Brazil, Racial Diversity and Education in

The subject of racial diversity and education in Brazil encompasses a broad spectrum of interconnected topics. There are the ongoing structural imbalances in which non-Whites, who make up over 50% of the Brazilian population, are heavily concentrated in poor, urban communities where they attend low-quality, underfunded public schools. These students face high levels of gang and police violence, antipathy from the middle and upper classes, and neglect by the government and civil society. There are affirmative action policies which various state and federal universities have undertaken to address the near absence of non-Whites in universities. There is also the broad pedagogical project of multiculturalism, which has undergone substantial changes in the past 2 decades. This entry focuses largely on this latter dimension of racial diversity ...