Slavery as an Ethno for Mathematics in Brazil

the black female people facing the coronavirus pandemic

Abstract

Considering the situation the world is experiencing during the new coronavirus pandemic, debates have begun in fields such as Biology, Medicine, Technology, Economics and, less expressively, in the field of Human Sciences. In this paper, we intend to present and discuss information that indicates how the black people, particularly the black female population, tends to suffer more severely the effects of the pandemic. At first, we made a survey of reports about the pandemic considering ethnic-racial groups that circulated in Brazil between January and May 2020. Then, we analyze how the mathematics in these reports enable discussions about the historical and current scenario of exploitation and extermination of black people in Brazil. Black women are more vulnerable to the virus in some jobs, such as a domestic or a health worker. Lastly, we propose the rise of a debate in Ethnomathematics in the context of racial inequality, related to an uncritical whiteness, demanding that the scientific-academic space – mostly white – takes responsibility for overcoming racial invisibility and asymmetry in the research.