Abstract

SARZURI-LIMA, Marcelo. Decolonizing Education Elements To Overcome Conservatism And Cultural Functionalism. Rev. de Inv. Educ. [online]. 2011, vol.4, n.3, pp.117-134. ISSN 1997-4043.

ABSTRACT This essay starts with the "whiteness" problem and the colonial rationale. It shows that the universalism of society in capitalist modernism is based on "whiteness", and that it implies not only ethnic racism (the white man dominating the non-white), but also racism based on identity. It is an identity racism that promotes the civilized "whiteness", which allows it to reproduce itself beyond color and culture. In societies impregnated with internal colonialism, discrimination does not stop with the "whitening" of subaltern groups; the mechanisms of society create new links of discrimination and institutionalize the exclusion; social classes are being constructed, where the component of class and race are mixed and those from "above" look down on the "lower" ones, and the latter dream of becoming like those on top. It is in this type of scenario that we must conceive of decolonization, which is not state politics, but a conquest of the indigenous fight to break the discriminatory and exclusive character of society and the Bolivian state. Therefore, the proposal to decolonize education, which is presented in part to dismantle the subtle (but not less perverse) forms of reproduction of the colonial condition, involves dealing in education with all imaginary forms of resistance and subversion of the hegemonic order, initiating in this sense a de-centralizing of the colonial narrative.

Keywords : blanquitud; colonial reason; decolonization; colonial narrative.

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