Teaching Racial Literacy: Challenges and Contributions of Multiculturalism

Abstract

Building on a critical post-colonial multicultural perspective and on whiteness studies that go beyond recognising cultural diversity towards challenging narratives that construct and exclude the other, the present article outlines impacts and challenges of the enactment of a recent Brazilian government educational law to combat racism in education, which makes it compulsory for schools to include black African history and culture in the curriculum. It analyses the underpinnings and the challenges within that policy. The article suggests that contradictory discourses, such as racial blindness, essentialisation of race identities, and the use of miscegenation as ‘evidence’ of racial democracy, are powerful lenses and cultural signifiers that have deeply polarised the way race has been addressed in Brazil. The study is relevant comparatively in that it provides illustrations of an official national anti-racist pedagogic experience taken as a case study, in the context of a highly inter-racial society, suggesting that anti-racist pedagogies are more likely to have positive impacts when they take into account cultural hybridisations and the provisionary nature of identity constructions.