Black youth, school and subjectivity: narratives about a project based on law 10639/03

Abstract

The school leaves marks on the identities of those who pass through its benches. For young black men and women, they are naturalized as a record of a process, which, said to be civilizing, promotes distancing from the culture of African peoples and the restriction of their bodies, compromising the understanding of the structures that keep black men and women in unequal conditions of life and work. Under the aegis of Law 10.639/2003, we observe projects on the ethnic-racial issue in schools, but little is known about how students evaluate the impact of these experiences. Therefore, we carried out a study in which we interviewed seven (07) young black men and women who graduated from a public school in Minas Gerais to analyze how they evaluate the impact of a project they participated in during high school. The theoretical framework was based on sociology, assuming a decolonial perspective as a sieve. After analyzing the content of the interview material, we concluded that, in the view of the interviewees, the project positively impacted their identities because it changed their relationship with their own bodies, provided knowledge about the issue of black people and potentiated strategies for adopting other ways of being in the world that imply connection with other black men and women and permanent action against racism.