THE WHITE NORM: POWER, KNOWLEDGE, AND DENIED ONTOLOGY

Abstract

The article investigates whiteness as a social and epistemic norm that structures power relations and legitimises practices of exclusion. The aim is to analyse how such normativity is articulated with the production of knowledge and the denial of black ontology, highlighting the mechanisms that sustain alienation and forgetting. The methodology applies a critical-interpretative bibliographic approach, combining philosophical, epistemological, and social reflections with the analysis of historical contexts and resistances formulated by black communities. The research demonstrates that whiteness operates not only through formal institutions but also through the control of representations and memory, functioning as a silencing technology. It is shown, however, that black ontology asserts itself through resistance, reworking categories and creating epistemologies that challenge the universality of the white norm. The investigation confirms that the struggle for knowledge is also a struggle for life, as it involves the right to narrate and to exist in non-subordinated terms. Preliminary findings indicate that questioning whiteness as a norm broadens the possibilities for a critical reconstruction of the human, offering theoretical and political contributions to the consolidation of decolonial epistemologies and practices committed to racial justice.