Anti-racist education takes a radical agenda to the classroom

More and more states and city halls have implemented “anti-racist education” in their education networks. The advancement of this type of curriculum is problematic: although it is reasonable that the fight against prejudice is part of the school content, the way in which the theme is presented follows the radical left’s primer.

The starting point of the “anti-racist” approach is the belief in the existence of “structural” (or “institutional”) racism. Instead of the conventional approach, which seeks to promote equality and combat prejudice, the “anti-racist” agenda aims to demonstrate that Brazilian society is racist by nature. Even if there were no longer racist individuals, it would be necessary to fight the “structure” that discriminates against blacks and Indians.

In addition to bringing to the classroom terms imported directly from the academic left, the promotion of this type of content has a worrying side effect: in a country with poor performance in fundamental subjects, such as Portuguese and mathematics, the politicization of the classroom can harm the learning of basic disciplines in favor of a strongly ideological content.

No “Indian Day” in schools

The government of Espírito Santo claims to be a “pioneer” in the adoption of an educational program focused on “ethnic-racial relations”. The State Executive usually promotes workshops to encourage teachers to adopt this type of content in the classroom.

In addition, last year the government launched a kind of booklet on the subject for public school teachers. In it, even the celebration of Indian Day is the target of radical militants at the service of the state government.

In the capixaba publication, the villain is “structural racism”, described as “the set of institutional practices and social, economic and political relations that favor one ethnic group over another.”

In an accusatory tone, the material brings a list of white artists who used “blackface” (they painted their faces to play a black character). These artists, according to the booklet, practiced “recreational racism.”

The document goes so far as to state that the idea that Brazil is a racial democracy, by itself, is already prejudiced. “The argument that we live in a racial democracy contributes to the perpetuation of racism,” says the publication, entitled “Education of Ethnic-Racial Relations and Indigenous and Quilombola Modalities.”

Celebrate Indian Day by dressing up as an Indian? No way: “This reaffirms stereotypes present in our society”, says the guide. By the way, the very term “Indian” needs to be crossed out of the dictionary, according to the organizers of the material. “The characterization ‘Indian’ (…) belittles all the cultural, ethnic and linguistic multiplicity that characterizes both the past and the present of the original peoples of this continent”, says the text.

Criticism of “whites, westerners and Christians”

In Ceará, which also prides itself on having an “anti-racist” approach to education, one of the documents designed to guide teachers reads more like a political propaganda pamphlet.

“In this whitening process, the school institution reflected, in its pedagogical and administrative organizational structure, this reality, propagating discriminatory and racist practices in the social space, the curriculum being the most affected factor, which resulted in the imposition of white, western and Christians, in which the dominant knowledge ignored and placed black and indigenous history and their trajectories of struggle for citizenship in invisibility and negation”, says an excerpt from the publication, in semi-intelligible Portuguese.

The material was released by the government of Ceará in 2022 with the title “Education for Ethnic-Racial Relations and Black Consciousness Week”. As in Espírito Santo, one of the main targets of the publication is the “myth of racial democracy”.

Meanwhile, in Bahia, the state government has just launched a public notice that will reward teachers and educational managers for developing a project to “appreciate African, Afro-Brazilian and indigenous culture”. The idea is to select 108 projects and 54 products (such as books).

According to the government of Bahia, the objective is “to implement educational actions that enhance the construction of new concepts and new pedagogical models capable of generating anti-racist practices, in favor of valuing these peoples and strengthening identity in school communities”. Each chosen project will receive up to R$ 50 thousand; for the products, the value is R$ 10 thousand. The total value of the program is close to R$ 6 million.

The announcement informs that, among the selection criteria, are the “Promotion of Anti-racist Education and Education of Ethnic-Racial Relations” and the “Implementation of decolonial pedagogies”. The term “decolonial”, borrowed from the vocabulary of the US left, refers to a worldview different from that of the “colonizer”. In the case of Brazil, it is an attempt to get rid of the Portuguese heritage in education.

The judging committee for the award will be made up of ten representatives from the Center for Studies in Gender, Race/Ethnicity and Sexuality at the (UNEB) University of the State of Bahia and another ten from the Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality and Traditional Peoples and Communities.

Municipalities embark

The federal government has also promoted so-called anti-racist education. In June, the Palmares Foundation, in partnership with the Roberto Marinho Foundation, announced a project that includes “the production of new pedagogical kits, considering the inclusion of contemporary debates and challenges in education for ethnic-racial relations”.

This agenda also reached the municipalities. The Municipality of Contagem has partnered with UFOP (Federal University of Ouro Preto) to create a kind of anti-racist school guide. The project resulted in a publication full of commonplaces of radical left militancy.

“The openness that the project participants had to black feminist epistemologies enabled the construction of these interventional actions that could problematize what seemed naturalized and made invisible by the discourse of mestizaje and racial democracy”, writes, in the presentation of the material, the professor from the University of Brasília Wanderson Flor do Nascimento.

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Laws opened doors for “anti-racist” content

The advance of “anti-racist” courses is linked to two laws that opened the door to the inclusion of this type of content in the school curriculum. Law 10.639/2003 includes in the official curriculum “the study of the History of Africa and Africans, the struggle of blacks in Brazil, Brazilian black culture and the black in the formation of national society.” The text, however, is short and does not provide details of how the teaching will take place.

Five years later, Law 11.645/2008 made teaching Afro-Brazilian and indigenous history and culture mandatory. Also not very detailed, the text says that “the contents referring to the history and culture of Afro-Brazilians and Brazilian indigenous peoples will be taught within the scope of the entire school curriculum, especially in the areas of artistic education and Brazilian literature and history”.

The two laws are cited in most “anti-racist” materials produced by the education departments. Both were sanctioned by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in his first passage as President of the Republic.

Excesses harm learning

For João Batista de Oliveira, doctor in Education and founder of Instituto Alfa e Beto, the problem with “anti-racist” programs lies in the approach and form. “The theme of racism – without adjectives such as institutional, structural or any other – should be a natural part of the study of science, geography and history”, he says, which continues: “The idea of ​​institutional or structural racism is a theory that, no matter how correct or adequate it was, it introduces an unnecessary bias that can be detrimental to the proper treatment of such a complex topic.”

In Oliveira’s opinion, the theme of racism does not necessarily need to be part of a specific curriculum. In addition, the adoption of this agenda can enhance ideological patrol within the classroom. Whether the idea of ​​“racial democracy” is itself racist is beyond debate.

“This is yet another initiative potentially doomed to create more problems than help to solve them”, says Oliveira.