5 books to understand structural racism in Brazil

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How many books questioning structural racism — whether theoretical or fiction — have you read in recent years? And which ones did you bring to your teaching practice? As part of Black November at Singularidades, we made a selection of five contemporary works that reflect on this shameful mark on Brazilian society, which fortunately has been the target of debates and struggles. Check out our list and bring these works to your classroom exchanges. For an Afro-Latin American feminism, Lelia González Philosopher, anthropologist, teacher, writer, activist in the black movement and pioneering feminist, Lélia González was one of the most important Brazilian intellectuals of the 20th century.

She played a decisive role in the fight against structural racism and in articulating relations between gender and race in our society. In this work, thewhatsapp number list anthropologist, sociologist, historian, philosopher and black movement activist talks about structural racism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism, the job market, forms of cultural resistance, among other urgent topics.



A fundamental book for understanding feminism in Latin America – or “Améfrica Ladina”, an expression created by Lélia to define the region, uniting the region's African and Iberian roots. Structural Racism, Silvio Almeida The concept of institutional racism first appeared in the book Black Power written in the 70s by authors Kwame Turu and Charles Hamilton. In this work, the authors point to racism as much more than the action of individuals with personal motivations, but something that is embedded in institutions and culture, generating a priori deficient conditions for a large part of the population.

It is based on this concept that lawyer and author Silvio Almeida presents statistical data and discusses how racism is in the social, political and economic structure of Brazilian society, in this book that is already a classic of new times in Brazil. A color defect, Ana Maria Gonçalves This historical novel tells the story of Kehinde, an elderly African woman, blind and on the verge of death, who travels from Africa to Brazil in search of her son who has been lost for decades. Kehinde's trajectory is told from her childhood, when she was kidnapped and taken as a slave to Brazil, until her return to her homeland, after being freed. The plot is the fictional recreation of the story of Luísa Mahin, mother of the poet Luís Gama, who participated in the Malês Revolt, in Bahia. It is a story of resistance, which reconstructs several aspects of Afro-Brazilian history in a very strong way.

The Genocide of the Brazilian Black: process of masked racism, by Abdias do Nasciment Abdias Nascimento, one of the greatest references in defending the rights of black people in Brazil even after his death, combines personal testimonies, reflections and criticism, deconstructing the myth of “racial democracy” and opposing the official version regarding the black condition in Brazil . During the military dictatorship, Abdias was exiled, and returned to the country after the amnesty.