Education for racism through adultcentrism: necropolitics and the Black children

Abstract

In Brazil, the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, the effects of colonization reverberate in the insurgence of a necropolitics that directly affects Black youth and children. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, between the years of 2016 and 2020, 35 thousand people from 0 to 17 years old were killed in violent ways. In 2021, around 7 children or teenagers were victims of lethal violence per day. For such, the text updated the condition of contemporary necropolitics considering its colonizing genealogy, having as central axis the comprehension of «the complex of Miguel Otávio», (Souza and Carvalho, 2022, p. 7) as the capacity whether rational or not, conscious or unconscious, of adultcentrism to banalize the risks to which children are submitted, to the point of dying in gratuitous, stupid, violent, irresponsible and negligent forms. Considering examples such as Miguel Otávio Santana, who was 4 years old and was killed due to infant abandonment, and João Pedro Mattos, who was 14 years old and was shot by the police with a rifle, both cases taking place in the most rigid period of the COVID-19 quarantine, it is possible to understand that such processes educate the Brazilian society to treat differences as a synonym to inequalities and that adultcentrism is key in the composition of the Brazilian racism that sustains the death of Black children.