Tornar-se negro: trajetórias de vida de professores universitários no Ceará

Abstract

The research deals with the stories of life of black professors of the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) and their identity constructions in the experiences of becoming black. We tried to find out and analyze their since the childhood to the moment they started working, in the continuous process of identification and negotiation which are part of the human formation.The focus of the investigation were the experiences of the professors in their multiple everyday relation with prejudice, discrimination and the stereotypes and its ways of confrontation, in a society that denies and silences racism. With this in mind, the research tried to understand the acknowledgment of being black in a country where the myth of racial democracy and the whitening policy are still in the social imaginary and where the institutional racism is a reality that hits many people in a symbolic and subtle manner. Furthermore, we aim is to know the perceptions of professors in relation to their affirmative actions and quota, a policy that has to do directly to the black people and that makes one reflect all the senses of being aware or not of the racial belonging. The analysis of the proposed object was built from life stories through ten semi-structured interviews with professors from different periods and of three big areas of teaching: humanities, health and the Engineerings. The theory supporting to develop the research methodology was inspired by biographic method, mostly in the studies of Ferraroti, Josso, Jovchelovitch & Bauer. The research is based mainly in Hall’s, Woodvard’s, Santos’, Elias’, Costa’s and Goofman’s studies to track the identity constructions, the subjectivity of becoming black in the identification processes and, further, the formation of identity in the family context, at school and in society as a whole. To complement the support from the theory, Da Matta’s, Skidmore’s, Nascimento’s, Guimarães’ and Hansenbalg studies have a highlighted position in the analysis of the racial democracy and in the whitening policy. All the authors agree with one of the main ideas from the thesis that the invisibility and absence of black people in the positions usually taken by white people are a perverse social-historical construction and the deconstruction of this idea lays on the conscience of one’s own black state, history and racial belonging, therefore, the construction of an identity. In the life stories from the professors, it was observed that the experiences about prejudice and discrimination lived in the familiar context are faced as jokes and are not a topic. About the experiences lived at school, the ones in which silence and denying of the prejudice are involved are still evident. The university as a locus of objetivation and appropriation of universal knowledge gave the black professors the social mobility and self-esteem elevation. For a few, the knowledge put them closer to the conscience of the racial inequalities, to others this seamed to keep it even more asleep. The results of the research and the objective reality show that becoming black tracks the process of becoming a social and historically mediated subject. Thus, as one suffers the multiple determinations arisen from the social relations of domination, the recognization of a black identity happens from the alternation of situations of exploitation guided by prejudice and discrimination and involved by the class conditions.