WHITE PROFESSORS ENGAGED IN ANTI-RACISM: RACIALIZATION, PRAXIOLOGIES, AND CHALLENGES FOR CRITICAL LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION

Abstract

In this article, as white English teachers at a federal public university in Brazil, we problematize how we have constructed our processes of racialization in our life histories, and how these processes relate to the praxiologies1 and curricula we experience. Allied with authors such as bell hooks (1994), Cida Bento (2022), Djamila Ribeiro (2019), Jacira Monteiro (2023), Gabriel Nascimento (2019), Esau MacCaulley (2021), among others, in this duo(auto)ethnography (Sawyer & Norris, 2016) we discuss the tensions we feel in our attempts to (re)position ourselves in relation to racial inequalities and how we are implicated in them by our own privileges. We expose ourselves at the risk of criticism as we attempt to generate new possibilities and search for new ways of building antiracist praxis in the areas of critical language education and language teacher education. We attempt to break the comfortable silences that, many times, white people tend to maintain regarding racism in Brazil and show how contextual and contingent antiracist pedagogies are.