Argentina: The University of Buenos Aires will have an anti-racist education course taught by Afro-descendants

For the first time in its history, the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) will have, as of this school year, an "Afro-centered" anti-racist education subject, that is, designed and taught by Afro-descendant teachers, with a bibliography composed almost exclusively by non-white authors.

It is about "Rights of the black communities in Argentina from an Afro perspective", an optional bimonthly subject of the Philosophy department that integrates the study plan of the Law career and contributes 2 of the 69 points necessary to pass the Oriented Professional Cycle.

"It is a historic achievement because the academy is a traditionally bourgeois, conservative space that generally excludes counter-hegemonic discourses, which is what this cathedra comes to produce, and which must also be understood as a conquest of rights," said Patricia Gomes (35), one of the professors of the cathedra

"Our Afro-descendant community has historically been forbidden their right to communication and we have not found representation in spaces of power" to the point that "I have never read an Afro-descendant author at university," said Gomes.

The other professor of the subject and also a descendant of Cape Verde, Alí ​​Emmanuel Delgado, (34) explained to Télam that "the main objective is to blacken the Faculty."

"The first thing is for people to know that Argentina is also Afro, breaking with the myths that make Afro-Argentine invisibility -which indicate that we were killed in the war or that we died with yellow fever- to understand the role that Africa and the Afro-descendant people in the construction and growth of the Nation ".

"And secondly, that they have an anti-racist perspective, that they understand that the oppression systems have one more leg: today patriarchy is beginning to be made visible in addition to capitalism, but we also have racism," he added.

Source: Télam