Abstract

This essay aims to reflect on the impacts of state violence upon black lives and childhoods. In the wanderings through the city of Rio de Janeiro and in the theoretical trails proposed by antiracist and decolonial thinkers, we discuss the impacts and challenges of racism in the formative and existential itineraries of racialized bodies, crossed by the public necropolitics that provides the premises of the pedagogical government of peripheral childhoods and adolescences in large Brazilian cities. From the bumping into M., 11 years old, who sells chewing gum in the surroundings of a train station in Rio de Janeiro, we problematize the vulnerabilities produced and the systematic violations of the black children’s human rights, which hinder racial justice in the country, in face of the permanent conversion of differences into inferiorized inequalities. The violence of this injustice, according to the argument developed in the text, culminates in the reinforcement of the vilification and naturalization of racial inequalities against populations historically inferiorized by the colonial wrath. It also points to the need to think about black childhoods from the territory, in order to problematize inequities and disparities that persist. We conclude, finally, that the capture and nullification of black childhoods is a State project, guided by criminalizing and stereotyping practices of subjectivation which brutalize bodies and dehumanize black lives.