This article examines how in Portugal, in political discourse and in the educational context, 'race' is part of a game of in/visibility. The racial, being considered as a result from the presence of the "other" from the colony, is therefore naturally irrelevant to the formation of the national-metropolitan space and, more generally, to the notion of "Europeanness". From this analysis, we illustrate the depoliticization of racism through the naturalization of colonialism and the reification of the 'immigrant imaginary'; accordingly, racism is understood as something that happens to "others" - ethno-racially marked - but that does not relate to what "we" are, a "we" that, actually, is never questioned. This paper is divided in three sections: (i) we examine the consolidation of the absent presence of the 'racial' considering how a cycle of silence and consensus has been consolidated by the very initiatives to combat racism - marked by anti-racialism - by global organizations such as UNESCO. We further examine how the dissolution of the 'racial' is being produced by the association between racism and immigration in the contemporary European context, both in politics and in faculty; (ii) we present our empirical work and analysis of contemporary history textbooks in Portugal. We show that debates about history and, more specifically, about the teaching of colonialism and slavery have emptied its political relevance and evaded the 'racial' in the understanding of so-called Atlantic slavery, since the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, (iii) finally, we conclude with an analysis of the contours of what we call the "(post) colonial consensus" in Portugal, within a broader context of the emptying of the plausibility of a vocabulary that takes into account 'racial'/racism in contemporary societies.
'racial'; public discourses; History and its teaching; (Post) colonial Portugal
