The article analyses current (up to 2012) race-based affirmative actions of various kinds in effect in Brazilian public universities. By drawing on laws and resolutions that regulate such actions, it resorts to microdata from the National Institute for Educational Research to present an overview of affirmative action in the country's public higher education. The aim is to bring out the universities' various diagnoses on education inequality on which they rely to define their student selection policies, and expose the procedures they adopt to lessen inequality, facing the challenge of transforming sociological categories such as class, race and ethnicity into public policy criteria, while dealing with demands from both government and social movements.
affirmative action; racial inequalities; higher education; public policy
