Abstract
The purpose of the article is to reconstruct a critical relationship between Guerreiro Ramos, as an intellectual of the Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN), and the theory of assimilation developed by the Chicago School and disseminated in Brazil by Donald Pierson. We start from a historical analysis showing how this theory was transplanted by Pierson here and became very influential in the 1940s. Next, we briefly discuss the relationships that were established between scholars and the intelligentsia of TEN. Finally, we made a comparison between the text of Pierson, Brancos e Pretos na Bahia, and the essays by Guerreiro Ramos, showing the criticisms of the latter to the concepts used in this work. We found a critique of ethnocentrism and racism incorporated in these concepts and also a reformulation of them in order to overcome these elements and think about a process in which the black people would be protagonists of their history. We recover this criticism with the aim of contributing to the decolonization and deprovincialization of sociology, recovering the agency of an important black intellectual and militant who built strong and well-founded criticisms of one of the main paradigms of the social sciences about race relations.
Guerreiro Ramos; Chicago School; Teatro Experimental do Negro; race relations; assimilation