Does Does the professor have color?

Racism and the myths of black people in higher education

Abstract

This article analyzes the dynamics of racialization present in Brazilian higher education, focusing on the position of the black professor and the symbolic mechanisms that sustain their exclusion and marginalization. Based on a psychoanalytic and critical reading of racial relations, the study discusses how the historical construction of whiteness institutes a normative ideal of behavior, knowledge, and appearance, which defines who is recognized as a subject of knowledge. The investigation addresses unconscious projections and repression mechanisms that sustain structural racism, understanding it as a symptom of a civilizational malaise and a logic of class domination. Finally, the text proposes that transforming this scenario requires the recognition of symbolic violence and the shifting of the subjective structures that produce the inferiorization of the Black population, opening space for new forms of knowledge production and existence in the academic field.