George Bush Likes Black People?

Well, at least in Brazil. On Thursday we met with a representative of the Fulbright Program which is housed at PUC-Rio. During our discussion, we discovered that the U.S. State department initiated a pilot program designed to promote opportunities for Afro-Brazilians. The program, entitled College Horizons, has as its objective to get students who would otherwise not go to college into colleges, either in Brazil or abroad.

This program, which is explicitly race conscious at the behest of the U.S. State Department, was initiated after a survey of Latin American countries found that Brazil had the greatest anti-U.S. sentiment. This sentiment is emerging at the same time Brazil is rising in terms of its regional and strategic importance to the U.S. As a result, the goal of this program is to expose Brazil's Black majority, or “vulnerable” populations, to U.S. values and to facilitate the development of a positive view of the U.S.

This discovery prompted for me an interesting reflection on Derrick Bell's interest convergence theory. Here when it serves the interests of the U.S., race conscious remedies are acceptable and the interests of racial justice can be promoted, albeit marginally. However, in the context of the U.S., where white interests are not served by racial justice, the rhetoric of the dominant majority falls back on "merit" and "colorblindness." Thus, this further demonstrates that these so called principles are merely tools to preserve white supremacy by insulating the government from any obligation to disrupt racial inequality by segregating race as an illegitimate subject to discuss publicly. This contradiction, for me, is additional conformation that the rhetoric of merit and colorblindness is not principled, but practical. What ever is clever in the service of white interests.

"Merit" and "Disadvantage" defined based on white standards?

Merit is also quite present in the standards for university admission generally in Brazil, which informs much of the backlash against affirmative action, as well as in the various programs offered by Fulbright. One of the interesting things we discussed is the vestibular, a standardized test used for university admission in Brazil, and whether it actually measures academic potential. We found that very few people could tell us whether the vestibular correlated to academic and professional success.

Even when other factors, such as socio-economic status are taken into account, as they are by the Fulbright program, there seems to be an implicit preference for whiteness. Additonal socio-economic factors, like the vestibular, seem to track white, rather than Black experiences of poverty. Although there is a recognition that urban (read: Black) and rural (read: white) poverty are different and present unique challenges regarding opportunity, this is not taken into consideration. This seems to suggest that race is implicitly taken into account because of the fact that a white experience of poverty is privileged over the Black experience of poverty. As a result, it is unsurprising to find that in programs where socio-economic status is ostensibly taken into account, in a country where most of the poor are Black, that nearly all of the participants are white.