Jair Bolsonaro and Affirmative Action : Political Rupture or Escalation?

Title data

Lempp, Sarah:
Jair Bolsonaro and Affirmative Action : Political Rupture or Escalation?
In: Allegra Lab.
3 April 2019

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Abstract in another language

On January 1, 2019, Jair Bolsonaro – a right-wing extremist with clearly fascist political views – became the new president of Brazil. Under his government, many of the social policies implemented under the progressive governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff might come under attack – among them the quota policies for Afro-Brazilians in universities and the public service. As an anthropologist studying these policies, I reflect in this article on the question of what might happen under the new government to these highly symbolic measures which the Brazilian movimento negro (black movement) considers to be one of its main achievements of the past two decades. By way of conclusion, I raise the question of whether one can speak of an acute moment of crisis – or whether those affected by racism in Brazil rather live in a permanent state of crisis.