Permanence and identity

the experience of a black student at a public university

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the challenges and possibilities of affirming the racial identity of Iuri, a young black man, beneficiary of Law Nº 12,711/2012, which is the result of affirmative action policies aimed at higher education. For this, the student was invited to speak, through interviews, about their school, family and social experiences that imply their daily life at the university. Here, the figure of a poor and black student in training in the Electrical Engineering course and in the process of constituting his racial identity is elucidated. In this way, I associate black epistemologies in an attempt to understand the paths that led young people to enter a space, until then, foreign. And I try to understand the tricks he needed to create to stay in this scenario. In this plot, it was possible to perceive that the investment in new student profiles challenges the racist gear in force in social institutions. Thus, it is thought that the incorporation of the criterion of race as a modality of access to public higher education is capable of adding other possibilities of existence for black bodies.