Narrating Racism in Bogotá's Public Schools

Racism continues to be an unresolved subject in Colombian schools. This article analyzes and interpret s the experiences of racism of 15 Afro-descendant students in primary education in Bogota. It s theoretical and methodological frameworks are based on narrative studies, particularly on the analysis of canonical narratives developed by Labov and Waletzky (1967) and the short narrative analysis approach developed by Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008), De Fina (2015, 2022), and Georgakopoulou (2015), among others. The results showed that children have difficulties in narrating personal experiences of racism, which is why the denial of racism constitutes a significant tendency, followed by ignorance of the concept s of racism and discrimination, the participants confusion of these terms with other practices unrelated to skin color, and their non-telling of canonical stories involving experiences of racism, which are mostly replaced with short generic narratives pointing to recurring actions rather than concrete and personal situations. It is concluded that it is necessary to develop strategies for racialized subject s to narrate their experiences and, thereupon, to think about how to face this scourge that is increasingly present in school institutions.