Education for Ethnic-Racial Relations: An Essay on Subalternized Alterities in the Physical Sciences

Abstract

One of the great challenges of anti-racist education in Brazil is to design and implement it in areas that are outside of the ethnic-racial discussion. This essay offers critical reflections on how education for ethnic-racial relations can help to problematize the notions of development and progress (linked to the modern scientific episteme) in science classrooms through the analysis of cases of political-territorial conflicts that involve traditional communities and State-owned enterprises. We discuss striking cases of ethnic-racial conflicts in Brazil and the United States relating to the installation of observatories, a hydroelectric power plant, and a rocket launching base, interpreted as elements of development in the context of the Modern and Contemporary Science Project, but which, alternatively, revive the tensions between Tradition and Scientific Reason. We argue from a historical, philosophical, and epistemological point of view, seeking to substantiate and encourage the discussion and implementation of Laws 10.639, 11.645 and the National Curriculum Guidelines for Quilombola School Education in basic and higher education science.