The significance of post-racial ideology,black political struggle,and racial literacy for Brazilian anti-racist education policy

Abstract

This paper furthers current analysis of anti-racist, critical multicultural, and decolonial educational reforms in Brazil through a focus on the significant role played by post-racial ideology, black politics, and racial literacy in policy design and implementation. The paper first details the ways in which post-racial commonsense and anti-black racism have been central to the Brazilian social formation and continue to constitute crucial obstacles to fundamentally reshaping the curriculum, educational institutions, educators’ racial literacy, and classroom pedagogies. The article then contends that understanding the politics of race and education in Brazil necessitates acknowledging emergent anti-racist policies and discourses as the product of decades of black political struggle by activists, educators, and community organizations to make racism and racial inequality public issues. In this way, the policy documents and discourses shaping recent educational reforms in Brazil should be understood as political interventions within a particular historical conjuncture and racial formation. Such an analysis reveals contemporary black Brazilian efforts in education as mobilizations that go beyond a ‘politics of identity,’ recognition and apolitical multiculturalism and towards building more transformative anti-racist and decolonial proposals that directly challenge the nature and effects of anti-black racism in society.

Keywords

Educational policy anti-black racism anti-racism post-racial racial literacy Brazil

Introduction

This article examines key issues shaping efforts to transform Brazilian education along more racially and ethnically inclusive lines. The passing of Law 10,639/03 by President Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva of Brazil in 2003 represents one of the more significant moments in the institutionalization of anti-racist, critical multicultural, and decolonial ethno-racial policies in Brazil over the past 15 years. Law 10,639/03 makes obligatory the teaching of African and black Brazilian history and culture in primary and secondary, public, and private schools in all school subjects, especially art education, history, and literature. The Law also requires that school curricula develop in-depth engagements with black participation in national society so as to make visible their contributions in social, economic, and political spheres.¹ In 2004, a comprehensive set of policy guidelines including conceptual and practical content was published for the Law’s implementation: the Curricular Directives for the Education of Ethno-Racial Relations and for the Teaching of African and Black Brazilian History and Culture (henceforth referred to as the Curricular Directives).² Over the past 13 years, state agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and black movement activists and educators have created diverse initiatives to implement the Law, engaging tens of thousands of educators through training courses, workshops, seminars, and new pedagogical materials focused on ethno-racial issues.

The emergence of Law 10,639/03 reflects a context where state institutions increasingly take race into account in public policy (Da Costa, 2014b; Guimarães, 2015) and where public debate around race, racism, and discrimination has become more visible than ever. These shifts towards anti-racist and critical multicultural perspectives signal a weakening of the hegemonic 20th-century ideology of racial democracy where the existence of racial and cultural mixture in society was often mobilized to deny racism and discrimination as structural issues. However, despite this weakening, racial democracy and mixture persist as components of a post-racial ideology that shapes understandings of, and actions around, race and racism in spheres such as education. Specifically, post-racial ideology structures institutional racism and stifles racial literacy. It shapes the degree to which some believe race to be an issue worthy of concrete policy. It also influences explicit rejections of policy implementation that minimize racism as an issue as well as frequently treat it as a question only relevant to black Brazilians (Da Costa, 2014b). Despite post-racial ideology and its effects constituting one of the main targets of black activism and anti-racist public policy, its implications in the educational sphere in Brazil remain both significant and understudied.

This paper argues that, to articulate effective anti-racist pedagogies in Brazil, analyses of ethno-racial policy implementation targeting Afro-descendents must pay critical attention to post-racial ideology and the ways it suppresses challenges to the coloniality of power and systemic anti-blackness. Post-racial commonsense and anti-black racism have been central to the social formation, as well as crucial obstacles to fundamentally reshaping the curriculum, educational institutions, educators’ racial literacy, and classroom pedagogies. The article also argues that understanding the politics of race and education in Brazil necessitates acknowledging emergent ethno-racial policies and discourses as the product of decades of black political struggle by activists, educators, and community organizations to make racism and racial inequality public issues. In other words, the significance of policies such as 10,639/03, including the impact of the alternative discourses on race that they introduce, must be interpreted within the political-historical conjuncture into which they intervene. Such an analysis reveals contemporary black Brazilian efforts in education as interventions that go beyond a ‘politics of identity,’ recognition and apolitical multiculturalism and towards building more transformative anti-racist and, it is hoped, decolonial proposals.

To make this case, I first elaborate the nature of post-racial ideology in Brazil and the implications of ongoing racism denial for educational policy implementation. Secondly, I foreground the role black movement activists, educators, and organizations have played in making race a policy issue in order to ground policy discourse and implementation in the knowledge and experiences of black Brazilians. It is this black ‘locus of enunciation’ (Mignolo, 2000) that formulates the political-epistemological intervention of contemporary anti-racist education reforms. Thirdly, I analyze the content of the Curricular Directives in order to highlight the anti-racist political aims and pedagogical resources they offer to undertake the unlearning and relearning necessary to build racial literacy and challenge racism in education. Overall, I argue that Law 10,639/03 and the Curricular Directives for implementation do pave the way for productive critical approaches to anti-black racism, institutional racism, and the lack of racial literacy in the education system. The analysis in this paper advances understanding of the discourse, content, and implementation of Law 10,639/03 with the goal of contributing to and furthering discussions of anti-racist and decolonial pedagogies and curriculum reforms in Brazil.

Implications of mixture and racial democracy as post-racial ideology

One of the main challenges for anti-racist activism and critical multicultural reforms in education in Brazil has been to confront denials of racism and contest the regulation of politicized (or ‘alternative’) constructions of blackness that deviate from dominant discourses on hybridity and mixed racial and cultural identity. Miscegenation, hybridity, and racial democracy are deeply implicated in historically dominant identity projects that have sustained racial domination. Like other racial formations in the Americas, they are shaped by coloniality and anti-blackness. They also involve commonsense understandings of race relations that minimize the persistence of racial difference as a category of exclusion and obscure people’s ability to identify, and thus address, everyday and institutional racism. The rhetoric that ‘we are all mixed, therefore we are not racist’ is powerful, especially given the actually existing cultural and racial mixture in society. While mixed identity does shape the ways many people understand themselves, aggressive investments in this identity as proof of inter-racial conviviality and equality have long shaped denials that racism was a societal issue. Miscegenation and hybridity thus figure centrally in Brazilian post-racial ideology and its historically hegemonic form of racial rule.

Post-racial ideologies:

involve forms of thought, discourse, and action that evade, delegitimize, and seek to eliminate race and racism, from the focus of academic scholarship, activist struggle, public debate, and state policy;

present the non-significance of race while operating through racialized forms of power;

influence forms of racism denial and minimization;

generate fraught understandings of belonging and inclusion that elide racial difference and structural racism, with the effect of re-articulating rather than addressing white supremacy, racism, and racial inequality; and

are deployed as a strategy of power to depoliticize race, racism, and difference in ways that demobilize anti-racist politics, substantive cultural recognition, and material redistribution.³

Despite increasing levels of the recognition of racism in broader society as well as public disparagement of discrimination (Bailey, 2009; Silva and Reis, 2012), a post-racial ideology involving racial blindness maintain a strong grip on people and within institutions. This ideology structures inaction and inhibits discussion around anti-black racism present in the curriculum and classroom. Analyses of policy discourse and implementation must thus focus on the ways racism oppresses, subjugates, and dehumanizes while simultaneously addressing denials of racism that constrain anti-racist pedagogies and curricular reforms.

Brazilian post-racial ideology emerged when racial mixture was reimagined in the 1930s as a positive attribute that diminished racial boundaries, increased inter-racial harmony, and helped forge national unity.⁴ An ‘anti-racialist’ ideal that rejected the existence of ‘races’ took hold; however, belief that race did not exist for Brazilian peoples and that racism was caused by individual prejudice (rather than structural issues) merged with the practice of denying racism (Guimarães, 2001). Skin color and ‘race,’ coupled with class, education, gender, and family origin, persisted in shaping hierarchical cultural, status, aesthetic, and spiritual characteristics ascribed to darker and lighter people. The desire for whiteness and whitening (branqueamento) and negative meanings ascribed to blackness remained ingrained in society despite the development of a mixed Brazilian identity (Nascimento, 1989). Moreover, in practice, miscegenation discourses themselves have tended to invoke African, Indigenous, and European as separate ‘original’ elements combined in a mosaic, rather than as fully melded within a hybrid, homogenous whole (Wade, 2005). As a result, rather than the disappearance of race, a ‘pigmentocracy’ emerged focused on color gradations as well as personal characteristics of appearance and background. The focus on the supposed ambiguity of color and the contextual nature with which determinations of status could be made or denied obscured ‘the existence of an extremely efficient system of racial domination’ that was anti-black at its core (Gilliam, 2003; Nascimento, 2007: 19).

In terms of cultural hybridity and national identity, recognition of black Brazilians tended to folklorize Africanness and transform Afro-Brazilian cultural practices into symbols of national and mixed, rather than an ethnically specific culture (Sheriff, 1999). This culturalist logic of inclusion afforded a ‘compensatory system of racial representation,’ which through selective aesthetic and symbolic aspects rather than substantive equality, camouflaged unequal social power between racial segments and preserved patterns of material inequality (Armstrong, 1999: 79–80; Hanchard, 1994; Warren and Sue, 2011). This contributed to positive sentiments around racial democracy, where symbolic visibility and acceptance of (certain forms of) African and black culture as ‘Brazilian’ stood in for as well as helped mitigate the invisibility of blacks in social, political, and economic positions of power. Overall, miscegenation and its forms of black inclusion precluded the necessity of culturally distinct groups based on racial difference to sustain a ‘discourse and practices that constitute racial difference as a social category’ and that determine individuals’ positions by ‘the degree of blackness in their bodies’ (Silva, 2010: 18).

Despite mixture’s potential to shape the construction of a less divisive racial hierarchy, anti-black perspectives remain so embedded in the Brazilian social fiber through stereotypes, political invisibility, and violence that the subordinated, non-/sub-human, and non-/sub-citizen status of blacks remains naturalized and often reasserted in the face of black demands for equality in various spheres (Alves, 2014; Da Costa, 2014b; Hernández, 2012; Smith, 2014; Vargas, 2012). Blacks are underrepresented in political and economic positions of power, as students and faculty within elite institutions of higher learning, in primary and secondary school curriculums, and in the media. At the same time, they are overrepresented as targets of (racist) bullying in schools and the media and as victims of police violence and assassination. While black subjectivity (and blackness) cannot be reduced to such death and suffering, black experiences reveal a ‘structure of antiblack antagonisms’ that is foundational to the Brazilian polity and demonstrates ‘the immanently corrupt character of the dominant Brazilian social and ideological project’ for which racial democracy and mixed belonging are central (Vargas, 2012: 4). Blackness and humanity remain antagonistic ideas, as do black subjecthood and citizenship. This marks the dominant national project of inclusion (and identity) as deceptive and impossible for Afro-descendants (Vargas 2012).

This is all the more significant given that, for much of the 20th century, racial democracy and its anti-black pillars of miscegenation and hybridity were the ‘official anti-racism’ of Brazil (Goldberg, 2002). Official anti-racisms (a) ‘institutionally validate some forms of difference and make others illegible,’ (b) control ‘what counts as a race matter, an anti-racist goal, or a truism about racial difference,’ and (c) ‘structure legitimate knowledges in the domains of law, public policy, economy, and culture’ (Melamed, 2011: 11). This has had an effect on the way people think about and interpret race and racism in state institutions such as schools. Racist acts were treated as anomalies in an assumed racial democracy, while individuals and organizations fighting to make racism an issue often experienced incredulity and sanctioning for bringing ‘race’ into a society where it supposedly did not exist. The power of post-racial ideology reveals itself here in the continued investment in miscegenation and racial democracy as inter-racial harmony and means towards a future beyond race, emphases that often displace challenging existing anti-black attitudes and structural racism. Black activists and scholars have long declared this system as one based on racismo velado (veiled racism)—the subtle, implicit, and disavowed racism and anti-black sentiments with pernicious effects that are as deep, if not deeper for their inconspicuousness, as those of more explicit systems of racial domination.

The system of racismo velado involves a hyperconsciousness/negation of race dialectic where people are deeply attuned to meanings of skin color (whiteness and blackness), aggressively invest in mixed identity, and avoid identifying racism (Vargas, 2004). Hyperconsciousness/negation of race ‘silences awareness of racial classifications and ensuing practices and representations’ in ways that obscure ‘the role race plays in determining one’s position in the historical structure of power and resources’ (Vargas, 2004: 444, emphasis mine). At the same time, acute awareness of racial differences allows their utilization to (often tacitly) justify, think about, and enforce behavior and social inequalities’ (Vargas, 2004: 446).

Even though the majority of Brazilians today believe that racism and discrimination are societal issues in the abstract (e.g. on opinion surveys), in practice, when confronting situations loaded with racialized meaning or when engaging anti-racist discourses, the hyperconsciousness/negation often emerges to minimize racism and deny the significance of race. This suggests that despite strong, historical investment in mixture, hybridity, and moving beyond race, what people do in relation to race more accurately reflects how post-racial ideology works on the ground to sustain anti-black racism and its institutional effects. This strongly suggests we must consider post-racial ideology and the hyperconsciousness/negation of race as a formative element of Brazilians’ interpretive frameworks and thus a particular local reality with its own forms of racial illiteracy.

In terms of anti-racist, multicultural, or critical intercultural policy implementation, hyperconsciousness/negation of race takes on a particular life within political and educational institutions. It shapes public officials’ and educators’ response to racism and evidence of its existence in the education system, both in terms of supporting implementation of Federal Law 10,639/03 and of addressing everyday racism in the classroom and curriculum. Understandings of race and racism thus frame the issue and its treatment, especially influencing political will to implement policies. For example, in my research with educators in the state of São Paulo, I observed how discussions around race and curriculum transformation, when not rejected outright, were characterized by some educators as solely a ‘black issue.’ Despite declared personal and societal commitments to anti-racialism and hybridity, conversations about policy implementation (e.g. curriculum content and classroom activities) often get deflected by non-black teachers who do not see themselves implicated in racism or responsible for anti-racist pedagogical and institutional reform (Da Costa, 2014b).

This reality of denial/avoidance and lack of political will hold very serious implications for successfully re-thinking curriculum and pedagogy (Conceição, 2010; Da Costa, 2014b). It suggests that the challenges to racial hierarchy, power, knowledge production, and authority around curriculum content and educational practice proposed by Law 10,639/03 and protagonized by black Brazilians makes many educators and politicians uneasy. This is also true about the critical self-reflexivity the Law’s implementation demands with regards to historically hegemonic understandings of identity and belonging at the national and individual levels and their effects on how people interpret and deal with race. Successful policy implementation thus demands direct engagement with the ways in which these factors shape how institutions and the people who inhabit them reproduce and defend power and privilege.

The significance of black politics for present education policy

Black movement struggle and critical intellectual work by black and non-black scholars have been central to the formulation and implementation of state laws and reforms targeting Afro-descendants. It is these movements and the countless local efforts by individuals that have produced critical knowledge about and driven anti-racist reforms, curricular and otherwise (Gomes, 2011). It is these efforts that fomented the public discussions of racism and racial inequality happening today. It is also, interestingly, the growing visibility, power, and success of these anti-racist efforts that have to a great extent animated recent concerns (and polemics) among scholars to rework aspects of hybridity and miscegenation into concrete anti-racist options in practice (cf. Canen, 2010). In this way, recent anti-racist discourses and public policy must be understood as black political interventions within a particular historical conjuncture oriented towards making explicit questions around anti-black racism and driving discursive and political-institutional change.

In the educational sphere, activist, NGO, and scholarly work on racism addresses curricular content, pedagogical practices, and experiences of Afro-descendant students in school spaces. Over the last three decades, such work has focused primarily on: (1) addressing stereotypes, invisibility, and problematic representations of Africa and Afro-descendants in the curriculum; (2) eliminating racism and discrimination in the schools; (3) affirming diverse forms of knowledge production, transmission, and ways of knowing, which involves incorporating Afro-Brazilian cultural practices into the curriculum; (4) improving educational access and retention for Afro-descendants; and (5) participating in the pedagogical coordination and implementation of Law 10,639/03 training programs throughout the country in cooperation with university programs in Black Studies, NGOs, individual schools, and municipal governments.⁵

These overlapping efforts and the knowledge and identities that shape them constitute a multilayered practice oriented towards ideological, cultural, institutional, and material transformation. Questions of knowledge production and racial literacy are paramount. Racial literacy involves ‘ways of perceiving and responding to racism that generates a repertoire of discursive material practices’ (Twine, 2010: 92). Its key components include the following: (1) the definition of racism as a contemporary problem rather than a historical legacy; (2) an understanding of the ways that experiences of racism and racialization are mediated by class, gender inequality, and heterosexuality; (3) a recognition of the cultural and symbolic value of whiteness; (4) an understanding that racial identities are learned and are an outcome of social practices; (5) the possession of a racial grammar and vocabulary to discuss race, racism, and anti-racism; and (6) the ability to interpret racial codes and racialized practices (Twine, 2010: 92).

Cultivating racial literacy in the sphere of education in Brazil necessitates challenging racismo velado (veiled racism) and the hegemonic idealized mixture for their failure to create concrete critiques of racism (not ‘race’ or ‘identity’) and produce anti-racist action among educators and the broader population. It involves acknowledging racism as an ongoing issue, understanding its specificity within Brazilian history and context as it relates to people of African descent (how it works and the representations it has created), recognizing the persistent devaluing of blackness (anti-blackness) and symbolic and material valuing of whiteness, and creating frameworks and language to interpret and discuss racism. When it comes to shifting the terms and content of knowledge production, racial literacy also involves interpreting African-matrix worldviews as well as black history, memory, and culture as sources for diverse epistemologies, pedagogies, and forms of thought. Engagement with these other epistemologies go beyond folkloric multiculturalism and ‘add and stir’ logics to open up critical intercultural learning possibilities and decolonize hierarchical notions that deem certain knowledge (and the peoples who produce them) as legitimate, useful, and/or valuable (Da Costa, 2014b; Oliveira and Candau, 2010).

Part of this process of making racism visible in Brazil and decolonizing education involves re-articulating black identity and mobilizing cultural knowledge and memory to address the present context. This demonstrates the ways in which not all turns to ‘tradition’ and African/black history involve reified culturalisms. As Stuart Hall (1990) notes, black diasporic cultural identities are a process in formation; they are about both being and becoming in ways that are attentive to ‘similarity and continuity’ as well as ‘difference and rupture’ with an African past. In this way, ‘alternative’ constructions of identity that politicize blackness, as black Brazilians have created in a society that not only privileges but essentializes mixed-race identity (Caldwell, 2007), are ‘inseparable from the totality of the struggle that provides [their] context’ (Dirlik, 1997: 232). In other words, contemporary black racial and cultural identities and the discourses they generate are deeply informed by embodied knowledge of racismo velado (veiled racism) and its histories of anti-blackness. They emerge dialogically through the affective and ideological experiences of structural racism, and thus the interpretation of what the Brazilian reality is for blacks. In other words, staking out these black identities is also about defining what it means to be Brazilian and, correspondingly, what should or should not be part of the content and practice of a public good such as education.

The diverse black Brazilian efforts in education mentioned above have addressed epistemic and material questions by mobilizing understandings of ‘Africanness’ and ‘African culture,’ ‘blackness’ and ‘Afro-Brazilian Culture,’ and ‘ancestralidade Africana/negra’ (African/black ancestrality) as oppositional and strategic as well as dynamic. Given the entrenched and normalized nature of anti-black racism, asserting a ‘positive,’ specific and historically situated black identity via policy discourses, revamped pedagogical materials, and training workshops for educators on race and racism are central to this process in the current historical moment. These mobilizations have become ‘a way to articulate what it has meant to be culturally and epistemically dehumanized by colonization’ and construct an identity that is ‘part of a lived, vindicated, and creative experience of identification within conditions of extreme political and socioeconomic marginalization’ (Walsh, 2002: 67). Identification makes dehumanization visible, facilitates recognition of oppressive structures, and reconstructs colonized cultures and epistemologies to bring them into educational discourses, institutions, and pedagogies. In summary, it is only within the contexts and conjunctures of power and struggle that we can gauge the constitution, meaning, and impact of cultural politics that employ identity and difference (Dirlik, 1997; Hale, 1997).

The Curricular Directives as a political-epistemic intervention

The Curricular Directives for the Education of Ethno-Racial Relations and for the Teaching of African and Black Brazilian History and Culture is the key policy document that outlines curricular guidelines for implementation of Law 10,639/03 (Brasil, 2005). One recent critique of the Curricular Directives (Canen, 2010) argues that the document presents limitations for generating effective anti-racist and critical postcolonial multicultural pedagogies for at least two reasons: (a) the ethnic and racial discourses therein are essentialist and black peoples and cultures are represented in a folkloric fashion; and, as such, (b) the identities presented contradict the miscegenation and hybridity that shapes the Brazilian context, its interpretive realities, and teachers’ self-understandings. While suggesting important issues in relation to identity discourses and anti-racist policy implementation, this analysis offers only a partial reading of the pedagogical content and function of the Curricular Directives. In this section, I summarize the Curricular Directives and focus on two key themes to offer an alternative interpretation of their content and potential for critical anti-racist work.⁶

Brief summary of the Curricular Directives

The Curricular Directives reflect demands by Afro-descendants for affirmative actions involving reparations that guarantee educational access, retention, and success as well as recognize and value African and black Brazilian history, culture, and identity in ways that foster more equal social, economic, civil, and cultural rights. Pluricultural, anti-racist, and decolonizing in its orientation, the Curricular Directives seek to restructure the education system when it comes to Afro-descendants. They aim to challenge and undo the unequal and assimilationist nature of a national identity and culture that has reproduced a whitening ideal and anti-blackness. Key moves made by the Curricular Directives include the following: (1) naming entrenched hierarchies and institutionalized racisms as well as the everyday practices that reproduce them in the education system; (2) recognizing African and Afro-descendant history, culture, and difference as valuable, rich, and specific sites of knowledge, experience, and identity; (3) delineating anti-racism and black consciousness as critical tools that can be put into action by Brazilians of all colors and classes; (4) remaking primary and secondary education curricula; (5) equipping schools with sufficient materials, infrastructure, and staff to guarantee quality education that values diversity; (6) preparing educators and administrators with necessary knowledge and training to understand ethno-racial issues and implement the Law; (7) outlining content and approaches for training educators and teaching African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture.

The Curricular Directives set out the political-epistemic terms of comprehensive transformation of educational institutions, knowledge production, pedagogical practices, and the minds of black, brown, white, and other Brazilians when it comes to race. They outline the insertion of hitherto excluded or minimally treated subject matter into the curriculum and provision racial literacy to educators. The Curricular Directives also importantly assert the fundamental role of black mobilization in demanding and actualizing educational reforms, as well as the necessity for black scholars, university research centers, movement organizations, and cultural leaders to maintain ongoing and significant roles in policy design and implementation. This aspect recognizes the centrality of black knowledge, research, and organizing to counterhegemonic analyses of race and racism. It also legitimizes the position of Afro-descendants as protagonists that dialogue with education officials and organize, carry out, and monitor implementation.

Understandings of race, culture, and identity

As with any policy document addressing race and ethnicity, potential exists for the usage of particular terms that are vague and/or less critical in their orientation. For example, within liberal multicultural frameworks the term ‘diversity’ often displaces the focus on racism and hierarchy, while culture becomes a hermetically sealed, static entity. The possibility thus exists for replicating non-critical approaches to race and ethnicity as well as binary visions of ‘us versus them’ (or black versus white) with great implications for pedagogy and inclusion. However, as discussed above, the anti-racism discourses and knowledge shaping the document explicitly aim to transform how educators and the education system more broadly conceptualize and address race, racism, history, culture, and Afro-descendant peoples.

The formulation of the Curricular Directives involved information from 1000 questionnaires sent to ‘black movement groups, individual activists, State and Municipal Education Councils, teachers who have been developing work in relation to the racial question, parents of students… independent of their racial background,’ of which 250 responded in groups or individually with perspectives on what issues and needs they saw as relevant (Brasil, 2005: 10). Moreover, the Curricular Directives make clear that the document (much like Law 10,639/03) is black-focused, that is, concerned with the history, experiences, perspectives, and needs of black peoples, while aiming its content and recommendations at all educators. Finally, the main author of the Curricular Directives is a long-time black Brazilian researcher of race and education. She clearly contextualizes the document’s presentation of questions of identity, blackness, and whiteness in relation to the particular histories of race relations and discourses in Brazil.

In terms of blackness and whiteness, the Directives’ content and significance are expressed through the discussion of the historical difficulties of embracing blackness, cultivating a black identity, and acknowledging one’s African heritage on the one hand, and the Eurocentric nature of the curriculum and societal value given to whiteness on the other. Regarding blackness, the document treats the term ‘negro’ or ‘black' as a politicized identity in an aggressively anti-black context that values mixture not only as hybridity, but in many cases as an escape from blackness (with all the negative meaning and status ascribed it through coloniality). Regarding whiteness, the Curricular Directives implicate desires for whitening in having led to those who exhibit whiteness as being seen as more human, of superior intelligence, and who, ‘because of this, have the right to lead and declare what is good for all’ (i.e. authority) (Brasil, 2005: 16). In this part of the Curricular Directives, whitening and whiteness are discussed in relation to anti-blackness and their negative psychic effects on Afro-descendants.

The intervention to claim a ‘positive’ black identity by undoing the effects of anti-blackness and whitening is fundamental given the very real detrimental effects on black children of curricular invisibility, racist bullying, aesthetic anti-blackness, negative representations, and discrimination by teachers due to ingrained stereotypes. Here, the excavation of black and African history and memory and its usage to affirm ‘positive identities’ remains necessary and likely represents a key, but perhaps not permanent, element or moment in the anti-racist struggle.⁷ Moreover, as discussed previously, self-positioning as black in an anti-black context is itself a means to counter cultural, aesthetic, and epistemic erasure and dehumanization. As such, exposing the relationality of whiteness and blackness as themes becomes a means for educators to teach about the racist system and contest its history, premises, and ideologies moving forward. It becomes a tool to construct an education without the alienation involved in invisibilizing black peoples and negating blackness and African ancestry.

In relation to ‘African culture,’ the Curricular Directives do not present a cultural perspective that is folkloric, multicultural, and reductive rather than a discussion of diverse African cultures and knowledges with origins in African ways of being (cf. Canen, 2010). Pages 20–22, where ‘educational actions to combat racism and discrimination’ are offered, includes long lists of themes, civilizations, geographical spaces and organizations, cultural practices/expressions, and black political, intellectual, and cultural figures demonstrating black diasporic and African cultures as complex, whole ways of life that have made contributions to both Brazilian and global development. There are ample options in terms of content that would likely reveal not only diverse peoples that make up Africans and the African diaspora, but also various forms of thought on issues of race, racism, identity, blackness, critical pedagogy, and even African ancestrality. When it comes to these and related suggestions, the Curricular Directives are very detailed, but also explicitly offered as only a starting point from which to launch further investigation of themes and topics.

Despite such detailed information, the possible construction and transmission of folkloric multicultural interpretations of blackness is an important concern. These can originate with individuals and organizations involved in implementing the Law (e.g. NGOs and their teacher training programs) as well as from educators who partake in training and then may transmit folklorized notions and reifying discourses in the classroom. This might be less a problem of the Curricular Directives themselves than of the amount and quality of training programs and pedagogical materials to which educators have access. Are teachers getting enough time and structure to discuss, digest, and work with this new knowledge? Are there national or state-level quality standards, reviews, or uniformization around pedagogical materials and teacher training programs in order to achieve dynamic and complex representations of Africa and black peoples? Effective government support must be boosted in order to systematize and raise the consistency and quality of Law 10,639/03’s implementation (Canen, 2010; Da Costa, 2014b).

Overall within the Curricular Directives, discourses seen as divergent—anti-racism, folkloric and critical multiculturalism, valuing ‘diversity,’ culturalist forms of recognition, black politics of identity, and hybrid/mixed Brazilian identity—all intersect and persist in productive tension with each other. Moreover, the discussion and inclusion of the worldviews and knowledge of black and Indigenous peoples are, as the Curricular Directives characterize, an ‘amplification and strengthening of theoretical bases of Brazilian education’ (Brasil, 2005: 24, emphasis mine). ‘Difference’ here encompasses other knowledges and worldviews and not simply reified identities; it also explicitly draws these together as complementary elements in re-building a critical intercultural Brazilian education that involves all students and teachers. Finally, while discourses by subaltern groups should not be considered immune from critique in relation to their potential for enabling or buying into cooption within dominant discourses and institutions, such an analysis itself cannot be made outside of the historical conjuncture or existing power relations. The difficulty of re-signifying blackness in an anti-black country, much less an anti-black world, cannot be underestimated.

Who does this critical multicultural and anti-racist education involve?

Rather than treat ‘multicultural and anti-racist education [as something] just for the marginalized and disadvantaged identities’ (cf. Canen, 2010: 551), the Curricular Directives discern a multilayered understanding of pluriculturalismo (pluri-culturalism), anti-racism, and diversidade (diversity) as interrelated, active, and inclusive processes, rather than distinct, passive, and the sole responsibility or domain of black academics, activists, or educators. For example, the Curricular Directives argue that pedagogies combating racism and discrimination can strengthen among blacks and awaken among whites a ‘black consciousness.’ Black consciousness can encourage in blacks critical knowledge, pride, and confidence, and in whites the ability to ‘identify the influences, contributions, participation, and importance of black history and culture in their way of being, living, and relating with other people, notably blacks’ (Brasil, 2005: 16). This understanding of black consciousness foregrounds the ways in which diverse histories and experiences differentiate as well as bind people together. It also empowers all members of society to re-think power and privilege and construct a more substantive democracy.

In several other places, the Curricular Directives do involve and implicate whites and those who define themselves as mixed-race in the contestation of dominant ideologies. While not an emphasis on mixture, hybridity, or ‘identity’ per se, the conceptualization of action is relational and undergirds the Directives’ goal to involve all educators in strategies to address racism and inequality regardless of ethnic or racial origin. In this way, the anti-racist vision presented in the Curricular Directives maintains a shared sense of belonging and mutual struggle against racism along with an explicit recognition of ethno-racial differences and the privileges/disadvantages they shape. This anti-racist vision intersects with, and perhaps strengthens (with a difference), understandings of connectedness by making explicit the elisions within nationalist constructions of mixture and racial democracy that work to reproduce hierarchical racial differences and inequality.

How educators relate to the project of anti-racist and decolonial education proposed by the policy under discussion is a significant aspect of getting them to take up the work of curriculum and pedagogical transformation. This process directly involves the question of a shared sense of belonging and connecting with educators’ current conceptual frameworks, identities, and experiences. However, it also involves a shared sense of investment, sacrifice, and willingness to have one’s hitherto secure (and comforting) understandings of race relations challenged in order to create an anti-racist and welcoming atmosphere in schools for all students on the one hand, and to dismantle white supremacy and institutionalized anti-blackness on the other. This involves disrupting the ways the national post-racial commonsense is ideologically and affectively embedded in educators’ senses of self as well as their understandings of history, geography, literature, and other school subjects. If Law 10,639/03 and the Curricular Directives aim to address black experiences of racism, invisibility, and dehumanization linked to anti-blackness and negative associations with African heritage, then challenging hegemonic racial commonsense will produce difficult conversations and create many tensions. Such challenges will not always be seen or read as welcome, especially given the scrutiny of unnamed power and privilege and the necessity of relinquishing authority and leadership to historically subaltern populations. Attention to educators’ engagements with this new knowledge and its critical discourses must thus identify points of enthusiastic uptake (the easiest content to digest) as well as develop strategies to address rejection of content that more fundamentally unseats privilege and disturbs and challenges educators.⁸

Conclusions

Prejudice, racism, discrimination, and racial inequality have only recently concretely made it into public debates and policy spheres in Brazil. The provision of racial literacy and new pedagogical practices through anti-racism work, the decolonization of minds, and the renovation of educational institutions must continue to contest the very foundations of hegemonic post-racial ideologies as well as educators’ racial frameworks and identities, given the ways these obstruct the work of implementation on the ground. Anti-racist discourses and the black politics of identity shaping recent policies have precisely sought to break the affective and ideological power of societal investments in post-racial understandings of mixture and hybridity. This system, based on racismo velado and expressed through the hyperconsciousness/negation of race, sanctions and sustains institutional racism in education. As such, the work of unlearning and thinking anew must be understood as part of the struggle to disrupt the epistemological foundations that sustain everyday racist behavior, anti-black perspectives, and anti-black curricular content.

The historicized and detailed understanding of racial ideology and the politics around policy design and implementation offered here help illustrate current impasses and emerging directions in discourses and practices seeking to make education more equal. Critical analyses must continue to focus on understanding the origins, historical significance, and political trajectories of the content new critical policy interventions bring in order to account for the multiplicity of possibilities they contain for re-thinking identity and education. More importantly, we can only gain deeper understanding of how these discourses are being taken up or challenged with ethnographic studies of policy implementation in schools and teacher training programs. There is much work being produced on this at the current time that will increasingly identify what possibilities and difficulties exist for challenging institutional racism in education, from the further study of racial discourses, teacher perspectives, and pedagogical materials to examining funding provision and policy implementation in action. A dialogue among scholars, activists, and educators regarding possibilities for praxis presented by various theories and experiences of implementation remains significant. So does attention to the histories, lived experiences, situated knowledges, and political positionings that have made interventions such as Law 10,639/03 possible.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank Bernd Reiter for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa is a assistant Professor of Theoretical, Cultural, and International Studies in Education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He received his PhD from the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University, USA and previously taught at Queen's University, Canada. His research interests include racism and racial ideologies, anti-racist and decolonial politics, the politics of knowledge in education, and global development. He is author of the book Reimagining Black Difference and Politics in Brazil: From Racial Democracy to Multiculturalism (Palgrave Macmillan).

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