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.