Do black lives matter? The urgency of thinking anti-racist education in front of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19, an infectious disease that spread throughout the world, as a pandemic, making containment guidelines necessary to reduce its transmission. The impact of these measures was felt at a general level, meaning an intensification of the political-economic crisis in much of the world, making social inequalities more visible, the result of issues of race, gender and class. At that moment, sources of information began to show the consequences of this, starting with the murder of George Floyd in the United States of America (USA), killed in May, by a white policeman, through suffocation, thus emerging a series of anti-racist protests and against police violence. In Brazil, these protests join so many other cases under debate, such as that of the boy João Pedro, 14, killed in a police operation in the Salgueiro complex (RJ). All of this sparks debates around racism, which has been put up so often, as a practice linked to a lack of information and education. Based on these statements, we ask: why do we need to think about anti-racism in the context of education in the pandemic and in the post-pandemic? in addition, we seek to reflect from a methodological basis of literature review on racism and education in the intrinsic links with various facets of daily life and the needs of anti-racism as a tool to tackle inequalities.