My skin is kind of sort of brownish pinkish yellowish white.
My eyes are greyish blueish green,
but I’m told they look orange in the night.
My hair is reddish blondish brown,
but its silver when its wet.
And all the colors I am inside have not been invented yet.
Shel Silverstein

It all started in 2018, when be.Living teachers felt an urgent need to develop a more robust and meaningful work on ethnic-racial diversity. Statements like “My cousin said that children are born black, because mothers do not wash their tummies during pregnancy” revealed, on a daily basis, how structural racism can manifest itself and perpetuate in our society, often in a subtle manner, through children’s unconscious speech. At the time, teachers, together with the school management, decided to look carefully at this important issue, undertaking a consistent work to include the anti-racist agenda in the school curriculum and the students’ daily learning process.

Teacher Érica Magosso recalls she then, along with teacher Luciana Nahas, started working with the little ones from the Blue classes in an activity in which they were introduced to different types of beans and a discussion on how to properly caring for plants was promoted. She explored with the poem “Colors”, by Shel Silverstein, with the students, among other texts addressing issues related to respect for others, such as “Hug o’ war” and “Helping”.

People’s different physical traits were also discussed with the children, both in English and in Portuguese. “We proposed that they observe other children’s and the teachers’ hairs and we made a picture in which they themselves categorized their hair types as straight, curled, curly, brown, as well as the colors of their eyes. Regarding the skin, we worked with them on a watercolor and gouache mixing technique (white + red which is the color of blood + yellow + brown) and we reapplied such technique in several activities. We tested the results on their own skins, made drawings of their perceptions of classmates and researched different skin tones across the school. We added words like “brownish”, “brown”, “curly hair”, “coily hair” to our vocabulary and majorly focused on the colors they identified”, the teacher explains.

She recalls that an important change was to ban the use of the term “skin color” in the school, mainly attributed to that shade of pink found in colored pencil boxes. “We put forward the idea of that being a tone of pink and we introduced a set of crayons to the children with 24 light to dark skin tone options. It was kept in the Arts Corner and whenever there was an intervention or design proposal, we would resort to it to reinforce that people’s skin tones are all not the same. If they were going to draw their families, we would question them whether fathers, mothers and siblings were all the same color or not. Among all skin tones, which were the most similar to each of their family members’?”.

As a way to also show appreciation for everyone who is part of the be.Living community, one of the final productions for the 2018 Art Fair consisted of the students taking pictures of all school employees and drawing their portraits. Our boys and girls illustrated their perceptions on those professionals who are extremely relevant for the school, such as Fernanda, from Finance; Rosa, from our kitchen staff; Elias and Cícero, our doorkeepers; Celene, who works at our reception; among others.  “This was intended to lend greater visibility and compliment those who are not usually recognized by our society”, Érica explains.

The following year, taking into account collective aspirations of the educational team to address ethnic-racial issues within the school context, the school management provided teachers with a training on Ethnic-Racial Education, with the purpose of promoting a space for dialogue and reflection at be.Living. Teachers were able to meet renowned professionals in the research of ethnic-racial topics and Afro-Brazilian, indigenous and Latin American literary and academic production.

For teacher Dedé Ladeira, from Year One, educators’ yearning for an increasingly qualitative and transformative knowledge transfer is of major importance: “As a black woman, I see the impacts of such initiatives as meaningful and extremely positive. I have worked in other institutions and I realize that the be.Living team is very unique in terms of how they build knowledge. It is nice to see that such process, such yearning for awareness came from the teachers themselves who, in 2018, when I wasn’t even part of the team yet, requested training on Ethnic-Racial Education so that, in this sense, they would be able to transfer knowledge in a qualitative manner”.

During the training, the entire team revisited old narratives seeking to reconstruct new meanings for the history of Brazil, its colonization and the impacts these relations have, even nowadays, on how we create repertoire and teach our children.

A debate on Laws 10.639/03 and 11.645/08 was raised, which instruct private and public schools to include in their curricula and pedagogical projects the study of African, Afro-Brazilian and indigenous cultures and their influence in the formation of the Brazilian identity, recognizing their contributions in the social, economic and political realms.

Another much-discussed issue was the democratization of information and knowledge in order to contribute to the appreciation, strengthening and assurance of the ethnic-racial identities of students teachers, managers and others involved in the teaching-learning process. 

Brazilian Culture teacher Mafuane Oliveira was in charge of curating the training, for which, she recalls, the pedagogical practices carried out by the school over the past 10 years were analyzed and mapped. “The training enabled us to identify the topics that were already given attention within the school environment regarding the work on Ethnic-Racial Education, such as the ‘Civil Rights’, ‘Revolta dos Malês’, ‘Projeto Ubuntu’, ‘Projeto de Culturas Indígenas’, ‘Coisas do Mundo’ and ‘Coisas d’Aqui’ projects and the issues addressed in the Social Sciences and History curricula. We were also able to pinpoint our weaknesses, such as the need to review the school’s bibliographic collection and provide the students with access opportunities to diverse literary and historical narratives that asdressed the respect for the differences of all social-racial groups and cultures”.

She helped teacher Érica put together a list of children’s books, considering different age groups and plots, such biographies and stories on the cultures and ethnicities from other regions of the world, including Africa, Mexico, India, Latin America and Afro- and Latino-descendants in the USA.

“When we consider sharing stories and narratives within a racialized society such as ours, we must always ask ourselves what kind of stories we should actually tell. What kind of plots?  How often? To whom? After the Training on Ethnic-Racial Education, these questions became more frequent, since stories, as well as games, are very important for the development of our children. It is through play and imagination that children begin to experience the world and build their identity. The more diverse our repertoire is, the more possibilities we will have to build healthy and respectful social relationships”, Mafu explains.

Teacher Dedé, who is working on the African continent with children aged 6 and 7, seeking to help them better acknowledge the African culture, feels that Brazil – a country with a majorly black population – direly needs to adopt an anti-racist educational process. “The current moment we are going through shows us that, as a society, we have long been doing things the same way and the reactions are always the same. How long will we keep acting the same way and achieving the same results? A different response from society requires a change of approach from schools so that children have the chance to look at the racial issue through a whole new lens, which is what our country needs. For this reason, the effort the school undertakes to help to transform this naive speech that contributes to the standardization of racism, considering its curriculum not only as a means to exchange information with children, but to reflect with children, is really very important”.

Teacher Mafu believes that online initiatives like the popular hashtag #BlackoutTuesday are important, but an actual transformation of relationships will come through education, information, revisiting history and changing old habits. “Above all, changing in our daily actions and attitudes, which go far beyond sharing news or joining online movements. Let’s keep attentively listening and willing to learn and transform the world forever!”.