Activists vs. intellectuals: epistemicide and studies on the Black movement and race in Brazil Juliana Góes Introduction This paper explores how the epistemic division between activists and intellectuals is being reproduced in studies on Black movements and race in Brazil made by American scholars. Such division is common in Brazil. Evaldo Oliveira (2008), for example, an Afro-Brazilian activist and intellectual, was being interviewed to be a master's student. The interviewers asked why he wanted to get into a graduate program: to make an academic research or to continue his actions as an activist? This “or” is commonly used to delegitimize the work of Afro-Brazilian militants and intellectuals that produce knowledge aiming emancipation - you need to be with the social movements or with the universty, but being in both spaces is seen as impossible and wrong. The dualism between activism and intellectuals is a contemporary form of epistemicide. This is the disqualification of the knowledge produced by subjugated bodies. In addition, it is the construction of the Other as incapable to think, since “it is not possible to disqualify the forms of knowledge of the dominated people without disqualifying them individually and collectively as cognitive subjects” (Carneiro 2005, 97, own translation). In Brazil, epistemicide started with the colonization. We, Black people, were transformed in scientific objects of study – the beasts; the animals without mind, soul, and ability to think; the primitive ones who produce folklore and superstitions, but not knowledge. The epistemicide continued through the content taught in the schools (Blacks are represented based on racist stereotypes) and the denial of access to educational institutions for Black people (by the absence of schools or by the discrimination to each Black child suffer in such intuitions). Nowadays, it continues through the division between activists and intellectuals, that taken the knowledge that comes from the Black bodies as less logical and precise – as “militantism” and not science (Gonzalez 1980, Nascimento 1978, Oliveira 2014). This is dichotomy is being reproduced in studies made in the United States on Brazil. “Black activists […] with honorable exceptions, are treated, by specialists on the racial question, as sources of knowledge but not of authority on the subject. Black researchers in general are reduced to the condition of source and not real interlocutors in academic dialogue […]” (Carneiro