Genetics against race: Science, politics and affirmative action in Brazil

Abstract

This article analyses interrelations between genetic ancestry research, political conflict and social identity. It focuses on the debate on race-based affirmative action policies, which have been implemented in Brazil since the turn of the century. Genetic evidence of high levels of admixture in the Brazilian population has become a key element of arguments that question the validity of the category of race for the development of public policies. In response, members of Brazil’s black movement have dismissed the relevance of genetics by arguing, first, that in Brazil race functions as a social – rather than a biological – category, and, second, that racial classification and discrimination in this country are based on appearance, rather than on genotype. This article highlights the importance of power relations and political interests in shaping public engagements with genetic research and their social consequences.

Liberalism and Its Contradictions: Democracy and Hierarchy in Mestizaje and Genomics in Latin America

“…In Brazil, blackness had for many decades been defined as a constitutive part of the nation, and the genetic othering of black people was not as evident as it was in Colombia. Indeed, statements about Afro-Brazilians' genetic mixture were used to undermine the black social movement by implying the nonexistence of a black category (Kent, Santos, and Wade 2014;Kent and Wade 2015). In Brazilian genomics, blackness was not othered; instead it was dissolved into genetic mixedness.…”

Negotiating Imagined Genetic Communities: Unity and Diversity in Brazilian Science and Society

“…However, rather than questioning its content, they have focused on its political uses and effects. From their perspective, by offering scientific support to the ideology of racial democracy and to arguments against affirmative action, this research bolstered political strategies aimed at maintaining a status quo of racial inequality (Kent n.d.; Santos and Maio ). The black movement's main critique was that genetic data and the arguments they sustained were irrelevant to the debate on race and affirmative action, for two interrelated reasons .…”

“…Second—as vividly expressed in the frequently recurring trope that “the police do not ask for a DNA test to know who is black”—racial classification and social inequalities in Brazil are based on appearance rather than ancestry or genotype. This separation between social and biological dimensions of race has been a central element in the black movement's strategy to keep genetics outside the debate on differentiated, race‐based policies (Kent n.d.). The conceptual negotiations taking place in this instance are not about the content of imagined genetic communities but, rather, about whether genetics has any legitimate place at all in the ways in which Brazil and (the different segments of) its population are imagined.…”

“…Members of Brazil's black social movement, however, responded by dismissing the relevance of genetics on the grounds that in Brazil racial identity and discrimination are based on phenotypic appearance rather than ancestry. Thus, genetic data became incorporated into political disputes about the pertinence of multicultural policies, as well as into wider debates about the nature of the Brazilian nation and its people (Kent n.d.; Santos and Maio ). Historically, such debates have revolved around the tension between unity and diversity, pitching views that consider the Brazilian population as a single, thoroughly mixed entity that cannot be differentiated, except at the individual level, against alternative interpretations that emphasize the multiplicity of its populations in terms of race, ethnicity, and region (Fry ; Guimarães ; Oliven ; Telles ).…”

Chess game for affirmative action at UFRJ

“…According to Fry et al (2007), the inevitable result of affirmative action for Afro-Brazilians would be the racialization of the national society and the emergence of racist movements and racial conflict. Experiments proving genetic mixture of famous figures were also used as a finding to invalidate the use of race in public policies (Kent andWade 2015, Wade 2017). In spite of a vast array of demographic and sociological studies revealing racial inequalities in every aspect of Brazilian society, the idea of racial democracy -even if just as a myth -appeared to be robust enough to negate the use of race to shape public policy.…”