Microagressões raciais no Ensino Superior no âmbito das Ciências Exatas

Abstract

Racial microaggressions are nebulous and subtle forms of racism manifested in interpersonal relationships through gestures, looks, jokes, jokes, whether intentionally or unintentionally, directed at individuals based on their race/ethnicity. In the context of Higher Education, research highlights that the constant exposure of students to racial microaggressions can lead them to develop health problems and also to abandon or dropout from their courses. This study seeks to understand the scope of the Quota Law in the admission of students to higher education courses in the area of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) at the Federal University of Alfenas (UNIFAL-MG) in 2020 and 2021. In addition, it founds to understand, through the way in which racial microaggressions manifest in academic daily lives of Black students from these courses. We carried out documentary research to map the scope of the Quota Law at UNIFAL-MG in relation to the admission of students into undergraduate programs between 2020 and 2021. This data provided a reference to understand the context in which the racial microaggressions in STEM programs. We also carried out the process of cross-cultural adaptation and content-related validation of the CDMS Racial Microaggressions Online Survey, a semi-structured questionnaire, which is part of a project called Racial Microaggressions at the University of Illinois and which inquiries about racist experiences, feelings and reactions both inside and outside university campuses. We then carried out a pilot study, applying the questionnaire to 60 Black students from STEM programs of 19 Brazilian universities. The sampling technique was Snowball Sampling. The data were analyzed, in the documentary research, in terms of the vacancy occupancy rate, using descriptive statistics. In the questionnaire research, we analyzed the answers to the students' objective and discursive questions, taking into account the racist incidents suffered in the campus, in academic environments and in the interaction between colleagues, as well as their ways of coping. The results of the documentary research highlighted that there was an underoccupancy of places allocated to Black, mixed raced and indigenous students, and students with disabilities, even more pronounced when it comes to racial profile and income. The COVID-19 pandemic, in turn, negatively influenced the occupancy rate of vacancies in the STEM at UNIFAL-MG in 2020 and 2021, more critically affecting the enrollment of the Black students. Our simulations indicate that those entering the places reserved for Black, mixed raced, indigenous students, and students with disabilities, would be the most affected by the absence of this Law. This factor highlights how structural racism acts violently in the exclusion of the black population in this area. Furthermore, when analyzing the scope of the Quota Law by area, greater racial diversity and a change in the student profile were noticed. The results of the survey with the questionnaire indicated that racial microaggressions are an element that black students need to deal with on a daily basis, in addition to the pressure of the area itself and the traditional difficulty of the course's mathematics subjects. We noticed that these students used a silencing strategy to confront practices involving racial microaggressions. This strategy occurred both as invisibility in the face of black men and women not expressing their intention to participate in the research, as well as their silencing when they agreed to fill out the questionnaire. We consider that this study can promote not only awareness of the existence of racial microaggressions in academic spaces within STEM, but also the way in which they appear as an obstacle that black students in these courses need to overcome in their academic trajectory.