Categorização racial e ações afirmativas no Ensino Superior

Abstract

The phenomenon of racial prejudice continues to manifest in Brazil not only explicitly but also covertly, as a consequence of a structural and historical logic that perpetuates it. Since universities are institutions also responsible for citizenship education, there is an urgent need to investigate manifestations of racial prejudice in this context. The aim of the present study was to investigate attitudes toward affirmative action for racial groups and their effect on the racial categorization of faces as white or black, in light of the Justified Discrimination Model (JDM), in a sample of young adult university students (n=42). Participants were randomly assigned to three experimental groups, defined by fake news containing different information regarding the consequences of affirmative action in the university, and subsequently responded to a racial categorization task. Standardized self-report instruments were used to investigate explicit measures of prejudice, while implicit measures were observed using the dot-probe task, a task of attentional selectivity. The sample showed highly uniform results of political progressivism, high endorsement of racial quotas, and low explicit measures of prejudice. The categorization threshold indicates that participants are inclined to identify people as black prior to the task's midpoint, indicating a non-universal perception of the "race" category. There were no relevant differences in response times for the dot-probe task, something potentially related to the general egalitarian tendency of the sample. Therefore, the importance of affirmative action for increasing diversity in universities is reaffirmed, along with its necessary complementation with institutional strategies for racial literacy.