54% of population in Brazil is formed by Afro-descendants, but only 12% of them are in college. That’s why the urgency to start decreasing inequality and to empower these teenagers.

All population knew is that black people were enslaved people. But with hours and hours of research, a lot about black people history that was left untold started to come up. Years and years of colonization and slavery washed away the fact that they were actually highly qualified, even before they’d become slaves.

To bring this kind of awareness to the students and to society it is to lift their power. To do this is the same as telling: hey, there’s knowledge, intelligence and power in your blood. If your ancestors did it, so can you.

This production had a low budget of $ 20.000 and counted with sponsorship to print the 10 thousand copies we distributed to the students.

Zumbi dos Palmares is the only college targeted to black people in Brazil. So we decided to develop a book that reinforces this commitment to their students.

Some of the subjects addressed in this book are: Africans had deep knowledge of astronomy long before the invention of telescopes; Africans did c-sections thousands of years before medicine was invented; Cusbism is an appropriation of African art.

As information like that is not really easy to be obtained – because it’s not on regular books –, the solution was to collect those hidden stories in order to bring pride and knowledge, so that black students can finish college in a much higher level than the one they were when they started college, not only in the academic field, but also in the social one, they have to know they deserve the same opportunities than everyone else.

We used a simplified version of the map of Palmares, this huge symbol of resistance to black people in Brazil, to form all images in the book through generative design. We created a code that transforms the map into tiny particles that were put together to construct each image. Plus, there are black boxes in translucent tracing paper throughout the book that will reveal important historical information whose protagonists are black once the pages are turned over.

There are 200 pages to start correcting these racial historical injustices and bring Black History to the spotlight - and all its the design choices, and even the printing process only using the color black are meant to reinforce this idea.

As students get all this information, they start to get a bigger notion of their power and their capacity.

We printed 10 thousand books to distribute to all students in in Zumbi dos Palmares and a thousand more to nonprofit institutions. Also, each chapter of the book became a subject and integrated the collage grade, so now students will be able to deeply study the subjects they’d like.

Last but not least, we’ll launch the book for a much larger audience in Brazil’s International Literary Fair in July (FLIP).