History textbooks and the Education of Ethnic-Racial Relations

Abstract

This article aims to evaluate how History textbooks, which were selected by Brazil’s Ministry of Education and chosen by History teachers of the Public School System of the State of Pernambuco to be used in Middle School during the triennium 2020, 2021 and 2022, are working on the Education of Ethnic-Racial Relations (Erer). To deal with Erer’s contents, we emphasized Afrocentric Education with the theoretical approach of Afrocentricity, as defined by Molefi Kete Asante (2014). The methodology employed was bibliographic research. The database was composed of the books: História, Escola e Democracia, by Flávio dos Campos, Regina Claro and Miriam Dulhnikoff (2019), from Ed. Moderna; História, by Ana Lúcia Lana Nemi, Anderson Roberti dos Reis and Débora Yumi Motooka (2019), from Ed. SM; História, Sociedade & Cidadania, by Alfredo Boulos (2019), from Ed. FTD; and Estudar História das origens do homem à era digital, by Patrícia Ramos Braick and Anna Barreto (2019), from Ed. Moderna. As a result, we identified that in the History textbooks for the triennium 2020, 2021 and 2022, there was a predominance of the eurocentrist perspective, a paradigm that makes the Education of Ethnic-Racial Relations unfeasible. We hope that this article will encourage new texts and contribute to the work of History teachers, in the sense of having more autonomy when they are working on the Education of Ethnic-Racial Relations.