UFSC Explains BLACK AWARENESS It is a very important day. There is a whole historical background that this day brings. MARISTELA CAMPOS ENGLISH TEACHER AT THE LABORATORY SCHOOL/UFSC RESEARCHES “POETICS OF RESISTANCE” It makes us reflect on all the fighting and resistance of the Africans that were enslaved in the country.
Besides all this, it aims to fill a gap especially in the educational field of showing the true history of these peoples living in this nation today. It is a huge mistake to study Africans in Brazil from slavery. People forget that Africans had a history prior to that, that the history of black or African people does not begin with slavery.
The diaspora was a historical milestone. Crossing the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas was a historical milestone that completely changed the Western world and all the history of this population. However, Black Awareness Day also seeks to show that beyond having been enslaved in the Americas they had a history prior to that and this is a requirement by law.
Law no. 10,639 of 2003 demands that African history and culture be taught in schools. Thus, it is necessary that this day be strongly marked by this perspective.
Black Awareness Day VALDEMAR DE ASSIS LIMA PROFESSOR IN THE MUSEOLOGY PROGRAM - UFSC RESEARCHES CRITICAL INTERCULTURALITY AND DECOLONIAL PEDAGOGY is a day for people to reflect on the importance of us working on racial justice in this country We talk a lot about equality, right? I believe that equality is a consequence of justice. So, we can use this day to reflect on the spaces of exclusion that black men and women experience in society and seek ways to mitigate, at least, this exclusion by creating fairer spaces for these people to be truly inserted in society.
Black Awareness Day is ALEXANDRA ALENCAR POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER IN THE INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAM IN HUMAN SCIENCES - UFSC "BLACK WOMAN ON THE MOVE" in my view, a day for us to reflect on how we are exercising our black awareness. For us, activists of the Black Movement, Black Awareness Month is a month of exhaustion because we have many activities, right? And I see this as a process which people don't act upon the whole year and they wait “oh, there is a law, law no.
10,639, that says I have to do an activity on black awareness, then I will do it in November”. The action, the fight against racism, has to occur all year long. There are 365 days, and every four years, 366.
We fail, sometimes, when we stop to reflect on this matter only in November or on 20 November, which is the day we celebrate the death of Zumbi. This is a huge mistake we make, because we cannot reduce this date, this moment, to a specific month of the year. It has to be present all year long.
At school, it has to be there throughout the whole curriculum because it permeates all activities of Brazilian society. If remembered only in November, it ends up being celebratory, as a festivity, and it is not a festivity, right? It is also a moment for us to stop and think about the importance of the contribution of Afro-Brazilian culture to our identity.
This African heritage that is in everything, right? It is in our body, in parts of our body, that we use African language to refer to. .
. Clothes, garments, utensils, ways we interact with each other, for everything we use words from Bantu and Yorubá language and we are not aware of it. So I think that Black Awareness Day is a day for everyone to develop black awareness.
Not only black people, of course, but everyone in Brazil that somehow thinks of a fraternal, sympathetic and humane country, which is really committed to life. Since I graduated in Journalism, I, as a black woman and university student, I started to create awareness of the invisibilization process that black people, especially in the South of the country, go through. Then, the place of black people in the South, nowadays, is first to say that they exist to then be able to say anything else.
After that, once they are visible, we can begin to address all the other issues that Brazilian black people go through, such as prejudice, having to deal, many times, with. . .
with the lasting of a white privilege and other things that are related to the idea of being a black Brazilian person. 300 years of slavery cannot be erased in decades, so there is still a situation where black people in Brazil occupy rather subaltern positions, have less access to good education, to a quality education. The quality of life of black populations in Brazil is also really precarious because they are still occupying subaltern places, receiving low incomes or no income at all, making do with informal work.
So there is still a lot of work to be done. Even though today we see black people occupying positions in society that are slightly more important within the social hierarchy, so to speak, there is still a lot to be done. Racism is something that structures our society.
But, sometimes, it is so rooted that we cannot realize why it exists. This way, racism gets naturalized as a rule and we begin to realize that, for instance, “good looking” actually means “not black”. We hear sentences like “Let’s make politics that do not prioritize favoritism”, which means “we will make politics that do not historically recognize what black people suffered for over 350 years”.
And that do not promote, then, historical reparation about that. The position of black people in the current context is a position of fighting. We are still subordinates.
We are still working in subordinate positions. We are still left with the physical work, the work negatively valued, the invisibilization. But, I think that with the advance of black movements in Brazil and the inclusion of discussions about Afro-Brazilian culture and history in school curricula, this certainly has contributed a lot to black men and women to have a broader understanding of their role, of their importance in society, and in the transforming power that political articulation has.
So these policies of racial inclusion came from this movement of black men and women aware, worried, upset and bothered by their subordination, searching for an equal and fair space in society. Prof. Muniz Sodré says something that I find very relevant: while white people are fighting for time, they fight, they seek, they search for time, black people are searching for space.
We are in a different movement, unequal and unfair, of search for a presence. We first need a presence. Then we can understand this presence and which meaning we will give to it.
