Corporeidades negras e Educação Física Escolar – construindo práticas antirracistas nos cotidianos da Educação Infantil

Abstract

The ethno-racial issue in Brazil is extremely complex. The trade of African citizens as slave labor with a view to producing wealth for the colonizing European elites, and the racialist theories, based on “pseudosciences” that attributed to the black supposed biological and cultural inferiority as a way to justify slavery , produced stigmas that relegated black populations to the condition of non-existence. The Brazilian context, especially from the mid-19th century onwards, represents a special moment in terms of social struggles, from the perspective of ethno-racial relations, since with the slavery process in decline and many blacks and mestizos already freed, inserted in the social context, Brazil was faced with something unique in the world until then, a country highly racially mixed. This mixture of races, according to the ruling elites of the time, was something that would make the construction of Brazil as a nation unfeasible. Nowadays, we see a strongly racist society, consequences of racialist theories, money laundering policies and the consequences of these, in the form of the myth of racial democracy. The split between black citizens and the pejoratively recognized as “mulattos”, produced an illusory acceptance of the mestizo as an intermediate racial class. As part of the black movements to fight racism, we focus on the present research pedagogical practices of an anti-racist character in school daily life. Starting from school Physical Education and Early Childhood Education, we recognize, in affirmative micro actions, through the body culture bias, a potent form of anti-racist struggle. Physical Education, which in its epistemological trajectory was used by government policies as an ideological tool of exclusion, today has, through body culture, the possibility of breaking with exclusionary practices, approaching and appropriating other knowledge in dialogues with small children of the popular classes, in the strengthening and exaltation of their forms of being in the world, in the search to enable the construction of positively affirmed black corporealities. Thus, in this narrative research with the lived experiences, I sought, in the overlapping of my personal and professional life, in the experiences as a black Brazilian citizen, father of black children, son, teacher and researcher, to understand the meaning of being black in Brazil and the contributions that anti-racist pedagogical practices can bring to young children in order to deconstruct stigmas and favor the construction of positive black ethno-racial identities.