Y con mi pelito apretao: una experiencia de racismo escolar desde los lenguajes y las percepciones referidas al cabello y a la estética afro.

Abstract

This reflection article develops the expressions and social representations about those with whom cultural histories and practices are not shared. In this sense, it is intended to present an analysis of some experiences of school racism, in which discriminatory languages, perceptions, and behaviors are evidenced concerning black, afro-descendant, Raizal, Palenquero, and Afro-diasporic girls and young women because of their afro hair and aesthetics. Based on semi-directed interviews and conversations, a series of stories and information is compiled about how hair and its styles become an instrument of delegitimization and mockery. As preliminary results, the information obtained has been categorized according to its meanings in narratives of pain and offense, in stories of denial of their identity referents, and experiences of appropriation of aesthetic and cultural paradigms distant from ancestral traditions. All of the above is a product of interactions in external relationship contexts, such as educational institutions in which colonialist paradigms predominate concerning perceptions of ethnicity, gender, and aesthetics. Concluding, the text presents some alternative considerations, extracted from the voices of girls and young women, in which actions are proposed both for the reaffirmation of identity and for the commitments to be assumed by the school.