Racialized pretend play: antiracist praxis and other narratives in early childhood education

Abstract

The article discusses the centrality of social markers of difference, with a special emphasis on ethnic-racial relations and racialization processes, within the scope of Early Childhood Education. Understanding play, interactions, and pretend play as fundamental rights and structural axes through which children produce culture and signify the world, the study analyzes how toys and ludic artifacts act as supports for social representations and vectors of power. Based on a historical and contemporary mapping of research on racial identification in childhood, it becomes evident how young children assimilate and reproduce bodily asymmetries and hierarchies inherited from the colonial matrix. Against this backdrop, the article presents and analyzes the report of an antiracist pedagogical praxis developed with very young children in a public daycare center in the municipality of São Francisco do Conde, in the Recôncavo region of Bahia, whose community is predominantly Black. Aligned with the assumptions of Paulo Freire and Kabengele Munanga, as well as national curricular guidelines, the investigated practice demonstrates how teacher intentionality and the structuring of everyday dimensions—such as welcoming, affirmative children's literature, the selection of representative toys, experiences with nature, and aesthetic and musical expressions—are capable of fracturing institutional and commercial racism. It concludes that critical pedagogical mediation and the qualification of everyday material and spatial culture in educational institutions are determining factors in destabilizing hegemonic discourses, promoting the strengthening of self-esteem, the positive affirmation of Black bodies, and the consolidation of pluralistic and emancipatory childhood identities.