The aim of this study is to present that affirmative actions in Brazilian public universities, which were originally claimed by the Black movement, ended up developing benefits to other social, racial and ethnic groups. Thus, we performed an analysis of indicators in order to infer the authors' conclusions. Therefore, the concept of "social by products" must be understood as the extension of benefits to other social groups that have not historically suffered significant disadvantages in Brazil. This is a conceptual discussion about two components: the first one is the essence of the ideological debate on the subject and the other is a perverse nature, because it moves vacancies from "racial quotas" to "social quotas".
affirmative action; higher public education; racial quotas; social quotas