Race talk in a public high school in Salvador Bahia: discourses of power and resistance

Racialization and ideology structures are constituted in the everyday talk that reifies and challenges dominant racial discourses among Soteropolitano teachers and illuminates distinctive culturally constructed borders and conventions as conditioned by the specific topography of race in Salvador, Bahia. Teacher's race talk in one diverse public high school both challenges and reifies racial inequity in Northeastern Brazil. Teacher talk in schools exists as both a political and a cultural terrains where racism is strategically silenced by some teachers and contested by others. This race talk reflects dominant discourses of racial democracy and subaltern discourses of racial consciousness that resist structural, historical, and institutional forms of racism. Everyday discourses around race employed in social institutions are one important aspect of the Black Atlantic and should be considered in how we theorize the political and cultural practices of the African Diaspora populations in Brazil.