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The following is part of a series of interviews produced by the Inter-American Dialogue’s Education Program that features Brazil’s Black population’s educational trajectory, challenges, and future opportunities.

In Brazil, efforts to build a legitimate and lasting democratic project must respond to the historical challenges and realities of a majority Afro-descendant population (55.5 percent, according to the 2022 census). While Brazil often projects an image of racial harmony abroad, its Black population faces severe economic, social, and political disadvantages at home. This disconnect limits Brazil’s potential for development, preventing it from leveraging its diverse society to address regional challenges in a hemisphere that yearns for innovative responses to inequality, social cohesion, and citizenship safeguards.

The context for this interview series could not be more appropriate. Recently, discussions over Brazilian inequalities, especially ethnoracial ones, have regained visibility at home and abroad. In 2023, the federal government re-established the Ministry of Racial Equality and the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, bodies responsible for implementing public policies to combat racism and promote the rights of Black and Indigenous populations, respectively. In addition, the country is reforming the national curriculum frameworks for secondary education, which could present a window of opportunity to address educational deficits and consider the demands of historically marginalized populations.

At the international level, while participating in the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, Brazil voluntarily adopted the 18th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) related to racial equality (in addition to the current 17 SDGs of the 2030 Agenda). In addition, the Lula and Biden administrations resumed the Joint Action Plan to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Discrimination and Promote Equality (JAPER), an initiative focused on education, healthcare, violence reduction, justice, and preserving the culture and memory of marginalized racial and ethnic populations. Similarly, Brazil has established cooperation channels with countries such as Colombia and Spain, providing exchange activities and sharing experiences of overcoming racism in scientific research, education, history, and culture. Also, during Brazil’s presidency of the G20, the country focused on inequality as the central theme of its four priorities at last year’s summit in Rio: sustainable development, social inclusion, the fight against hunger and poverty, and global governance reforms.

Considering the context and seeking to understand how the Brazilian education system produces unequal educational development trajectories, we spoke to Jackson Almeida, educational policy analyst, and Gabriel Corrêa, public policy director at Todos Pela Educação, a Brazilian civil society organization that seeks to promote improvements in primary education.

Lucas Martins Carvalho (LMC): How do you see the Brazilian education system and its shortfalls with Black populations?

Jackson Almeida and Gabriel Corrêa (JA and GC): The root of our country’s inequality for the Black population, from an educational perspective, is anchored directly in structural racism and the entire condition of vulnerability that it entails for this underrepresented group. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, data from IBGE and PNAD Education 2019¹ already showed that 71.7 percent of young people who were out of school were Black, while the illiteracy rate was 8.9 percent, compared to 3.6 percent of white people. The brutality imposed by inequality is a sign and symptom of a long historical process that determines the distribution of power and opportunities based on race/color, socioeconomic status, political representation, and level of access to knowledge, among countless other factors that continually insist on turning a statistic majority group into a minority.

LMC: What were the educational challenges for Black populations before the COVID-19 pandemic? How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the educational trajectory of these populations in Brazil?

JA and GC: Within an already daunting scenario, the pandemic’s effects on education also express Brazil’s institutional racism. We have seen a widening of educational inequalities, and it is no surprise that the Black population has been hit much harder by the damage caused by the lengthy closure of schools, the fragility of remote education, and the lack of coordination by the federal government. Data from the Carlos Chagas Foundation, based on a post-pandemic scenario, indicate a 51 percent decrease in learning and a 52 percent increase in anxiety and depression among students, which highlights the need for emergency coordination to promote the recovery of learning and support for students’ mental health and thereby demands deliberate action to address the needs of Black populations.

LMC: In your view, what should be the post-pandemic priorities to guarantee the right to a quality education for the Black population?

JA and GC: Education is a transformative factor for a change in perspective, and it is the road we must travel to achieve social justice and racial equity. Elected governments must prioritize technical and financial support for learning recovery programs and pedagogical subsidies that contribute directly to tackling the inequalities that the pandemic has intensified.

Promoting an education with equity necessarily involves raising Black, Indigenous, and Quilombola² voices so that they are in leadership positions with proportionality, in-depth knowledge about ethnic-racial equity, and receive support to remain in these spaces with respect and dignity. And this should include active participation in various areas of activity, not just the racial agenda. In addition, educational policies that value Black, Indigenous, and Quilombola identities must be implemented to increase the legitimacy of these groups within the educational system and ensure that they learn properly and remain in school.

1. The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) is a federal public administration entity and the country’s main geographic and statistical information provider. The IBGE’s National Household Sample Survey (Pesquisa Nacional por Amostras de Domicílios – PNAD) aims to monitor fluctuations and the short-, medium- and long-term evolution of the labor force, as well as other information necessary for the study of Brazil’s socio-economic development.

2. Quilombola is a term used to describe people who live in Afro-descendant communities characterized by their traditional ways of life and ancestral territories. Historically, quilombos were communities of runaway enslaved people who resisted the colonial regime in Brazil.