FROM INSTITUTIONAL SILENCE TO ANTI-RACIST PROTOCOL: IDENTIFICATION AND RESPONSE TO RACISM IN THE BRAZILIAN EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

This article analyzes the Protocols for Identification and Response to Racism, launched by the Ministry of Education in 2026 within the scope of the National Policy for Equity, Education for Ethnic-Racial Relations and Quilombola School Education, established by Ordinance MEC nº 470/2024. The problem investigated is the following: does the institutionalization of anti-racist protocols change the way in which Brazilian schools recognize and respond to racism, or does it remain dependent on the training, management and institutional culture of each education network? Based on a documentary analysis of the materials released by the MEC between May and September 2026, the article reconstructs the architecture of the protocols, which cover everything from early childhood education to higher and professional education, distinguishes response flows according to the subject involved in the episode of racism and seeks to replace institutional improvisation with common procedures of identification, reception, referral and accountability, organized here in an analytical matrix that locates what the official materials allow to confirm and what remains inaccessible to public consultation. The text places this initiative within a longer trajectory of anti-racist educational policy, which dates back to Law 10,639/2003, and examines data from the 2026 Equity Diagnosis, according to which the formal adoption of protocols increased from 59% to 93% among state networks and from 36% to 53% among municipal networks. It is argued, in dialogue with the literature on ceremonial isomorphism in organizations, that the existence of a protocol is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the effectiveness of combating school racism, and that the distance between formal adoption and daily use depends on factors that the normative document, in itself, does not resolve, such as continued training, management culture and willingness of school teams to activate the instrument in specific cases.