HBCUs Increase International Presence by Hosting 1,000 Brazilian Students

Joan Robinson is provost of Morgan State University and the chair of the HBCU-Brazilian Alliance.
In order to support the partnership between the United States and Brazil, referred to as the Joint Action Plan to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Discrimination (JAPER), the Brazilian government has agreed to send approximately 1,000 students to several of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities. As a result, selected HBCUs are preparing efforts to accommodate an average of 30 to 50 students to be admitted into each selected school for the 2013 fall semester.

Brazil, a country that shares a similar historical past to the United States as a hub for transported African slaves, relies heavily on affirmative action within the education system. Facing many of the same social and economic disparities that minorities in the United States endure, the Brazilian government established the JAPER agreement in 2008 to initiate an interagency that would share resources between commercial, economic and educational efforts. Along with the JAPER agreement was the formation of the HBCU-Brazilian alliance, which recognized the social and economic challenges for Afro-Brazilian students.

HBCU-Brazilian Alliance Chair Joan Robinson attributed the barriers of Afro-Brazilian students to the aftermath of Brazil’s slavery, which prevented many of their people of African descent from attaining higher education. With the history of HBCUs as a marking point that eliminated the educational gap for African Americans, the HBCU-Brazilian Alliance attempted to assist Afro-Brazilians in recovering from paralleled injustices.

“[Brazilians] are looking to see what we have done. We [African-Americans] have done a lot after the Civil War. So, we want to make sure that many of the Afro-Brazilians, while also the descendants of slaves, will get an opportunity to go to college,” Robinson explained.

In honoring the alliance during the annual “Brazil-U.S. Partnership for the 21st Century” conference last April, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff discussed President Barack Obama’s goal of sending 100,000 Brazilian students to schools around the world. Particularly interested in strengthening STEM education for Brazilian students, Rousseff agreed to send 50,000 to American institutions and 1,000 students to HBCUs. Signed with a memorandum of understanding, this new agreement would promote further discussion around collaborative projects, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.

Since Brazil hosts the largest number of people of African descent in the entire Western Hemisphere, it seemed most logical to send a great portion of Afro-Brazilian students to experience HBCUs, where the presence of African descendants tops all other American institutions, according to Meldon Hollis, associate director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs.

“It is a win-win situation,” said Hollis.