Racismo na educação: estratégia do Estado & uma possibilidade de superação

Abstract

The present dissertation comes from my indignation about the permanency of racism in Brazilian society, particularly in the educational segment. The main purpose of this research is to denounce it, and hopefully contribute to its defeat. This work is divided into two parts. The first one brings up a historical study of the thinking developed by the Brazilian elite scholars during the last decades of the 19th century, according to the development of the imperialist period of the Capitalist System, which needed an ideology that could classify poor people and their culture as secondrate. In order to justify this domination, they use physical aspects as the colour of the skin and the type of the hair, by saying that those who resemble Europeans and Americans capitalists are culturally superior, civilized, and more intelligent, so naturally nominated to rule the world. Such an ideology is called racism. In Brazil racism still is the executioner of part of the population that came from the Diaspora imposed to Africa. Lots of Africans have been dragged into Brazil as slaves. They made up the wealth for the white people, for instance working as sugar-cane cutters, on coffee plantations or excavating for gold and diamond in mines, usually in extremely inhuman conditions. Even before the legal end of slavery, they had already been banished from the world of work by the immigration policy. From a cultural point of view, racism is a Eurocentric concept. To impose such a concept the national elite massacred - even literally- the cultural agent with an African background. The school system has been had an outstanding role within the whitening of our culture, for it is a powerful ideological tool. Such a politics began with Comte s positivist racism as well as Spencer s liberal thinking. It got to its top level with the Constitution of 1934. By this period Francis Galton elaborated the eugenism concept (the name used to be given to scientific racism), along with lots of Brazilian intellectuals and scholars. During the period named Estado Novo and during the military dictatorship, the official racism began to be called cordial racism. In fact it is even more perverse because its first characteristic is to refute its own existence. That is why it makes difficult to find ways to overcome it. The second part f this dissertation is a search for the cure of this social cancer, namely racism. In the year of 2003, the Black Movement had a legal victory: the Law 10.639. It changes the Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional (the guiding rules of Brazilian Education), including in the official curriculum of the schools the obligatory teaching of History and Afro-Brazilian Culture , later enlarged in order to attend to the indigenous communities. In the year of 2009, it will have been already 6 years from the approval of the aforementioned law. Despite that, it seems that it practically has not changed yet the curriculum inside the classrooms. The Municipal School Comandante Garcia D Ávila, located at Morro da Casa Verde, in the city of São Paulo, is a school where the issue of the overcoming of racism can be seen. The newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, among others, published an article talking about the pedagogical activities performed at this school, as well as at the samba schools Unidos do Peruche and Morro da Casa Verde. Following the suggestion of philosopher Mario Sergio Cortella, we performed a case study at the referred school , by means of interviews with the students, teachers and the crew of the samba schools, the latter being the owners of the afro descendent cultural properties. According to Paulo Freire, there is knowledge that must be present when one teaches. Throughout these principles, which ordinate the philosophical base and pedagogical antiracist curriculum, we tried to identify how much the community of the school EMEF Comandante Garcia D Ávila has already acquired against the hegemony of the racist thinking, which still prevails in our Education, but not forever, i.e., The world isn t. The world is still being (Freire, Paulo. 2008, p. 76)