Racism in childhood and the childhood of racism: life and tracks of a black child

Abstract

This article, based on an archaeological-type methodology of genealogy, aimed at retrieving and mapping fragments of the life of a black child in a judicial document housed at the Simonense Historical Museum in 1861. Further, it intends to understand this document, its speeches and positions, deciphering how the legal machinery worked in its most expressive concept of power-knowledge, and what views and approaches the local power used to manage lives and bodies. The work also sought to understand how, in that nineteenth-century context, “color” and “race” influenced procedural disentangling. The work led us to find that in the middle of the 19th century a new idea of ‘child’ came into being. This child model, idealized at that time by hygienist medicine, would only serve the white, Catholic, wealthy child. It would not support the black child. It was not just an existing type of racism, but a new type of racism that was born along with the very idea of a child. It was the childhood of this type of racism in Brazil. And this racism would have consequences for legal proceedings involving black children. It would give rise to selective justice, with judicial decisions affected by the racial issue.