Official rhetorics often highlight horizontality, solidarity, and shared interests as features of South-South cooperation (SSC), but scholars have argued that tensions shape SSC as much as North-South development relations. This study examines the Brazilian SSC discourse and its everyday practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a newly created international university and textual analysis, this research finds that actors made sense of the international university's purpose from different perspectives and that they try to influence the university's institutional consolidation accordingly. These divergent perspectives reflect the controversies regarding recently adopted affirmative action policies in Brazilian higher education. This article offers a new perspective on how race shapes international development education policies and practices. It concludes that conceptualizations of race in educational research and theory have to account for blackness as a legitimate albeit politically contested category.