This proposal addresses the struggle to build racial equity in Brazilian education by examining two decades of policy enactment that shape anti-racist mandates in schools. Brazil is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world, yet also among the most unequal. More than 55% of the population identifies as Black or Brown, but racial disparities remain evident in income, employment, access to higher education, and exposure to violence. Indigenous and African histories and cultures have been historically underrepresented in the curriculum, shaped by Eurocentric traditions that marginalise these knowledges. Additionally, the myth of “racial democracy”, built during the twentieth century (Silva, 2018), has long obscured the persistence of racism in everyday life and in schools.

It was in the 1980s that Black social movements strengthened their influence to criticise inequalities and racism affecting Afro-Brazilian people (Domingues, 2007). Fortunately, domination and violence never avoided resistance from Black and Indigenous people, and this resistance was responsible for advancing educational policies to change curriculum (Gomes, 2017). The Federal Laws nº. 10.639/2003 y nº. 11.645/2008 defined Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous culture and history as mandatory in the curriculum of all schools and universities, introducing the field of Education on Ethnic-Racial Relations (ERER) (Gomes, 2011). Despite the advanced federal policy architecture, scholars recognise many challenges. Two decades after the landmark legal mandates, ERER remains frequently treated as episodic, delegated to specific subjects, or dependent on a small number of highly committed teachers.

Furthermore, recent data on educational inequalities have shown that racism directly affects learning outcomes (Nascimento, 2019; Botelho, Madeira, Rangel, 2015; Barbosa et al., 2024). Despite the educational universalisation of the last decades, which was a relevant achievement, Black students tend to perform less well in secondary school. Participatory research with teachers and leaders is relevant to discuss the school’s reality and develop strategies that can be shared and analysed, considering the intersectionality perspective (Collins & Bilge, 2021) and specialist literature.

Empirically, the paper draws on a study (Cirilo & Weschenfelder, 2025) conducted with 35 teachers from ten cities in the Metropolitan Region of Rio Grande do Sul (Southern Brazil), which aimed to develop innovative pedagogical practices about ethnic-racial diversity, fostering racial equity in education (Weschenfelder, 2023). A teaching laboratory was created with this group, composed of teachers and managers, mostly experienced in ERER and deeply committed to racial equity. Among these participants, eleven specialist teachers were subsequently interviewed to examine how they interpret, negotiate, and sustain ERER enactment in everyday school life.

This paper asks: How do specialist teachers in Brazil interpret, negotiate, and sustain ERER across two decades of policy enactment, and what do they identify as necessary for racial equity to become embedded in school systems rather than delegated to individuals or isolated initiatives? To address the main question, the study is grounded in the equity framework composed of three foundational principles: justice, recognition, and belonging (Howard, 2024).

The analysis also draws on policy enactment scholarship (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012), conceptualising policy as interpreted, translated, and recontextualised within schools under micropolitical dynamics, rather than implemented linearly. ERER is further situated as a critical perspective to discuss racial relations and pedagogical practices in schools, in dialogue with interculturality studies (Walsh, 2012; Candau, 2012), and teacher education (Nóvoa, 2019; Imbernón, 2024) in a democratic society (Laval & Vergne, 2023).

The proposal expects to contribute to the international studies on social justice and intercultural education (Akkari & Radhouane, 2022), at the same time as it seeks to add new theoretical perspectives to continue to improve research about racial equity in Brazilian education.

The research was qualitative, with an applied orientation and a formative purpose, producing data intended to directly impact the field under study. It adopted radical critique (Veiga-Neto, 2020) as a premise of the investigation, seeking to practise the continuous problematisation of prevailing discourses and of the very “truths” that constitute us as teacher-subjects and researchers. In working with K–12 teachers, the study drew on “a conception of research as a methodology in which the research activity itself functions as the participants’ formation within the investigative process. It is a type of research that, in all its stages, aims to be formative, participatory, and collaborative” (Fabris & Lima, 2022, p. 152). In 2022, the teaching laboratory operated as a 40-hour university extension course bringing together 35 teachers from ten cities, indicated by partner school systems. The programme comprised nine online meetings and one in-person session at the university and was structured as a pedagogical laboratory called LABDOC Racial Equity. In this setting, teachers were positioned as knowledge producers rather than passive recipients of training, and the research team adopted a co-formative approach centred on dialogue, collective authorship, and critical reflection. The empirical corpus analysed in this paper consists of eleven semi-structured interviews with specialist teachers who participated in the LABDOC research context and who demonstrate sustained engagement with ERER policy and scholarship. One participant from each city who was teaching in secondary education was invited to the interviews, plus one teacher working in the state education system. Ethical procedures included informed consent, confidentiality measures, and reflexive attention to positionality and power differentials in knowledge production. Interviews focused on teachers’ enactment trajectories, perceived barriers and enabling conditions, and the micropolitical and affective dimensions of sustaining anti-racist pedagogies. Interviews were analysed through a Foucauldian conception of discourse (Foucault, 2009), using thematic and discursive analysis, as well as references from the field of Education on Ethnic-Racial Relations (ERER) and culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2021). Three sub-questions guide the analysis: 1) What curricular, institutional, and professional barriers do specialist teachers identify as they attempt to enact ERER? 2) What forms of governance, leadership support, and professional learning infrastructure do specialist teachers consider necessary for sustained enactment? 3) How do teachers describe the equity-related outcomes of ERER enactment, particularly regarding justice, recognition, and belonging, and how do these outcomes shape their pedagogical and institutional decisions?

This paper is expected to show that, even after two decades of ERER-related mandates in Brazil, racial equity still struggles to become a systemic driver of educational quality. In specialist teachers’ accounts, ERER does not appear as a linear implementation process. It appears as a “very big challenge,” a struggle to fight “a perverse system,” because “there is no way not to talk about racism” and, at the same time, there are “many racist ways” operating inside curricula and school. Teachers identify curricular and professional barriers that are not only about content, but about legitimacy and authority. Enactment is narrated as a process of self-positioning and reconstitution: teachers describe how they keep “doing a critical analysis” of materials and lessons. Institutionally, they point to a persistent pattern of delegation: “it falls on the Black teacher,” and it also “falls on the History teacher,” as if “nobody else needs to work on it.” This disciplinary and racialised allocation of responsibility isolates specialist teachers and becomes individualised labour, which reflects the dispositif of raciality (Carneiro, 2023). The current micropolitical moment intensifies these challenges. Teachers speak about a climate marked by right-wing backlash, where “any moment” someone can accuse a teacher, and where students “come at you.” Against superficial approaches, specialist teachers are explicit about what does not work: “it’s all very superficial”; “it’s no use sending those beautiful links for teachers to click.” They argue that the school system needs to “stop the school” to do the work properly. Finally, the findings reinforce the need for further research that explicitly connects racial equity to the role of leadership. Specialist teachers’ accounts suggest that ERER is most sustainable when responsibility is shared and institutionally protected, so that teachers do not feel alone in the struggle.

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