ABSTRACT:
This article aims to bring visibility to the use of humor as a mechanism of structural racism and the marks left on the body-territory of black adolescent girls who are students in a public school in the city of Governador Valadares, MG. The study draws on authors who discuss race and black feminist authors, conceptually operating with recreational racism, intersectionality, and body-territory. Empirical material was produced in thematic workshops, and the narratives brought by the 12 students participating in the research were analyzed through episodic analysis. The narrated episodes denounce the marks on the body-territory of these adolescents, as well as the naturalization of race and gender oppression, instrumentalized by recreational racism that appears in daily school life. This presence creates and reaffirms stereotypes about the category "black woman", provokes desires to stay away from school to avoid being the target of "jokes" and/or "pranks", and questioning their own humanity, reflecting if their appearances resemble the animals used to "insult" them. The adolescents denounce the silencing of the school in the face of this type of "humor", putting pressure on its naturalization and challenging us, as educators, to take a stance against these silences that engender exclusions and the naturalization of racism, among other mechanisms, disguised as humor but need to be named as recreational racism.
Keywords:
black adolescent girls; basic education; intersectionality; recreational racismo; body-territory