“Look, I'm going to listen to the Society, I'm going to do Politics, I'm going to introduce myself, am I going to show myself? I never had that purpose”

Abstract

This article presents a detailed look at the elaboration of the first law to create an admissions’ quota for black (negro) and brown (pardo) students in Brazilian universities: law n° 3708/2001, which established a 40% quota in Rio de Janeiro’s state universities for black (negro) and brown (pardo) students. It examines the Brazilian print media’s coverage of the United Nation’s 3rd World Conference Against Racism (WCR), specifically the newspapers representation of quotas for blacks in public universities as the demand of civil society and government representatives at the WCR in South Africa, to the arena of the State Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro (Alerj), where local political actors opportunistically grab onto the phrase and appropriate it to their own ends. It also discusses the important new alliances formed between the organizations of the Black Movement and the print media during the preparatory process for the WCR.