Page 2 0f 2

Our goal at this point of view is to make them see that the racial discrimination in Brazil and in all of the world can be described as a set of economic, political, social, and ideological relations--as a systemic process grounded in everyday life. As a result, in general, racism is tolerated as if it were a "normal" procedure of the dominant (white) culture, as was demonstrated by the statistical results mentioned above. All this evidence indicates the need for a new strategy against racism, that is, to develop as much as possible, through a global political education strategy, the powerful flame of instruction for consciousness. It’s difficult but possible.

For all these reasons I decide to introduce into my teaching at the University and in the black community where I have been working for several years some essential elements for reading and discussion. These include:

• Conscious of our blackness;
• Why self-esteem has been lost over the years by most people in our black commmunity and
• How to detect veiled of prejudice.

In this way I’m trying to show people that racism in Brazil is so subtle that the offenses are almost taken as mere jokes in songs, in textbooks, in illustrations, in poems and other cultural texts and contexts. I start this learnine process using children’s literature where we can find a lot of good examples of exclusion that isn’s usually noticed by the majority of readers because these publications are seen as "innocent" and "sweet" children’s books. What we can see in these books?

• Black characters in general don’t have a structural familly; they live alone. But when the parents appear, they don’t work in a respected profession. The father is a simple laborer, for example, and the mother is a housemaid;
• At school black children are always disturbing the classroom order and they are punished by the principal;
• In general, children in these books are not shown as being intelligent enough to succeed in school, and so they are shown as failures;
• They are poor, and receive kindness and sympathy from the white people who are rich or middle class;
• In many stories black characters are not called by their Christian names but by some nickname, according the stereotype created to represent the respective character;
• Rarely are the heroes either Black adults or children in this literature. Kings, queens and princess are Europeans, are always blond, with light (clear) skin and they have blue eyes. They are beautiful, tall and strong-- exactly the opposite of the way black people are portrayed in the majority of the stories written by whites.

This is just a single aspect of a big universe of racism and exclusion that we can document in our daily lives that I choose to discuss with black teachers, university and colleges students and the community in general, with the goal of demonstrating the inherent problems that exist in our society but which are not discussed or addressed as part of our national public debate on education. Along with some other black leaders in the country, I am personally involved in discussing these issues in schools, at black programs and through a few non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

We know that if we don’t change the history, if we don’t restructure our communities; if we don’t include Black people in the society’s formal knowledge(s), and if we don’t stop--by denunciation and/or affirmative actions–the veiled racial discrimination that exists in the public and private Brazilian school system, we will never attain our rightful place in this society. And the myth of the white supremacy will endure for more "500 (more) years of oppression" in Brazil.

Professor Juraci teaches Children’s Literature in the Teacher Education Program at the Faculdades Integradas Ritter Dos Reis (College) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The title of her Master’s Thesis research in Portuguese is Literatura Infanto-Juvvenil Angolana: Cinco Autores Contemporaneos (Children’s Literature from Angola: Five Contemporary Authors).