“I was born white”: the construction of black identity at school

Abstract

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14244/198271991117

Educational inequalities between whites and blacks in Brazil, regarding the school years, have been decreasing, but the distance is still large and racial exclusion in education goes throughout generations. Many everyday situations reaffirm the need to act towards an anti-racist and anti-sexist education. By describing the racial drama of a six-year-old pupil, the paper intends to reflect on the school's role in the construction of gender and race identity process. The case occurred in a federal public school located in the metropolitan area of the city of Rio de Janeiro. It is representative of the condition in which black children are formed and the field in which they are constituted as subjects. Through field observation, the analysis considers race and gender as social constructs that organize social experience and categories that contribute to the identification of unequal treatment and opportunities in school and in Brazilian society. The study aims to provide elements to think about possible curricular changes and practices that contribute to the overcoming of racial and gender discrimination, by affirming identities, as well as to encourage other studies to identify the impacts of these discrimination relations in everyday school life and their effects on the production and reproduction of educational inequalities.

Keywords: Identity, Racism, Educational inequality.