Over the past few years more than ten million relatively prosperous families in India gave up the right to buy fuel at subsidized prices so that poorer Indianscould do so. On the other hand, some wealthy Indians have muscled their way into qualifying for affirmative action privileges, undermining an effective way of improving the prospects for deserving low-income students. In Brazil, the new millennium gave birth to a radical departure from the race-blind “racial democracy” myth to enact benefits for deprived Afro-Brazilians, despite the lack of a powerful pro-affirmative-action movement. Yet the affirmative action program has divided the Afro-Brazilian community, with recriminations and student expulsions for not being “black enough.”