Brazil is undergoing a paradigm shift in its approach to racial inequality. Once eschewing race, legislators and other policy makers are now vigorously implementing racial quotas in public institutions of higher education. In this paper, we explore public opinion on racial quotas using the 2010 and 2012 AmericasBarometer. In 2010, a surprising majority of Brazilians strongly supported these policies. Afro-Brazilians and individuals with lower levels of education were more likely to express strong support compared to whites and those with higher levels of education. In 2012, a question format change that set up a zero-sum game scenario between afro-Brazilians and others resulted in a dramatic fall in that support. Interestingly, those 2012 results show that education, and not race, contours support. We discuss possible explanations for these particular patterns of public opinion on racial quotas in Brazil.
Dozens of Brazilian universities recently adopted racial quotas for negros, read Afro‐Brazilians, in higher education. Anyone familiar with the Brazilian context will recognize this step as a paradigm shift in the state’s approach to ‘race’. State discourse in past decades touted a mixed‐race population not beset by overt discriminatory practices. In response to this new approach, two well‐defined clusters of professors in Brazil’s universities authored several dueling manifestos supporting and opposing race‐based affirmative action. This article suggests a ‘culture war’ framing of the debate and delineates the contrasting historic ideologies of racialism and antiracialism that inform the divergent racial worldviews of each academic camp. It then explores four points of contention from the manifestos that characterize their conflicting perspectives. They differ in terms of (1) their images of the Brazilian nation, (2) their diagnoses of the mechanisms behind non‐white underrepresentation in Brazilian universities, (3) their prognoses for a remedy via racial quotas, and (4) their motivations for entering the debate. At the same time, the article locates some possible common ground.
■ Through an ongoing team fieldwork project that entails ethnographic observations and interviews at multiple research sites in southern California, this study seeks an understanding of the growth of contemporary megachurches by examining how they go about the business of attracting new members and retaining old ones. In this article, we focus on how the megachurches assist members in addressing personal issues through diagnostic and prognostic framing within large congregational gatherings and problem-oriented small groups. These processes are elaborated through the intensive examination of a small group dealing with ‘the problem of same-sex attraction’. The study explains the appeal of megachurches at two levels: for individuals, megachurches sharpen and fine-tune an expanding array of personal problems or issues; and, at the organizational and institutional level, they have become major players in the self-help market.
“Megachurch” is a term used to refer to a type of church, often defined as having 2000 or more people in attendance at a typical weekly service. As a significant development in Protestant Christianity, megachurches are part and parcel of an increasingly globalized world. While scholars dispute the nature and impact of globalization, a globalized world is readily recognized as one of increased acceleration of flows of people, things, and ideas across borders driven by the tools of modern technology and the free‐market economy. Arguably, the openings created by this process have facilitated the development and growth of a globally inclined Christian mission and impacted the flourishing of megachurches in recent decades.
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