During an interview with the Brasil de Fato website and the site’s radio station, Santos recounts how these forms of discrimination, even subtle or naturalized, leave deep and lasting marks on the lives of Black children from their first months of life. Some take longer to walk due to lack of stimulation. Others, lacking affection, develop rapidly out of necessity.

The marks of racism in early childhood are also evident in the way other children reproduce exclusion. “The Black child will be the last one chosen to play, the last one to dance at the June festival (Festa Junina). If adults do this, the white child learns that they can do it too,” warns the author.

The writer, who draws attention to the way Black children’s bodies are treated with suspicion or discomfort, points out that many of these attitudes are unconsciously reproduced by educators, but that doesn’t make them any less harmful.

“We were built on a society in which racism is structural. The repeated choices denied to Black babies are often not even noticed by those who raise them,” she observes.

For Santos, these experiences don’t disappear over time, even if children don’t have conscious memories, and stressed that: “Racism may not be remembered, because they are very young children, but it leaves traces.”

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