Day care center and racism

Abstract

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14244/198271991118

The purpose of the paper, based on studies about race relations, is to debate the presence of racist mechanisms in early childhood education, the first step of basic education. It is a reflection built from an ethnographic research carried out in a day care center in the metropolitan area of Campinas, Brazil, involving three-year-old children and their teachers. The data analysis points out to the existence of racist processes that contribute to the removal of Afro-Brazilian and African contributions from the early childhood education spaces, and to the exclusion of very young black girls and boys from the social field permissible to the experiences regarding the acceptance of their own body and their ancestry. We also perceive the presence of a “whitening” pedagogy, strongly denounced by the black movement since the 1980s, based on an educational model with the purpose of reproducing prejudices regarding the black young children and the Afro-Brazilian and African history and culture.

Keywords: Racism, Childhood Cultures, Black young child, Day care center.