Denise Ferreira da Silva is a Brazilian philosopher with an anticolonial black feminist perspective that highlights the centrality of raciality in post-Enlightenment thought.

She worked on the successful campaign of a black woman, Benedita da Silva, to be elected to the Brazilian Congress, in 1986.

She was a visiting associate professor at the University of Southern California in 2006 and 2007, teaching in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department.

In 2015 she was appointed as professor and director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she lives and works on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam First Nation.

Her 2007 monograph Toward a Global Idea of Race raises the question of "why, after more than five hundred years of violence perpetrated by Europeans against people of color, is there no ethical outrage?"

[3][9] Although Ferreira da Silva's written work often seems impenetrable to non-philosophers, she insists on a broad spectrum of communication directed at different audiences.

Would Blackness emancipated from science and history wonder about another praxis and wander in the World, with the ethical mandate of opening up other ways of knowing and doing?