"A gente" como agente: vivências de mulheres negras nos cursos imperiais da UFBA

Abstract

Historically, racism is one of the challenges faced by black populations in their process of social ascension. Thus, this population develops strategies to overcome this challenge and reach the possibility of becoming members of places which were traditionally mostly frequented by white people. These strategies range from abolitionist movements to ordinary everyday practices. In Brazil, black movements conquered the institution of affirmative action policies in several areas at the beginning of the 21st century, and since then it is a state obligation to guarantee actions to promote equal opportunities among racial groups, such as expanding access to professional courses, public service, and public universities. Brazilian public universities are the area of interest of this study, and current research in area indicates that the majority of its students are black women whose monthly income of up to 1.5 minimum wage; this data demonstrates that the institution of affirmative action policies for the democratization of Brazilian higher education resulted in a change in the university profile in general. However, research in specific undergraduate courses, as in prestigious one’s such as Medicine, shows that there is a large quantitative difference between its student profile in terms of color and class: black students remain the minority, and upper-class students remain the majority. In Brazil, Medicine, as well as Law and Engineering are prestigious undergraduate courses called “imperial undergraduate courses” because they were founded in the Imperial era of Brazil, and the traditional student profile of these courses were upper-class white people. This means that even with the institution of affirmative action policies, this tradition of exclusivity and exclusion remain at the imperial undergraduate courses. This problem raises questions at a micro-sociological level – in other words, raises questions about the repercussions of this problem on everyday interactions between the different racial groups at the university. Therefore, this study focused on the experience of black women of middle and lower social classes in these imperial courses. The perspective of this study is ethnomethodological, articulated with theoretical postulations of black intellectuals, and aimed to understand processes experienced by black women in becoming members of these specific undergraduate courses: Law, Electrical Engineering and Medicine at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). This study has a qualitative approach, and analyzed how these students perceive and how they describe their everyday experiences living at elitist university contexts where the majority of students are white. So, this study aims to contribute to understandings about the experiences of black people in social places where they are a quantitative minority, and to contribute to understandings about how the process of democratization of Brazilian higher education has been happening at micro-sociological levels for this new student profile.