Jessé Souza and Multidimensional Racism

the Absence of the Modern Educational Ideal and the Genesis of Brazilian “Sub-citizenship”

Abstract

The objective of this article is to investigate in the works of the Brazilian sociologist Jessé Souza, especially in his books “A ralé brasileira”, 2020, and “Como o racismo criou o Brasil”, published in 2021, the relationship between the absence or incompleteness of a modern educational project - forged in the context of liberal civilization of Western modernity - in the processes of construction of Brazilian society and the generation of a practically static social structure, marked by inequality and exclusion of the majority of the population, to which a status is attributed symbolic of indignity, demerit and social discredit, elements that are part of a kind of “subcitizenship” associated with what the author called the “ralé brasileira”, formed, above all, by blacks, browns, indigenous people and the poor. This rabble sub-citizenship contrasts with the self-image of the “elite do atraso,” the privileged white minority, who consider themselves morally superior to others because they are supposedly inheritors of the highest immaterial attributes of Western citizenship and civilization, including, the ability to self-control, discipline and prospecting. At the center of this division, a racist device that presents itself in a multidimensional way: as global and symbolic racism; as class racism; and as racial racism, which commands the process of social exclusion in Brazil (Souza, 2021). To better understand Souza’s relational hypothesis, we will examine how the historical development of education in Brazil, equally marked by exclusion and inequality, supports the maintenance and reproduction of this social scenario.