An Experience Report for Racial Literacy: Psychic Suffering, Racism and White Bodies at the University

Abstract

The writing of this experience report comes from the experience of white researchers within the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and an ethical-political concern to try to understand the psychic suffering in the university and ways of producing knowledge that does not reproduce racist practices. The objective is to show a way of doing research that operates from pratices of violence, arising from an imperial dimension of knowledge that historically vulnerates black and peripheral lives and that, to a greater or lesser extent, produces psychic suffering. The methodological orientation permeates the notion of Foucaultian experience, and the objective of this report is not to confirm theories or hypotheses, but to complete paths in conjuction with academic life through collective movements and denunciations of racism. The bet consists, therefore, of an ethical proposal to establish a critical stance as white bodies as an ethnic-racial condition in a fight against the violent positions of whiteness. To do so, a notion of helplessness is proposed as an affirmative courage of renouncing white violence and the construction of plural worlds in which racial literacy and anti-racist alliances become possible.