Religious Racism in Brazilian Public Schools

• In Event: Culture, Identity, and Discrimination

Proposal

This paper analyzes two case studies of discrimination involving the religion of students and school officials in Brazilian public schools. Drawing on an intersectional approach, it assumes that the conflicts between devotees of Pentecostal and Afro-Brazilian religions, particularly in schools, are part of a broader structural process of subalternization of the latter in contemporary Brazilian society. We will see how racism manifests itself in the religious and educational fields from the victimization of a portion of students and teachers who challenge whiteness in teaching and learning practices.
The data on the cases that we analyze come from multi-sited research on the growth of religious discrimination in Brazil, especially in the last two decades. From 2009 to 2013, the fieldwork was carried out in different places to follow up on allegations of religious discrimination: at the headquarters and events promoted by a civil society organization, in police stations and courts. Later, we chose a public school to do fieldwork, as we began to have access to cases of conflicts arising in classrooms involving the religion of teachers or students.
To qualify these cases of discrimination in urban public schools, we adopt the idea of religious racism, which is conceived as manifestations of disregard for the right to free worship and belief in religions of African origin, as well as the right to preserve Afro-Brazilian culture. Religious racism refers to discrimination suffered due to the intersection between ethnic-racial and religion identities of historically marginalized populations in Brazil.
Race and religion are two intersectional variables that can significantly impact individual's life experiences and perspectives in Brazilian public schools. As a framework that recognizes that individuals hold multiple identities that intersect and interact with each other, intersectionality has been more studied from axes of social subordination based on gender, race, and social class (Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Collins and Chepp 2013; Carastathis 2016). Among anthropological studies on education, many have already demonstrated how the school experience of children and young people is strongly marked by the intersection between their identity belongings, such as race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, and class (Dei et al. 1997; Deyhle 2009; Eckert 1989; Fordham 1993; Keddie 2010; Villenas et al. 2006). Few studies, however, have taken religion as a defining axis of intersectional violence and subordination within the school.
This paper deals with explicit and direct discrimination cases involving the religious identity of actors in urban public schools in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The first case concerns a student who suffered religious discrimination in the classroom by his teacher after going to school wearing an adornment typical of Afro-Brazilian religious traditions, which is legally permitted. The second case occurred with a Portuguese language teacher from a public school who, after starting to introduce the content on Afro-Brazilian and African culture in her classes, following the current educational policy, was removed from the school due to a series of conflicts with the school administrators, parents, and students.
The religious racism observed nowadays in urban schools results from the conjunction between two more structural phenomena that permeate Brazilian society and its institutions, especially in the last two decades. On the one hand, the uncovering of marginalized selves linked to Black identities, as the expression of belonging to Afro-Brazilian religions, stimulated by multicultural policies. On the other hand, the practices of silencing marginalized identities carried out by more conservative groups of the so-called ‘right‐wing populism’ (Alves et al. 2021), with a significantly increased sphere of influence in Brazilian public life.
The focus on situations of discrimination involving more aggressive and violent practices is not related to a pessimistic view of racial and religious relations in Brazil. Instead, it is related to the assumption that such phenomena allow us to unveil the relationships between interrelated power systems and new possibilities for political resistance on subordinate groups (Collins 2017). And, as Rosa (2019) put in a similar way, it also shows how public schools and their communities can become key sites to imagine alternatives futures in contesting racial and ethnic disparities.

Author

• Boris Maia, Federal Fluminense University