Dealing with Racism in Schools: Experience of Black Adolescents Girls in Public Schools in Inland of São Paulo

Abstract

In this work we propose to identify the subjectivation processes of self-declared black adolescents girls enrolled in public schools in the peripheral and central regions of a city in the interior of the State of São Paulo. To this end, a qualitative study was carried out with an emphasis on content analysis. Firstly, we elaborate a theoretical survey of anti-racist psychoanalyses. Then, semi-structured interviews were carried out with two black teenage girls. Finally, we considered three thematic axes for data analysis: a) Image of self – Ideal Ego; b) Influence of racism on self-image – Ego Ideal; c) Resistance to racism. The results point to a reality in which racism at school age is marked by the silencing and erasure of the history of black people and blackness. This fact, as demonstrated in the interviews, produces processes of subjectivation crossed by the imposition of a white and intangible Ego ideal. Thus, becoming a black woman, in this context, comes through the pain of the epidermisization of an inferiority that limits the subject.