"ME? RACIST!?"

Coloniality, racism and branchitude in Brazil

Abstract

The research starts from the observation that Brazil, having been the last nation to officially abolish the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, and also due to the absence of public policies to ensure the insertion of the Afro-descendant population in the economic, political and social process of the country, keeps racism as a structure and daily manifestation in a kind of social collective memory. In the meantime, the study aims to investigate the role of whiteness in the construction and permanence of racism as a social practice. Therefore, it seeks to review the literature on the coloniality of power and being, and problematizes the strategies of whitening and whiteness, analyzing them as devices that perpetuate privileges, imposing themselves as an aesthetic, economic and social paradigm. The research is exploratory and qualitative, outlining in bibliographic research. The object of the study is important, since it dialogues with cultural, social, historical, political and subjective aspects of the formation of the Brazilian people, as a mixed race, whose roots emerge from complex racial relations, consolidated and not harmonized for some time, whose resonances mark the experiences of the new generations.