Ethnic-racial classification in discussions on Twitter: allegations of alleged fraud in affirmative action by Brazilian public universities in 2020
In this research I seek to understand the debates around Brazilian ethnic-racial classifications through twitter. The analysis of the arguments mobilized was carried out through the tweets of the profile reservanonymous and the hashtag #FraudadoresDeCotas, between May and July 2020. This interval is marked by the creation of several pages on this online platform, with the aim of denouncing alleged frauds that were occurring in the ethnic-racial quota system of Brazilian public universities. In this sense, many dialogues reproduced discourses that refer to the myth of racial democracy, to the theory of miscegenation, to brand and origin prejudice, as well as to the narratives resulting from essentialized phenotypic characteristics. In view of this, I sought to: (a) map the controversies on twitter about fraud; (b) understand how social networks have been used in discussions about racial belonging in the country; (c) analyze native conceptions of the concept of “race”; (d) identify how the category “brown” and whiteness are represented in these contexts. For that, the following methods were used: discourse analysis; “wanderings” in the hashtag and the literature review of the Brazilian Social Sciences, Cultural and Post-colonial Studies literature.