In the last few years, a new element in racial relations in Brazil has been the affirmative action policy for ethnic minorities. The policy of quotas for Negroes and coloureds in public universities has brought to the surface an intense debate on discrimination and issues of racial identity which had not seemed relevant before, in the country that holds the largest black population outside of Africa. The purpose of this work is to analyse the relation between the perceptions of social justice and the attitudes of students towards the policy of quotas. To this end, we carried out two studies in the city of Aracaju with candidates for university places from two courses (a public and a private school) and students from all courses at the Federal University of Sergipe. The results revealed a strong rejection of quotas, mainly in the university context. We suppose that this resistance can be seen both as an affirmation of the model of liberal justice, based on individual merit, and a reaction to the type of merely newsworthy action in which quotas are being transformed in Brazilian society.
social justice; quotas and attitudes
