Through the critical feminist lens of intersectionality, this article examines how race, gender, and sexuality were contested through a process of curricular revision before the "Base Nacional Comum Curricular," the new Brazilian 'common core' curriculum known as the BNCC, became federal law in 2017. Drawing on interviews with professors who wrote the BNCC curriculum and an analysis of the different published iterations of the curriculum, the article argues that curricular debates around race, gender, and sexuality in the BNCC were constitutive of, rather than simply a reflection of, broader ideological debates about difference and inequality in the contested history and future of Brazil. The curricular politics of the BNCC are thus a key political terrain for understanding the subsequent election in 2018 of ultra-right-wing President Bolsonaro, whose candidacy was predicated on anti-Blackness, misogyny, and homophobia in a conjunctural moment of steep economic decline, political upheaval, and increasing violence and fear.