EDUCATIONAL POLICY AND WHITENESS – THE PRESENCE-ABSENCE OF BLACKS AND ANTI-RACIST EDUCATION IN EDUCATIONAL REFORMS

Abstract

Although the official discourse on racial equity has gained ground in recent decades, Brazilian educational policy still persistently reveals a structural pattern of invisibility of the black population. In this context, this article investigates how whiteness operates silently in educational reforms, naturalizing the absence of blacks as an epistemic subject and depoliticizing the proposal of an anti-racist education. Although legislation such as Law 10.639/2003 represents important milestones, it is notable that its implementation, in many cases, is diluted between the lines of curricula, official documents and training policies, which continue to be centered on a Eurocentric and monocultural logic. In view of this, we propose as an object of study the critical analysis of recent educational reforms in Brazil, with emphasis on the ways in which these policies reinforce or silence the centrality of confronting structural racism in schools. We start from the assumption that whiteness is not presented only as the absence of the other, but as the active presence of a project that excludes, normalizes and legitimizes certain forms of knowledge, existence and belonging. From this reflection, the starting question that guides the research is: how has whiteness shaped Brazilian educational reforms, affecting the presence of the black population and the advancement of anti-racist education in the country? Theoretically, we made use of the works of Almeida (2019), Bento (2022), Billings (2009), Brookfield (2019), Casey (2020), Dabiri (2021), DiAngelo (2018), Dijk (2020), Fanon (2008), hooks (2013; 2019), Husband (2016), Ignatiev (1995), Kendi (2019), Ladson (2009), McManimon (2020), Rankine (2022), Ribeiro (2019), Saviani (2018; 2021), Schwarcz (1993; 2019; 2022; 2024), Stephen (2019), Van Dijk (2020), among others. The research is qualitative from Minayo (2007), descriptive and bibliographic according to Gil (2008) and with the comprehensive analytical bias of Weber (1949). The research revealed that, although diversity and inclusion discourses are increasingly present in educational legal frameworks, whiteness continues to operate as a silent normative structure that empties the critical power of anti-racist education. Educational reforms maintain a Eurocentric logic, which marginalizes the black presence and prevents the rupture with exclusionary patterns. It was found that diversity is often treated as appeasing rhetoric, while confronting structural racism is avoided or diluted. In addition, the "absence" of whiteness as an analytical category was observed in the documents, which contributes to the maintenance of its invisible epistemic power.