostility, and that poor whites continue to be excluded from university education. Furthermore, they claim that affirmative action is a U.S. import that is out of place in Brazil, even though affirmative action began in India in 1948 and has been used in several other countries. Legal challenges to university-based affirmative action are now before the Brazilian Supreme Court. A statute of racial equality, which would institutionalize affirmative action in all Brazilian universities as well as in public contracts and in public employment, passed the Brazilian senate and is now pending before the Chamber of Deputies, and has come under particular scrutiny by opponents of affirmative action. Defenders of racial quotas continue to argue that race conscious remedies, together with universalist policies, are needed to significantly reduce Brazil s high levels of racial and class inequality and that prior to affirmative action there was little concern for redressing racial inequality or even for reforming the poor state of public schools. The end of racial democracy thinking, a national debate about race and racism and the beginning of serious policy attempts to reduce racial inequality represent a new stage in Brazil. Brazil s affirmative action experiment is still in its early stages and so far the concerns of its detractors have not been borne out as Afro-Brazilians often do as well or even better than the regularly admitted students, and race relations have not become hostile. At the same time, an unprecedented number of Afro-Brazilians have begun to graduate from top universities, which is certain to diversify Brazil s middle class and create positive role models for Brazil s large Afro-Brazilian population.

Affirmative action refers to policies that take "race, color, religion, sex or national origin"[1] into consideration. The focus of such policies ranges from employment and education to public contracting and health programs. Affirmative action is action taken to increase the representation of women and minorities in areas of employment, education, and business from which they have been historically excluded. Brazil. Some Brazilian Universities (State and Federal) have created systems of preferred admissions (quotas) for racial minorities (blacks and native Brazilians), the poor and people with disabilities. There are already quotas of up to 20% of vacancies

reserved for the disabled in the civil public services.[6] The Democrats party, accusing the board of directors of University of Braslia of "nazism", questioned the constitutionality of the quotas the University reserves to minorities on the Supreme Federal Court. Racial Mixture and Affirmative Action: The Cases of Brazil and the United States

THOMAS E. SKIDMORE

For me, as a historian of Brazil, North America's "one-drop rule" has always seemed odd. No other society in this hemisphere has defined its racial types in such absolutist terms. David Hollinger, like many American historians before him, is clearly intrigued by this apparently unique "approach to the question of ethnoracial mixture."1 How can we account for it? How could such a different racial classification have arisen in North America and not in any of the many other European colonial experiments in the New World?2 Hollinger cites three features that in combination allegedly made U.S. racial 2 evolution different. The first is a regime that tolerated slavery and thereby produced a significant population of slave descent. The second is massive immigration that enriched American society. The third is survival of an Indian population, even if only in token numbers. But Hollinger examines the influence of these three factors on racial attitudes 3 and behavior in the United States alone. If we add one other country, Brazil, to the picture, we find something rather startling.3 All three of Hollinger's conditions also obtained in Brazil. Yet they did not produce the one-drop rule. Something else must have been at work. If I had been writing this commentary a half century ago, I would have stressed 4 the enormous difference between the two countries in the racial status given to the offspring of mixed unions.4 Throughout the United States (multi-racial societies emerged in Charleston and New Orleans, but only temporarily), the one-drop rule defined mixed bloods (even the lightest mulattos) as black. In Brazil, by contrast, racial attribution depended on how the person looked and on the particular circumstances of that person, which led to the racial fluidity for which Brazil is famous.5

My account would have given several reasons for this, based on a strong 5 consensus of scholarly opinion in both countries, epitomized by Charles Wagley (the dean of U.S. anthropologists specializing in Brazil) and Gilberto Freyre (Brazil's most famous articulator of his country's racial identity). Both men argued that the milder race relations in Brazil reflected contrasting historical, social, cultural, and moral traditions in the two countries.6 These were the days the 1950s when both Brazilians and Americans believed that Brazil had "solved" its race problem. The explanations were several. One argument was that Brazil had achieved abolition in the 1870s and 1880s, not through the chaos and destruction of a civil war but by negotiation and successive legislative compromises (with legislation in 1871, 1885, and 1888). If, by the twentieth century, those of color seemed to be at the bottom, the standard explanation was lack of education. Carl Degler, in his pioneering comparative analysis of race relations in Brazil and 6 the United States which argued that the greater mobility of the mulatto in Brazil was central reasoned that the differing status of women in the two cultures was crucial in explaining why the free mulatto did not appear in numbers in the United States. The Anglo-American white wife, who allegedly enjoyed higher social status than her Luso-Brazilian counterpart, was enabled by her status to prevent her philandering husband from legitimizing his mixed-blood offspring.7 Another possible explanation emphasized social values, especially the English 7 colonists' attitude toward sexual behavior. This was expressed as a fierce defense of the sanctity of marriage, especially when accompanied by racial endogamy.8 What was the basis of this early racial preference in marriage? Winthrop Jordan has documented Elizabethan England's phobia about all things black.9 Could this racial preference in marriage have combined with the family nature of English settlement of North America? To facilitate racial endogamy, English colonists came with their wives, whereas the Spanish and Portuguese colonists arrived without wives or other family. Thus Anglo-American wives were in a better position to enforce racial endogamy. A third possible explanation was demography. Brazil had a smaller percentage of 8 Europeans than Anglo America. Fifty years before abolition, Brazilian free coloreds already outnumbered the slave population. The Brazilian mixed bloods could therefore find more "economic space" in which to emerge as a free colored class.10 According to this explanation, Brazil had generated a de facto multi-racial society before the campaign to abolish slavery even began. As of the 1940s and 1950s, both nations but especially Brazil defined their 9 race-relations system in terms of what it was not. The Brazilians pointed to the United States, with its segregation and anti-intermarriage, as an example of the

institutional extremes to which white Americans carried their Negrophobia (with lynching a violent manifestation of the same). The hypocrisy of the U.S. claim to be a model democracy was much criticized from abroad especially from France, still the spiritual home of the Brazilian elite. This critical stance was reinforced by the worldwide anti-American campaign unleashed in the early Cold War a climate that helped give the Brazilian elite a feeling of moral superiority toward the United States. Brazil may have imported more African slaves than America, the feeling went, but it had not created a society that created excuses (political belief as well as race) for dehumanizing measures of exclusion. E. Franklin Frazier, the noted African-American sociologist trained at the University of Chicago and expert on the U.S. African-American family, described this contrast in 1942: "Whereas in Brazil white, Brown, and black people know each other as individual human beings, white people in the United States only know the Negro as a symbol or stereotype ... While we may provide Brazil with technical skill and capital, Brazil has something to teach us in regard to race relations."11 The Brazilian elite's favorable view of their country's race relations was 10 strengthened in the international world by several events in the cultural history of the 1950s. The first was the publication in English of Gilberto Freyre's classic The Masters and the Slaves (1956, originally published in Portuguese in 1933), which had become the bible for those who attributed to the Portuguese a uniquely benevolent system of race relations. For the next decade or so, Freyre was feted and praised in academic circles in the United States and Western Europe. Freyre's image of Brazil as the polar opposite of the racist United States was 11 reinforced when UNESCO, the de facto official arbiter of culture in the Third World, chose Brazil for a case study in how a thoroughly mixed racial population could live in harmony. The researchers were French, American, and Brazilian, thus underlining the project's international flavor. Such argumentation seems much less conclusive when viewed through today's 12 lens.12 It is certainly true that Brazil lacks the history of racial hatred that characterizes the United States. But lack of racial hatred does not turn out to have led to lack of racial discrimination. That part of the story was first revealed by the UNESCO study. Begun as an investigation of an ideal environment for racial relations, its findings in fact documented the presence of racism in differing forms throughout most of the country.13 Beginning in the 1960s, a consensus grew among a small number of Brazilian 13 academics and writers that the conventional explanations for Brazil's race relations were no longer convincing.14 But none of these writers made much of an impact on Brazilian elite opinion. Leading cultural spokesmen, almost invariably white, simply

ignored attempts to enlarge the space for Africans in Brazilian consciousness. The nation's most prominent sociology department, at the University of So Paulo, devoted virtually no effort to research and teaching on Brazilian race relations during the 1970s or 1980s. The same could be said of the sociology departments throughout the country. Discussion of the subject was generally limited to departments of anthropology, and then only approached in qualitative terms rather than quantitative measurement of discrimination. In the 1990s, however, opinion began to shift in Brazilian universities, with debates about the lack of Brazilians of color among the student bodies and about possible measures to compensate Afro-Brazilians for past discrimination.15 In the mid-1990s, the president of the country, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, officially acknowledged the existence of racial discrimination in Brazil, which he followed up by appointing a national commission to propose remedies.16 Most dramatic of all, the federal government of Brazil adopted racial quotas. Several universities, such as the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, have also set quotas for minority admissions. In looking for some mechanism to decide which candidates are eligible for a system like Affirmative Action, they have actually adopted the one-drop rule! Brazilian specialists in race relations have found themselves lost in the crossfire of these debates. As two organizers of a 2000 conference on race confessed, "either we are totally alienated or we are living in a social paradise."17 Recent trends in the United States have been dramatically different, with the one-drop rule losing its grip. Although ethnic and racial prejudices persist and discrimination still mars American democracy, non-white Americans have experienced significant upward mobility since the 1950s. Previous lines of racial and ethnic distinction have blurred, as identities, particularly of the younger generation, have been created anew.18 Affirmative Action as a redress of previous injustice is out, disallowed by the federal courts. And Affirmative Action to promote diversity is under serious legal siege. Incidentally, this distinction among differing rationales for Affirmative Action has not been appreciated in most Brazilian discussions of this subject. By 1992, one American specialist on Brazil had written that a comparison of Brazil and the United States based on official data showed the United States to be the more racially equal of the two: "While most measures of racial inequality had declined markedly in the United States, the same measures in Brazil had tended either to remain stable, or in some cases most notably vocational distribution actually to increase. As a result, by 1980 the two countries had reversed position, with the United States now ranking as the more racially equal of the two societies." The same scholar noted elsewhere that "Brazilian race relations thus appear far more bi-polar than has traditionally been thought; conversely, black/white

dichotomy in the United States is breaking down in the face of both massive emigration from Latin America and Asia and of new multi-racial identities."19 Race relations are still more conflictive in the United States and, at least on the surface, more humane in Brazil. But it is not unusual to hear Afro-Brazilians saying they prefer the situation as they now see it in the United States to the frustrating ambiguities they still face in Brazil. Present-day African-American scholarly opinion is represented in a book by an African-American sociologist who spent ten months of field research in a relatively small Brazilian community in 1992 1994. The title of her book is revealing: Racism in a Racial Democracy. The subtitle is even more revealing: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil.20 It could not be farther from E. Franklin Frazier's enthusiastic endorsement of the traditional Gilberto Freyre view in the 1940s. How far Brazil will go down the road of quotas is impossible to say. Obviously, many conditions social, cultural, ideological, economic in Brazil differ sharply from those in the United States. But it is also worth remembering that quota systems of whatever content are now widely used in India and other nations of Latin America even as they have become illegal here. Has Brazil come full circle in its racial practice? Are Brazilians now beginning to embrace the very measures they once denounced as inappropriate for Brazil's "racial democracy"?21 It is too soon to say. As a foreign observer, I would guess that white guilt over past discrimination is weaker in Brazil than in the United States. This may mean there will be stronger resistance to racially oriented remedial action than has proved the case in North America. The embrace of Affirmative Action in Brazil will certainly generate a backlash, especially among many of the white elite. They will continue to argue that any racial preferences violate the merit-oriented standards (as validated by examination) that are needed to modernize their society. And they are already charging that advocates of Affirmative Action are servants "of cultural imperialism engaged in pitting Brazilians against Brazilians in order to destroy our confidence in the high value of our interracial culture."22 As one can see, much has changed, but not the penchant for comparative analysis.23 http://www.vibrant.org.br/downloads/v5n1_oliven.pdf
There are more people of African descent in Brazil than in any country outside the African continent itself, but the higher you go in Brazilian society the less evidence there appears to be of that reality.

Critics say part of the blame lies with a system which has often failed to provide equality of access to third-level education, though recent years have seen some improvements. To try to address the problem, many Brazilian universities have adopted affirmative action policies or quotas to try to boost the number of black and mixed race students, or more generally those from poor backgrounds. It is a controversial approach which some argue is necessary to end decades of inequality, while others fear it threatens to introduce racial tension in a society which has been largely free of such problems. Gisele Alves lives in a poor neighbourhood in Nova Iguacu on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, and says she doubts she would have got to college without a helping hand from the state. She is studying at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), which was one of the first to adopt quotas. "I thought I was going to finish school, find work in a little shop, get married and pregnant and that would be it. I didn't expect much more than that," she says. "But with the system of quotas I started to think I could go to university. My parents couldn't pay privately - if I wanted to study it had to be at a public university." Giselle got her place in part due to Rio's controversial quotas system which sets aside 20% of public university places for poor black and indigenous students, and the same number for students educated in the much criticised public school system. Legal challenge Those parents who can afford it often opt to have their children educated in more expensive private schools, giving them a considerable advantage when it comes to highly competitive university entrance exams - especially for prestigious courses such as law and medicine. It is a process which works against poorer students which in Brazil often means black or mixed race. "When you consider the way things are in Brazil, you can see that poverty has a colour," says Lena Medeiros de Menezes, vice rector at the State University. "It will take a long time for investment in primary and secondary education to bring about equality. How do I see quotas? It's a way to change things and change them rapidly." But in Rio de Janeiro a question mark hangs over the quotas system after a legal challenge mounted by state congressman Flavio Bolsonaro. He argues the approach is a form of reverse discrimination. "What are you going to say to a teenager who goes to do a university entrance exam and gets a high mark, but doesn't get through, but another teenager has passed with a much lower mark because they have a dark skin?" he says.

"What would be the legacy of that for future generations?" White or black? Rio's Federal University (UFRJ) does not operate a system of quotas, though the issue has been widely debated. Professor Marcelo Paixao, who lectures there, says it is clear that in Brazil those of African descent are largely absent from many key professions. "Here the percentage of black people holding jobs - such as doctors, engineers, economists, lawyers - is very low," he says. "When you have universities - principally the most prestigious ones which are the public ones - so closed to presence of the Afro-descendent population, this means these professions will also continue to be exclusive to a certain group of people for a very long time." The debate in Brazil is further complicated because of the sometimes uncertain definition here of who is white, black or mixed race - official surveys let people classify themselves. Hundreds of years of racial mixing means that many Brazilians regard themselves as neither black nor white but something in between, and recent surveys suggest some people have even changed their view of how they should be described. Racial equality law Some argue that quotas even partly based on race introduce a tension that never existed in Brazilian society in the way it has in the United States, while others say it simply recognises the obvious link between being poor and black. "I think the main issue has to do with poverty and the bad quality of basic education," says Simon Schwartzman, senior researcher at the Institute of Studies of Work and Society in Rio de Janeiro. "People who are poor don't have access to good education; they have more difficulty in having access, in particular to the more prestigious courses. It is a question of poverty not of race. "There are good reasons to be against race quotas in Brazil - I don't think it makes any sense at all. For people who are poor and didn't have a good education, I think there is a good argument for that, provided you do it properly. "You can not force a racial identity in a population where a large percentage of the population don't have a clear racial identity and don't want that. If you look at the population and ask people 'what is your race?' - many people won't know exactly what to answer. "That is not to say that you don't have prejudice, that the fact that you are black you don't suffer, because you do. You should do specific things about that, but not to institute a kind of national policy based on race," Mr Schwartzman says.

For a future generation of students this complicated question has still to be finally resolved. A long-debated law on racial equality only recently passed an important stage in congressional approval by avoiding controversial issues such as quotas. It appears the final word may be left to the country's Supreme Court which is due to give its views on the matter in the year ahead.

Um acordo com a bancada ruralista garantiu ontem a aprovao do Estatuto da Igualdade Racial na Cmara dos Deputados, depois de uma tramitao de quase dez anos. Na prtica, o estatuto abre mais espaos institucionais para os negros. Para destravar a proposta, o deputado Antnio Roberto (PV-MG), relator do projeto, aceitou excluir do texto final um artigo que tratava da regularizao de terras para remanescentes de quilombos. Na viso da bancada ruralista, o artigo abria brechas para futuras ocupaes por quilombolas de reas com produo agrcola. "Na minha avaliao, no havia qualquer problema. Mas como a Constituio j trata do assunto dos quilombolas, preferi negociar o acordo poltico retirando o artigo e garantindo a aprovao do estatuto", explicou Antnio Roberto. Com o acordo que excluiu a regularizao de terras para remanescentes de quilombos, a bancada ruralista aceitou apoiar a votao do estatuto em carter terminativo. Ou seja, permite sua ida direta para o Senado, sem necessidade de aprovao pelo plenrio da Cmara. Pelas regras do estatuto, os partidos polticos passam a ser obrigados a destinar aos negros 10% de suas vagas para candidaturas nas eleies. Tambm passa a exigir do sistema pblico de Sade que se especialize em doenas mais caractersticas da raa negra, como a anemia falciforme. Na Educao, passa a ser obrigatria a incluso no currculo do ensino fundamental aulas sobre histria geral da frica e do negro no Brasil. Outra novidade o incentivo fiscal que o governo poder dar para empresas com mais de 20 funcionrios e que decidirem contratar pelo menos 20% de negros. "Esse estatuto como um bico de arado. Ele no um ponto de chegada. um ponto de partida", afirma o relator, que branco.

A excluso de alguns itens polmicos que compunham o texto original do Estatuto da Igualdade Racial, aprovado nesta quarta-feira (16), definitivamente no agradou os representantes das comunidades negras brasileiras. Porm, ainda que com diversas ressalvas, a aprovao do texto, aps sete anos de tramitao no Congresso Nacional, foi considerada um avano na luta pela igualdade de direitos. Para o diretor de Proteo ao Patrimnio Afrobrasileiro da Fundao Palmares, Maurcio Reis, o Estatuto poderia ter aguardado mais tempo para ser votado no

Senado. Assim seria possvel garantir maior apoio aos pontos considerados polmicos, como as cotas para negros em universidades e as polticas de sade, que ficaram fora do texto aprovado. Poderamos amadurecer, no fazer da forma que foi feito, no votar [agora]. Poderamos garantir que os pontos ditos polmicos no ficassem de fora , disse Reis. Para ele, as cotas de acesso universidade fariam com que "essas pessoas tivessem xito no mercado de trabalho e que pudessem estar qualificadas para competir de igual para igual". Para a coordenadora do Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) do Distrito Federal, Jacira da Silva, a deciso de suprimir alguns pontos vai na contramo da histria e na contramo da sociedade brasileira. Nesta sexta-feira nosso movimento completa 32 anos. muito triste, aps trs dcadas combatendo a discriminao racial e propagando a conscientizao da populao, receber este estatuto como presente , lamentou Jacira em entrevista ao UOL Notcias. Ns do MNU defendemos que foram retirados itens inegociveis, que formavam a espinha dorsal do Estatuto. Com isso, no estamos dizendo que a aprovao no tenha sido um avano. Foi, sim, uma aprovao importante aps anos tramitando no Congresso, mas a retirada destes itens vai representar uma grande perda na vida de ns negros , completou a coordenadora. Rebatendo o argumento de que a aprovao das cotas aumentaria o dio racial, Jacira afirma que dizer isso faz parte da estratgia que alguns usam para barrar a aprovao de direitos para a classe negra. Todas as reivindicaes dos negros tm sempre um seno . A luta continua Para o ministro da Igualdade Racial, Eloi Arajo, o projeto servir de base para que o Executivo crie medidas afirmativas e para respaldar a defesa de aes que tramitam hoje no Supremo Tribunal Federal -de inconstitucionalidade das cotas no ensino superior e da demarcao de terras dos quilombolas. Segundo ele, uma das aes do governo federal poder ser a criao de mecanismos que ampliem a presena de negros na administrao pblica. Para o ministro, a lei aprovada pelo Senado extraordinria e uma vitria fantstica . Com esse estatuto ns colocamos uma argamassa poderosa na consolidao e sedimentao da nossa democracia. Fora do ambiente democrtico, ns no teramos condies de discutir esse tipo de matria sobre a incluso de negros

e negras. Com a incluso de negros e negras damos um passo definitivo na consolidao da democracia , avaliou. O senador Paulo Paim (PT-RS), autor do projeto original, disse, em entrevista Agncia Senado, concordar com o ministro Eloi Araujo. "Ele [o estatuto] tem um valor simblico que ilumina o caminho dos que lutam pela igualdade de direitos e por aes afirmativas", disse o senador, acrescentando que o estatuto dar "conforto legal" para que se avance na busca da regulamentao das cotas raciais. Porm, Paulo Paim lamentou que o relator da matria, senador Demostenes Torres (DEM-GO) tenha retirado artigo pelo qual o poder pblico estaria habilitado a conceder incentivos fiscais s empresas com mais de 20 empregados que mantivessem uma cota mnima de 20% de trabalhadores negros. O senador considera como pontos positivos do Estatuto o reconhecimento ao livre exerccio de cultos religiosos e o direito dos remanescentes de quilombos s suas terras. Para a senadora Serys Slhesssarenko (PT-MT), que votou pela aprovao do texto, ainda que com algumas ressalvas, a garantia de igualdade entre todos princpio fundamental para a existncia de uma democracia de fato e de direito. Devo admitir que o projeto no o ideal, mas ainda assim, est prximo de aes mais contundentes de combate ao racismo. Estamos mais prximos da reparao de injustias histricas que afligem a raa negra , disse durante a votao. A coordenadora do MNU-DF ainda rebateu as declaraes dos que avaliaram de forma positiva a aprovao do Estatuto. Eles [os polticos] dizem que com a aprovao tudo vai melhorar l na frente. Bom, isso a histria vai dizer, mas enquanto isso no queremos ficar de braos cruzados. Vamos continuar lutando pelos nossos direitos. Queremos aperfeioar o Estatuto com ajuda de toda a sociedade civil . O Estatuto da Igualdade Racial foi aprovado nesta quarta-feira (16) no plenrio do Senado, em sesso extraordinria. Mais cedo, o texto havia sido aprovado na CCJ (Comisso de Constituio e Justia) e passou sem alteraes no plenrio da Casa. O projeto segue agora para sano presidencial.