A TRAVESSIA (AUTO)ETNOGRÁFICA DE PROFESSORAS NEGRAS E UMA PROFESSORA BRANCA DE LÍNGUA INGLESA PELOS MARES DA MODERNIDADE/(DE)COLONIALIDADE

Abstract

Considering that racism is structuring the world-system, it becomes urgent that teachers of all races problematize modernity/coloniality. As a white teacher in an English degree program, I recognized that I had not complied with Law No. 10.639/03 and that my inertia regarding ethnic–racial relations perpetuated racism in my teaching practice. That recognition motivated this doctoral research, situated in Applied Linguistics (AL), whose objective was to understand how the experiences of black English teachers within modernity/coloniality affect my perspective and praxis as a white teacher. I sought to (1) reflect on how Black teachers’ understandings of ethnic–racial relations influence their teaching and how this displaces my praxis; (2) discuss if and how coloniality crosses black teachers’ experiences and how that echoes in me; (3) uncover whether teachers have strategies of resistance, what they are, how they are activated, their effects, and how they impact me as a white teacher; and (4) understand similarities and differences between our experiences and their consequences for our personal, academic, and professional trajectories. The theoretical references articulated decolonial and anticolonial perspectives (Baptista, 2019, 2021; Fanon, 2008; Grosfoguel, 2020; Kilomba, 2019; Maldonado-Torres, 2016a; Mignolo, 2018), afrodiasporic approaches (Gonzalez, 2020; Nascimento, 2019; Ribeiro, 2019), whiteness studies (Bento, 2022; DiAngelo, 2018; Frankenberg, 1993; Ramos, 1957; Schucman, 2020), Critical Applied Linguistics (Pennycook, 2021; Pennycook; Makoni, 2020), and critical (racial) literacy (Ferreira, 2019; Menezes de Souza, 2011). The study, which involved five English teachers (four black and one white, this researcher), is qualitative/interpretivist, narrative and (auto)ethnographic in type (Bruner, 1986, 1990; Erickson, 2018; Adams; Jones; Ellis, 2022). Data collection employed a form, interviews, autobiographical narratives, a questionnaire, and a field diary. Results revealed a systematic coloniality that permeates the personal, academic, and professional lives of black teachers, ranging from explicit retaliation to subtle mechanisms of silencing and devaluation. Although the black person is constituted as alterity, it is we, white people, who must examine our psyche, marked by a fallacious internalized superiority that we seldom admit. Some resistance strategies to the coloniality of being include valuing the body, marking the locus of enunciation, questioning, problematization, denunciation, and demands for retraction. Their effects on teachers’ personal lives could be broader if we white people engaged collectively in the face of racial and cognitive injustices. In teaching, through critical multiliteracy practices that emphasized the body and the arts, results were visible among the teachers’ students: they began with aesthetics and extended to knowledge construction. As a white teacher, I recognized my privileges and an inwardness that, in the past, prevented me from encountering other epistemologies. I have then sought to prioritize pluriversality and ethnic–racial issues across different disciplines, mark my locus of enunciation, and learn alongside my students. The process of becoming aware of whiteness and/or racism proved complex, since I had to confront my nonideal self. As Kilomba (2019) states, it is more a psychical process than a moral one. All in all, it can be liberating, and antiracist language education benefits from it.