At the heart of this tragedy is race

Gender relations, black masculinities and narratives about prejudice and discrimination at school

Abstract

The present article is a section of a doctoral research of critical-interpretative anthropological approach to understand the phenomenon of the school gap of boys in relation to girls in the stage of secondary education in a public school in the Recôncavo Baiano. The research resorted to the production of strategies and methods preponderantly qualitative in the intention of identifying and analysing the processes that have led these subjects to leave school behind, interrupt their studies by means of dropping out or abandonment, as well as the daily forms of resistance of those who attend, and through them, perceive the way they negotiate and interpret their position as subjects in face of this school challenge. The particular analysis of this article starts from the very singularities and daily complexities of these boys against the values of hegemonic masculinity, from their own reflections and discussions about the construction of racialized masculinities and gender relations established in the school system. In a socially structured context like the school, gender practices have a determining aspect since we deal with the differences in a hierarchical and unequal way. In fact, since the colony until today, the social classification system is based on a racial and sexual hierarchy, and on the formation and distribution of social identities from superior to inferior, with the white male at the top of the pyramid and the indigenous and black at its base. Contrary to the discourse according to which the school is the basis for social transformation, in fact, it is the nucleus par excellence for the maintenance of the dominant status quo in society. In general, the pedagogical processes allow/provoke an erasure of the subjectivity of the student, an accommodation of him as an active political being and potential transformer of reality. The subjects of this investigation occupy a unique and incommunicable position, since posthumous slavery makes them live with gratuitous and structural violence in perpetuity, since they are situated outside the fabric of civil society and humanity; since violence does not depend on their own transgression, but because of who they are.