Against racism, education – 01/31/2024 – Cida Bento

Some news related to racial issues caught our attention this week. One of them was the initiative of a group of entities to propose the inclusion of racial equity goals in the new PNE (National Education Plan), which will establish the objectives to be pursued by the country in this area until 2034, as reported in this Sheet.

The newspaper also reminds us that, ten years ago, when the first PNE was approved, conservative groups managed to remove all mentions of racial, gender and sexual orientation equality.

The second piece of news that caught our attention is that the Rio de Janeiro Court accepted the complaint from that state’s Public Prosecutor’s Office and made defendants in a racial slur case the two women who gave bananas and stuffed monkeys to black children, in May 2023.

This action by the influencers aimed to humiliate children, attack their dignity due to the color of their skin, their racial affiliation. And these black children are part of a segment that is in a persistent situation throughout the history of education in the country, of being those who drop out the most from school and have the worst performance. And this is associated with a school that is not hospitable to children, that does not recognize them, that humiliates them exactly as the influencers did.

Violence against black children, which is part of Brazil’s history, brings two elements that have been extremely frequent in cases of racism, which is associating black people with animals, with monkeys. And, when these influencers film and post videos of the children receiving the gift, these videos are investigated and they become defendants, the Judiciary takes a step forward in the country’s education and civilization process.

There is no way not to know that bananas and monkeys have been fundamental elements of the discrimination processes that have gained a lot of visibility in recent years. And then I remember in particular the case of Vinicius Junior.

Revisiting the countless cases of violence against the player, we see that football team fans imitated sounds and gestures of monkeys and ordered Vinicius Junior to pick up bananas that they threw on the field. In other words, bananas and monkeys have been associated with acts of racism against black people, and this has been highly visible in the press, so there is no way for influencers not to know about this.

They knew what they were doing. And their actions express racial hatred of a whiteness that does not accept otherness, does not accept that another segment occupies, as required by the Federal Constitution, its place in the country, its aesthetic, religious, cultural expression.

Whiteness as a place of privilege is understood as supremacist, occupying a special place, and tries to place the non-white population — in this case, our children — in a place of humiliation, of inferiority, animalizing them.

On the opposite side of the influencers’ initiative, we have the expression throughout Brazil of efforts by educators and education managers to promote racial equity and value the diversity of cultures and religions that make up Brazil.

It is worth remembering here initiatives from different civil society organizations, including the Educar Award for Racial and Gender Equality, a Ceert initiative that in 20 years of existence has collected almost 4,000 experiences from hundreds of Brazilian municipalities, of good valorization initiatives religion, culture, phenotype.

And precisely this Wednesday (31st) we launched the ninth edition of this award, seeking to identify experiences carried out across the country that promote anti-racist education, which, without a doubt, strengthens the path towards consolidating Brazilian democracy.

This column was written in partnership with journalist Flavio Carrança, from Cojira.

LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access five free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.