By Jon Jeter
Washington Post Foreign Service

RIO DE JANEIRO -- The 36 freshmen who stroll into Prof. Geraldo Monteiro's sociology of law class at the State University of Rio de Janeiro are as diverse as they
are loud, a distinctly Brazilian gumbo of blue eyes, cornrows and complexions from black to white and every earthly hue in between.

"Last semester," said Monteiro, a law professor here, "there weren't enough blacks in the law school to even mention. I'm generalizing only a little when I say that all
of my students were blond, white and rich. A lot of those kids are in court now, learning the law a different way: by suing the university."

With more blacks than any country outside of Africa -- on a continent where few of its neighbors have a black population of any significant size -- Brazil is divided
over new government policies to begin closing the yawning gap between rich and poor by establishing rigid quotas for college admissions, contracts and jobs. But in
this blended population of 180 million, where virtually everyone claims an ancestor who is either much lighter or much darker, Brazilians are struggling to answer a
question that is central to affirmative action: Who, and what, is black?

Among Brazil's largest and most prestigious colleges, the State University of Rio is the country's first public institution to implement affirmative action. Virtually
overnight it has doubled and in some cases tripled the enrollment of black and mixed-race students in elite professional schools such as medicine, law and engineering.

Gabriella Fracescutti, 19, has filed one of nearly 300 lawsuits against the State University because of its quota policy. She has dreamed of being a surgeon since she
was a high school freshman -- "I like blood," she says sheepishly -- and studied during her entire senior year for the vestibular, the national college entrance exam.
She did very well, scoring 82.5 percent, better than half the students admitted ahead of her. But her application was rejected, essentially because she is neither black
nor poor.

"I just don't understand how you can justify someone with a lower grade getting into the school, and turning me down. Why, because I have blond hair?" said
Fracescutti, the daughter of an architect and a botanist. "I have friends who are whiter than me and didn't study and didn't do well on the test, but they wrote down
they were [black] on their application and they got in. My grandmother is black. I could have written down that I am black, but I didn't feel right about that. In a
country like Brazil, everyone's blood is mixed together."

In much the same way that affirmative action has created an ideological divide in the United States, this country's nascent attempt to create a middle and upper class
that represents all Brazilians has produced fewer opportunities for whites like Fracescutti, who worked hard and did well only to find the ground shifting.

'We Live in Color Every Day'

What's taking place here, say a cross section of Brazilians, is not just a dialogue about racial preferences, but a broader discourse on inequality, race and what debt, if
any, is owed to the descendants of African slaves. More than ever, blacks and whites here agree, Brazil is reexamining its idealized notion of itself as a harmonious
"racial democracy" in which race has never been publicly articulated the way it was by the United States' Jim Crow laws or South Africa's apartheid government.

"The biggest advantage of this quota system," said Paulo Fabio Salgueiro, the admissions director at the State University, "is that it has broken this myth of a nonracial
society. Brazilians have by and large always believed there are no white Brazilians or black Brazilians, just Brazilians. But the debate over quotas has forced everyone
to confront the fact that racism, discrimination and social exclusion are alive and well here."

In some ways, Brazil's debate is remarkably similar to the ideological battle that has raged in the United States since President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced
affirmative action at the pinnacle of the civil rights movement nearly 40 years ago. Legal challenges to the State University of Rio's race-conscious admissions policy
raise essentially the same fundamental question that is being raised in a Supreme Court case that challenges the University of Michigan's law school admissions
standards: Who, ultimately, gets ahead?

But the argument here is also strikingly different from the U.S. experience. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Western Hemisphere to do so. This
former Portuguese colony never has been particularly squeamish or defensive about miscegenation, nor has it had any urgent need to formally categorize black from
white.

The result is a country in which census forms contain more than 100 classifications focused on skin color; one category is "coffee with cream." Only 6 percent of the
population chooses the darkest classification, "black," but nearly half of all Brazilians identify themselves as either black or pardo, the term used here for mixed race.

Even former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, by all appearances a white man, boasted of having a "foot in the kitchen," a Brazilian colloquialism for mixed
ancestry and a subtle reference to the proliferation of black maids in white households.

As a result, Brazilians struggle mightily to resolve the issue of racial identity, on which science is mute but which was largely defined decades ago in the United States
and South Africa.

In a country where the distribution of wealth is more uneven than in virtually any other place in the world, the question of racial identity is hardly academic. Race does
indeed matter here, sorting rich Brazilians from poor Brazilians in much the same way it does Americans and South Africans. To some, the country is a living,
breathing rebuttal to the idea that racism will lose its currency as Americans increasingly intermarry and produce darker children.

The unemployment rate for Brazilians considered either black or mixed race is twice that of whites, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, a
government agency known by its Portuguese acronym, IBGE. White Brazilians generally earn 57 percent more than black Brazilians working in the same field, and a
white Brazilian without a high school diploma earns more, on average, than a black Brazilian with a college degree.

Blacks in Brazil die younger, are more likely both to be arrested and to be convicted of crimes, and are half as likely as whites to have running water or a working
toilet in their homes, according to IBGE. And of the 1.4 million students admitted to universities in Brazil each year, only 3 percent identify themselves as black or
mixed race; only 18 percent come from the public schools, where most black Brazilians study.

"People here say that it's impossible to say who is white and who is black," said Jocelino Freitas, 25, a first-year law student at the State University of Rio who was
admitted under the quota system and considers himself pardo. "Really? Ask the police. I bet they can tell you who is black. Ask any doorman who can go through the
front door and who goes through the service entrance. I bet they can tell you who is black. What color is the maid? We may not spend a lot of time talking about who
is black and who is white, but we live in color every day."

A View From Ground Zero

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has focused on racial equality issues. Usually referred to as Lula, the former metalworker and trade unionist chose a cabinet that
includes four blacks, including one in the newly created position of secretary for the promotion of racial equality. And perhaps the most prominent black Brazilian
member of the cabinet is the minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, an internationally renowned musician who is outspoken on issues of African cultural heritage. Lula has
promised that blacks will account for at least a third of the federal government within five years.

In May, Lula appointed the first black Supreme Court judge, and his government has put its full weight behind the Racial Equality Statute, which, if passed by
Congress, would require quotas for all levels of government and even in the casting of television programs and commercials.

Brazilians have bickered about the proposals on call-in radio shows, in university classrooms and cafes. A local newspaper columnist last month said the government
had started a war in introducing the plan. Many Brazilians say that affirmative action is a U.S. invention that cannot possibly work here.

"We don't have the kind of anger between blacks and whites like you find in the U.S.," said Zozimo Bulbul, a 65-year-old black filmmaker. "We've always had
segregation here, but it's never been legally mandated like it was in other places. People say, 'We never had the Ku Klux Klan,' and wonder if this kind of acrimony is
good for Brazilians."

Ground zero for the debate so far is the State University of Rio, which, under a state law passed last year, was required in May to admit a freshman class that is no
less than 40 percent black. Additionally, half the class must be graduates of Brazil's public secondary and high schools, which are notoriously overcrowded,
under-financed and vastly inferior to the private schools where Brazil's middle class and wealthy send their children.

"This has been the X-factor in Brazil since the '70s," said Monteiro, the law professor. "Because universities are so competitive, we have relied on test scores to
decide who gets in. But only the kids who receive private schooling are prepared to do well on the test. White kids from privileged families are the only ones who
receive the kind of instruction and preparation to have any real chance to do well on the test.

"And every day on the first day of class, they would waltz into class and claim their seats with this confidence, like a ruling class claiming their rightful place in
society."

The difference this year, he said, couldn't be clearer.

"Each class has its own personality," said Monteiro, who considers himself white. "But now my class is maybe 60 percent black, and they are shy, less willing to
contribute to class discussions, like they are at a party to which they were not invited."

The change in students' test scores is evident. The average score for students admitted into the law school last year was nearly 81 percent. Under the quota system,
the average score was 64 percent, according to the university admissions office.

Eric Oliveira Guarana, the attorney representing Fracescutti in her lawsuit against the university, said the solution creates more problems than it addresses.

"You are lowering standards," said Guarana, who cites in his suit the landmark 1978 Bakke decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that universities may use
race as a factor in admissions, but cannot use quotas.

A Time to Start Talking

Elza Soares, a popular singer here who is black and outspoken on racial issues, says quotas are not the problem. "We need to improve the schools at every level. We
need jobs. We need to make sure kids get three meals a day."

And, as in the United States, some blacks here oppose a policy of quotas because, they say, it taints all blacks with a subtle slur.

"Now, no matter what I do, people are going to look at me and say: 'Oh, he's an affirmative action student,' or 'He's an affirmative action hire,' " said Darli Goncalves,
23, a black law student who scored high enough on the entrance exam to have been accepted without the quotas. "Because I am black I lose all the credit for getting
good grades, for doing the work. I think the quotas are really a form of racism in reverse."

University administrators say that 14 percent of applicants who declared themselves "white" when they took the entrance exam, declared themselves either black or
pardo when they submitted their applications to the university.

"I don't think there's any doubt that some middle-class white kids are taking advantage of the system by declaring themselves black," said Salgueiro, the admissions
director. "It's disappointing because that means the program is not always benefiting poor or underprivileged kids. But at the same time, what can you do? We have no
idea really who is black and who is not. This is Brazil."

Bulbul, the black filmmaker, acknowledges that the quotas are an imperfect tool, and that the solution really is to expand education opportunities to accommodate
people like Fracescutti and poorer Brazilians, both black and white.

"But we have to start somewhere, and this is one beginning that is long overdue," Bulbul said. "Whatever happens with quotas, Brazilians are talking about the issue of
race and discrimination and there's no going back.

My white friends will ask me what I think about racism in Brazil or the quotas, and I always tell them: The answer is in your question.

"Three months ago, you would never even have asked."

                                              © 2003