Florestan Fernandes: biography, ideas, performance

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forestFernandes was a Brazilian sociologist, anthropologist, writer, politician and professor. From humble origins, the Brazilian intellectual walked the first 20 years of his career at the University of São Paulo until the year he was exiled due to the promulgation of the AI-5. Fernandes dedicated himself, at the beginning of his career, to the ethnological study of Tupinambá Indians. After the 1950s, the sociologist began to study the remnants of slavery, racism and the difficult insertion of the black population into a society highly dominated by white people.

Read too: Paulo Freire: great name in Brazilian education who was also persecuted and exiled

Biography of Florestan Fernandes

Florestan Fernandes was born in the city of São Paulo, on July 22, 1920. His mother was a Portuguese immigrant and had only Florestan as a child. His godmother helped in his creation, awakening in the young man an interest in studies and reading. Part of his childhood and youth took place in the tenements on the outskirts of São Paulo, which put him in direct contact with his origins.

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In the third year of primary school, which today is equivalent to Elementary School, Florestan he dropped out of school and went to work to help his mother. He worked as a shoeshine boy, in a restaurant and in a bakery. At the age of 17, the young man went back to school, taking a kind of extensive normalization course, in which he completed the equivalent of seven years of study in three years.

Florestan Fernandes (standing), the great sociologist and anthropologist who denounced social and racial exclusion in Brazil. [1]
Florestan Fernandes (standing), the great sociologist and anthropologist who denounced social and racial exclusion in Brazil. [1]

In 1941, 21 years old, Florestan Fernandes started his Bachelor of Social Sciences at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences, University of São Paulo (USP). In 1943 he got his degree, and in 1944 he got the degree in social sciences. Between 1944 and 1946, the sociologist studied the master's degree in anthropology from the Free School of Sociology and Politics, an institution linked to the University of São Paulo, starting its ethnographic research on the Tupinambá Indians.

In 1945 he joined as teacher in higher education, being an assistant professor of professor Fernando Azevedo, his master's and doctoral advisor, at USP. At the same time, joined the extinct Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR). In 1947, Florestan defended his master's thesis entitled The social organization of the Tupinambá. In 1951 the sociologist defended his doctoral thesis, at USP, entitled The social function of war in Tupinambá society.

In 1953, Florestan Fernandes became acting full professor at USP, occupying the chair of French sociologist Roger Bastide. In 1964, Fernandes became free teacher from the same college in which he graduated, with the defense of the thesis entitled The insertion of blacks in class society.

in 1964 was arrested because of his political and teaching performance when the Brazilian military coup. In 1969, he was arrested again, had his public office revoked and was exiled, moving to Canada and the United States, having taught at several universities abroad. In 1972, Fernandes returned to Brazil. In 1977, he was visiting professor at Yale University, and in the same year he returned to Brazil again because he was hired as a full professor by the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, PUC-SP.

Between 1987 and 1994, Florestan Fernandes served two terms as Congressman elected by the Workers' Party (PT). His political action was in favor of reducing the social inequality in Brazil and the improvement of public education. Florestan Fernandes participated in the first discussions and in the formulation of the Brazilian Education Guidelines and Bases Law (LDB), which was enacted in 1996 and registered as Law 9,394/96.

In 1994, Florestan Fernandes had to undergo a liver transplant and was unsuccessful. passing away in August 10, 1995, at 75 years of age.

ideas by Florestan Fernandes

Florestan Fernandes was a scholar of ethnic-racial relations in Brazil, having studied the Tupinambá Indians first and then the blacks, always from the perspective of the difficulty of democratic integration of these non-white peoples in the Brazilian culture White. In a Brazil that aimed at industrialization and modernity, and which had left colonialism and slavery, it was necessary to seek a way to understand social exclusion and the structures that allow exclusion, especially of the poor and blacks, to find some way to achieve this situation.

For Florestan Fernandes, slavery left a legacy of exclusion for the black population.
For Florestan Fernandes, slavery left a legacy of exclusion for the black population.
  • Social inequality: Florestan Fernandes experienced inequality against the poor and those living in the periphery. The sociologist went on to say that, even with the influence of his godmother, the jobs he got as a young man were stigmatized and nothing better was offered to those who lived in the ghettos of São Paulo. There was a distrust of those people. Social inequality marked his childhood, and, in his view, overcoming this inequality was the only possibility for our society to progress morally.

  • education: the only way to achieve a fair society free from social inequality was, according to Fernandes, through quality public education. Fernandes was a friend and professional colleague of the sociologist and anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro. Together, the two drew up projects to value basic education and contributed to the formulation of the Law of Guidelines and Bases for Brazilian Education.

  • Democracy: defender of a teaching democratic, of a democracy of social relations and access to basic services guaranteed to all citizens, Fernandes was a democrat. Above all, he was a defender of democratic relations between blacks and whites in Brazil. Gilberto Freyre's theory of harmonious coexistence between blacks and whites in Brazil, called by Fernandes the “myth of racial democracy”, never existed in a country like Brazil, which failed to include blacks in its capitalist society.

See too: Racial quotas - measures aimed at the democratization of public higher education

The bourgeois revolution in Brazil: sociological interpretation essay

This book by Florestan Fernandes was published in 1975 and launches a thesis that goes against the grain of many existing sociological theories so far. Its author defends the existence of a bourgeois revolution in Brazil, a country dominated by other countries in the colonial process. It was a common thought in sociology that bourgeois revolutions would only have occurred in countries where colonial and imperialists.

In this work, Brazil's social identity was formed based on a set of relations between the dominant and the dominated and on the evolution of Brazilian capitalism. The big problems found in Brazil are, for Fernandes, the big problems of capitalism: exclusion, social inequality, exploitation of the bourgeoisie on the proletariat and the consequences of racism.

THE Brazil's social formation was that of a people subaltern in the capitalist process, as capitalism here did not develop in the same way as it did in Europe and the United States. For Fernandes, it was necessary to understand this complex structural chain to understand the Brazilian sociological formation.

Image credit

[1] Public domain / National Archives Collection

by Francisco Porfirio
Sociology Professor

Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/biografia/florestan-fernandes.htm

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