Brazil is generally seen as a false paradise. Every level of its social structure supports a racial paradox that keeps the majority Black population at the lowest levels of the social hierarchy through a wickedly alluring national concept called racial democracy.
This false narrative convinces the rest of the world that Brazil is a tropical heaven with a uniquely race-less lore.
Despite a superficial history of multiracialism, the effects of Brazilian systematic racism are quite tangible and are perpetuated through a variety of social and economic opportunities and outcomes, especially education. Decades of research yield evidence that Afro-Brazilians experience serious disadvantages socially and economically. Blacks are disproportionately represented among the lower social classes in Brazil, have significantly lower earnings, and have higher levels of instability in domestic situations. They also experience less social mobility and higher levels of racial segregation than whites.
Afro-Brazilians have far lower levels of schooling than white Brazilians. Despite Brazil’s significant educational expansion over the last 30 years, the disadvantages in educational opportunities caused by racial inequality still exist. Furthermore, even with the educational progress over the past 20 years, Afro-Brazilians continue to face a pronounced systematic racial disadvantage in a variety of educational outcomes.
This issue is important to me because of my own history. I was the first in my family to obtain a college education. I have witnessed the powerful Malcolm X quote for myself.
“Education is the passport to success.”
And it was no coincidence that the majority of my peers here in Brazil were raised also, like me, by women who cleaned the homes of white families. They represent a generation of Black Brazilians who were able to grind their way through a deeply racist set of systems to achieve higher education.
This year marked the 20th anniversary of Law nº 10,639 in the Brazilian government. Established through the activism of the Brazilian Black Movement, Movimento Negro, the law establishes the mandatory teaching of Afro-Brazilian history and culture in schools. Sanctioned in 2003, during the first term of President Luiz “Lula” Inácio Lula da Silva, the law establishes that studies on the history of Africa and Africans must be included in the syllabus of public and private schools, from primary to secondary education. This curriculum must include knowledge of the struggle of black people in Brazil, black Brazilian culture, and black people in the formation of society.
This law was an attempt to recognize the critical role of black Brazilian people in the social, economic, and political areas throughout the country’s history. In addition to establishing Nov. 20 as “National Black Consciousness Day” in the school calendar, the law requires that Afro-Brazilian education be present throughout the school curriculum, especially in the areas of Artistic Education, Literature and History.
Despite all this time to get it right, the effective implementation of law and federal curriculum standards is outright tragic. A 2022 study showed that 71% of municipal education networks in the country do not practice the requirements of Law 10,639 .
This reminded me so much of the various educational struggles in the United States that depend first on the federal and local educational seats of power to acknowledge the whitewashing of education and thus guarantee reform in the forms of admissions quotas for university education all the way down to Black history in public schools.
I pulled some friends from the educational fields in Brazil and the United States together to compare the struggle for Black education in these twin societies. Below is a clip from a short documentary that will premiere this year and it features, long-time Afro-Brazilian educator, Tarry Cristina Santos Pereira.
Tarry helps us begin our dialogue in the present. After a career in education and political activism, she went back to the community that raised her to deal with the issue of fair public education for the most vulnerable population.
