“Educação para uma vida melhor”: Trajetórias sociais de docentes negros

Abstract

The historic engineering of the black workforce exploitation and subjugation in Brazil created a circle of recurrent social inequalities. Such a situation becomes clear when considering the structural limits that still govern the possibilities for social upward mobility of the African-descended population today. This paper aims to reflect on the pathways of black professors in Brazilian public universities in order to understand how education is exploited in these discourses, stretched between the conscious search to overcome that historic condition, the socio-cultural limits of formal and symbolic inequalities, and the self-representation in terms of merit. This analysis is developed by taking into account sociological productions that discuss the relationship among education, race and social mobility based on the analysis of the strategies and pathways used by the subjects to face institutionalized prejudice.