Black population’s health: affirmative action and teaching whiteness in undergraduate health courses

Abstract This paper aims to analyze the implementation of black people health in the undergraduate courses of Public Health, Nursing, and Medicine at a public Brazilian university. The theoretical foundation consists of a qualitative intervention-research study, based on Black Feminist Epistemology and Black Perspective of Decoloniality. Two workshops were held with the members of the Structural Teaching Nuclei of those courses in 2019 and 2020. Despite the guidelines of the legal framework on the teaching of ethnic-racial relations, it was possible to observe the incipience of training, the absence of black professors in these spaces and the presence of a faculty’s whiteness that perpetuates privileges. From the results and discussion presented, it appears that it is through emancipatory movements and thoughts in the political, cultural, pedagogical and epistemological fields that it is possible to intend ruptures in power relations and in the structures of the State.