12.09.2022

Book Review: “O Avesso da Pele”

The Beacon Movement for Racial Equity is inspired by the school’s mission, which is based on diversity, acceptance, and solidarity as central ideas aligned with our values. 

The school community has discussed, reflected on, and gained awareness through training sessions and study groups in order to establish anti-racism practices, based on the purpose of forming students who are aware and responsible for being agents of change in society. 

The families got together in a committee formed by specialists, people engaged in the subject or interested in learning more. The participants wrote a sensible, yet forceful review to inspire us on the subject. 

Review: “O Avesso da Pele”, by Jeferson Tenório

“Then, sneakily, race occupied a space in your lives, and you didn’t even realize that. There was no turning back.”* If there is no turning back, there is the possibility of reconstructing this structural prejudice history present in our Brazil. “For it is necessary to preserve the inside out… and no matter how much your life is measured by color… there is a place of your own… unique… where the affections lie.”* Embracing, as much as uncomfortable. It is also provocative because of its raw, sentimental tone. It exposes the common places of this veiled racism present in our society. This is how this narrative, in the form of a monologue, by Jeferson Tenório, narrates, in the first person, the reconstruction of the life trajectory of Pedro’s parents, black people who lived in the South of the country and who faced, from an early age, the contradictions of our miscegenation history. Miscegenation that did not unite us, on the contrary, imposed a false harmony based on the perpetuation, even if disguised, of the socioeconomic structure of the colonial slavery era. “This story is still the story of an open wound.”* It is up to us to heal it, starting from what we carry in our hearts as to what it is to be non-white in Brazil.”

*Free translation