Racial democracy myth and the (non) support for race-targeted policies in Brazil: evidences from a survey list-experiment

Abstract

This paper aims at understanding the strength of the main arguments of the racial democracy myth and its application on shaping Brazilian college students’ opinions on the adoption of affirmative actions on public universities. Through an experiment embedded in a survey, we look at the attitudes towards racial and social quotas expressed by college students from the University of Brasília and the Federal University of Minas Gerais, both public institutions in Brazil. The list-experiment technique guarantees the necessary privacy for the respondents to feel free to give honest answers, avoiding the social desirability effect. Empirical data support our hypothesis: the racial democracy myth depreciates racial attributes as explanatory factors to inequalities in Brazil, leaving them only to class and income features. Thus, the opposition to racial quotas is always higher than to social quotas, and social desirability effects affect both quotas systems.