Opinion – Cida Bento: We must join forces to change the dangerous path that Brazil is taking

Three weeks from now, we’ll enter the year 2022.

More than ever, we must collectively join forces to change the dangerous path that Brazil is taking right now.

In 2021, the IBGE tells us that Brazil is a young country, as more than half of the population is between 0 and 34 years old. And, among these children, adolescents and young people, the majority is black (61%) and was particularly affected by the pandemic and by the policies to overturn rights and the protection network that we have witnessed in recent years.

We must bet on the future. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that the year 2022, an electoral year, has been mobilizing articulations between parliamentarians, executive leaders and large corporations, in an effort to remain in power, at any cost, taking decisions in strategic areas such as the environment, which never suffered as much devastation as in the last five years.

These are decisions that directly impact the life (or death) of the largest portion of the Brazilian people, who have never had so many unemployed, living on the streets, with entire families living in squares, under bridges and viaducts, in a situation of desperate hunger and despondency, movement opposite to what we lived between 2003 and 2014, when 30 million were lifted out of poverty.

These leaders in Parliament are fighting to implement a billionaire “secret budget” with as little transparency and inspection possibilities as possible.

And it is in this scenario, through education as a public good, that we can collectively act, barring violent governments that dismantle public policies as if they owned the concrete and symbolic good that schools represent.

There is no lack of legal and budgetary provisions to implement programs aimed at equity, which strengthen affirmative action throughout basic education to tackle inequalities. But we have to watch over them, monitor their implementation, produce and offer conceptual and methodological subsidies so that organized civil society can carry out social control, actions that Anansi (Observatory of Racial Equity in Basic Education), which is being born from efforts of different civil society organizations, it proposes to carry out from 2022.

It is by strengthening education and schools that we will be able to maintain our historical heritage, our cultural assets and the beacons of civilizing values, which, although attacked in recent years, especially after the entry of black youth into universities, thrive once again on the basis of the actions of the movements social and civil society organizations.