Structural racism, memory, and emancipation: Adult Education as a space for transformation and resistance

Abstract

This article analyzes ethnic-racial relations in the context of Youth and Adult Education, understood as a space historically marked by processes of social, economic, and racial exclusion that have shaped Brazilian society since the colonial period. The research, conducted with a class at the Municipal School for Youth and Adult Education, located in a shelter in Vitória, Espírito Santo, aimed to understand how students in vulnerability construct their identities, memories, and historical consciousness through pedagogical practices grounded in ethnic-racial relations. The sources, produced through field observations, socioeconomic questionnaires, and students’ autobiographical narratives, were examined from the perspective of Bloch (2001) and Ginzburg (2007), for whom every trace reveals something about men and women across different temporalities. The results show that the participants’ experiences are shaped by structural racism, expressed both in experiences of prejudice and in difficulties of social and educational inclusion. The narratives reveal tensions, contradictions, and processes of racial awareness mediated by the teaching of History and by self-writing. The article concludes in this type of education, when guided by critical and anti-racist educational practices, can become a space of resistance, (re)existence, and identity affirmation, contributing to the democratization of the right to education and to confronting historical racial inequalities.