"If I know who I am, I know I am Black, no one can ever take the land from me, because the land is Black": pretuguese gender, whiteness, and Rural Education

Abstract

This text explores the perceptions of Black women, students of the Graduate Program in Rural Education at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, regarding themselves, gender, and race. It examines whether and how, by constructing Pretuguese linguistic expressions, they affirmatively assert their place on the land and in rural education. The research employs (auto)biography in an epistolary genre, extending beyond its methodological potential, as for Black women, it has been and continues to be a powerful political strategy to unveil positions of power and reveal epistemic privileges. In this sense, the text discusses whiteness as a process configuring the racially unmarked political apparatus of white identity, which, by positioning itself outside racial relations, leverages socially experienced privileges—particularly in institutions of knowledge—to exclude, diminish, and frame science through its assumptions. This allows the problematization of the formation of this white researcher and her role in producing antiracist education. The women address the (im)possibility of situating themselves in rural education without self-locating through the lenses of gender and race, which are both structures of labor and land division in Brazil and the materiality of their existences. Thus, the racialization of gender—the Pretuguese gender—constructed in pedagogical spaces enabling diverse experiences becomes fundamental for them to claim their place on the land. It concludes that rural education should draw from (auto)biographies and the wisdom of elder women to craft a racially-conscious pedagogical project.