Despite the fact that English courses have already been addressing issues on race and ethnicity as cross curricular themes, I have noticed from my experience as a teacher that teenagers tend to be silent, hesitate or provide very vague answers when exposed to this kind of topic. In order to analyze this silent dynamic during racial discussions, in this study, I draw upon the myth of racial democracy (FREIRE, 1933) as an ideological construction that granted Brazilians' unawareness regarding their black heritage and therefore, their distance from issues of race and ethnicity. Under Fairclough's approach (1992), I analyze the discourse of racial democracy, as a strategy to maintain hegemony. I focus on the lexical choices my students might have made oriented by this sense of racial equilibrium to shelter themselves and avoid talking openly about race, concentrating my investigation on the interpretation of "patterns of silence and rationale strategies" (DIANGELO, 2012) that often work as discursive strategies to help maintain white hegemony.
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