Affirming Blackness Amid Neoconservative Narratives: The Communally-Bonded Education Model (CBEM) and Black Education in the United States and Brazil

In the United States, Brazil, and places across the globe where African/Black diasporic people exist, we are witnessing the rise of neoconservative narratives that reinforce old and recurrent discourses rooted in anti-Blackness. These narratives and discourses have too often sought to invisibilize, erase, and mute African-descended groups’ histories, experiences, communities, and identities. For example, in Brazil, the rise of the extreme right has resulted in validating anti-Black discourses (Treece, 2021) that support the dismantling of racial quotas in higher education. Afro-Brazilian students continue to face racial violence and discrimination in schools. Recent stances against Afro-Brazilian cultural institutions, including the dismantling of the Palmares Foundation (Oliveira, 2024), further marginalized efforts to promote Black history and advocacy, while attacks on affirmative action policies undermine efforts to address racial inequalities and reinforce the illusion of a so-called racial democracy. In the United States, on the other hand, this neoconservatism became more evident in the United States Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against the use of race in college and university admissions (SFFA, 2023), the significant reduction of Black history instruction from public school curricula (King, 2020), and the current administration’s eroding of civil rights efforts that sought to equalize opportunities throughout U.S. society. As noted, these neoconservative narratives are not only being played out in their respective tumultuous sociopolitical climates; schooling structures in both countries are serving as sites to deny the humanity and histories of African/diasporic people. Our paper echoes this conference’s theme by highlighting an indigenously rooted and liberatory scholarly framework that aims to empower the educational ecosystem of Black diasporic communities. Specifically, we discuss the utility of the Communally Bonded Education Model (CBEM) emanating from researching Black schools and communities in the United States and its potential for understanding, researching, and empowering the educational ecosystems of Black Brazilian people. The CBEM is a new scholarly framework that emerged from decades of ethnographic and historical research in the United States and the role of Black educational environments, formal and informal, in cultivating liberatory spaces that affirmed and protected Black people against systemic racism (Author, 2004, 2009, 2025). Although a new framework, the CBEM is informed by African/Black diasporic peoples’ earlier visions of education. The first author, an African-American male, developed the model from (1) scholarly ideas developed by and for Black people regarding the education of their people, (2) the historical scholarship on Black learning spaces, and (3) empirical research. As presently constructed, the CBEM is uniquely grounded in the experiences of Black people in the context of the United States. In this paper, we aim to interrogate the extent to which the theoretical tenets in the CBEM facilitate and inform scholarly insights related to the education of African/Black diasporic people in Brazil. The second author, an African-Brazilian woman, uses her decades of research and emic understanding of race, language, culture, and identity in Brazil to shed insights about ways to further understand, challenge, and eventually, deepen theoretical understandings unique to the education of Black communities in Brazil. As scholars from African/Black diasporic communities in two countries, we engage in this collaborative endeavor aware of the hierarchies that often emerge in transnational and gendered encounters. We discuss these issues within the paper, while also being certain to capture the genesis and evolution of the CBEM tenets beyond the U.S. context. The goal is to understand how African/Black diasporic communities across the globe have created educational ideas and practices that are rooted in their unique socio-historical contexts. References Author, 2004 Author, 2009 Author, 2025 King, L. J. (2020). Black history is not American history: Toward a framework of Black historical consciousness. Social Education, 84(6), 335–341. Oliveira, A. (2024). Forgetfulness as an institutional policy: The case of the Palmares Foundation during the Jair Bolsonaro government (2019–2022). IBAM Journal, 24, 199-214. Treece, D. (2021). The Challenges for Anti-racists in Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 27(2), 213–233.