Eugenia como prática científico-discursiva: uma crítica dialógica a partir das Ciências Humanas

Abstract

This work was to have the proposals of eugenics-based public policies in education, as a theme, in the first half of the twentieth century, especially during the Vargas period. But, as the writing progressed, it ended up turning into a reading on the power of whiteness as a central axis, favoring a micropolitical analysis of racially constituted alterity relations in Brazil. From this perspective, one of the possible arguments for the origin of this ideal of whiteness was colonization and coloniality since then, as a process of western modernization and how such ideals were metamorphosing in Brazilian culture over more than 350 years of slavery, almost a century as an empire and a little over a hundred years as a republic. For this work, only the period of the “old” republic and the “new” republic was analyzed, and their modes or regimes of political, cultural and scientific-epistemological enunciation. Eugenics enters its most violent period in its proposals in the 30s of the twentieth century, a privileged period in this work, in which the figure of the eminent pharmacist and physician Renato Ferraz Kehl becomes hegemonic in the diffusion of eugenics. Just when Nazism took power in Germany, with Vargas taking power in Brazil and a National Constituent Assembly was convoked in 1934. A period in which Brazilian nationalism assumed its most perverse face in the twentieth century. Since then, after the Second World War, the dominant discourse has taken on a very different face, the affirmation of racial superiority guided by whiteness is diluted in the discourses about the supposed racial democracy, while racial inequality remains in the DNA of Brazilian nationalism. From a bibliographic survey, it appears that eugenics was part of the Brazilian social imaginary and permeated practically all scientific knowledge and practices, such as medicine, education and social sciences.