Maria Beatriz Nascimento Sociology

According to the biography written by Ratts (2006), Maria Beatriz Nascimento was born in Aracaju, Sergipe , in 1942. Daughter of Rubina Pereira do Nascimento, housewife, and Francisco Xavier Nascimento, a bricklayer, she was eighth among ten brothers and sisters. When she was still a child, her family moved to Rio de Janeiro. Despite the family’s financial difficulties, she accomplished the college, studied History of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and persuaded a career as a teacher. Nascimento also participated of groups of black activists and maintained links with the Unified Black Movement.
Ratts points out that, despite of the great number of publications, Beatriz Nascimento was not considered ‘academic’ at that time.

She claims that ideology is where racial discrimination is located and it articulates with the infrastructure and superstructure of society. However, ideology would not have seen originated in infrastructure, as some marxists claimed, and this attempt to reduce a complex phenomenon to economic explanations would limit the view of some academics, preventing them from looking at the totality of the concrete reality (Nascimento, 2006 [1974]a). Then, Nascimento argues that the ideology “is not dissociated from the economic or legal-political level; it is neither before nor after these two, [but] it is not either above or below” (Nascimento, 2006 [1974]a:101, own translation).
The perspective that social oppression is subordinate to class, according to the author, would come from racial discrimination, since it would carry a certain ‘ingenuity’ that is ‘fundamentally purposive’: the authors who defend this perspective would not give to themselves the work of to analyze racism and its instruments (Nascimento, 2006 [1974]a); Nascimento, 2006 [1974]b). They treated black people as a primitive object of study and ignored the black people’s thinking about themselves (Nascimento, 2006 [1974]a). Nascimento This racist attitude also reinforced the racism, and the racism reinforced this attitude.
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Quilombos are communities organized by fugitive slaves in the colonial period of Brazil and they exist until today as a symbol of the resistance and as a settlement of African descendants. Nascimento considers the quilombos as alternative forms of social organizations, both they and the slums. To the author, to study them was not only a way to recover the history of Brazil, but to search for societal forms that could represent advances in relations to the inequality existent today. Thus, the author reconstructed the history of Quilombo Carmo da Mata, in Minas Gerais, gathering stories about how it emerged, considering the oral tradition of the community. To Nascimento, to tell the Brazil’s history by the quilombos is to put the black people in the center of the history (Nascimento, 2006 [1982]; Nascimento, 2006