Relações entre racismo e medicalização na educação

Abstract

The present work arises from a concern about the medicalization process and how it would be, or not, intertwined with racism, since the social project of the construction of Brazil as a nation is strongly crossed by racism. With the objective of elaborating a theoretical essay on race and medicalization, a bibliographical research was carried out. The study was produced in two stages. At first, we carried out a narrative review based on the consultation of articles, books, theses and dissertations on racism, subjectivity and medicalization. This stage was designed to enable the theoretical foundation. In a second moment, we produced a systematic review, based on a bibliographic survey on the VHL-Psi and SciELO platforms. In this stage, we used the descriptors “medicalization and medicalization of education”. We selected 25 articles that were read, recorded and organized into two groups. The first brought together texts in which racism and medicalization were brought together. The term race appeared, often alongside social class, however, without further analysis, elaboration and articulation. The second group of articles, in turn, pointed to the relationship between racism and medicalization in education, considering the intertwining of this phenomenon with racist ideals, discourses and practices. It was noticed that, since the transition from Brazil Empire to Brazil Republic, the school institution has been crossed by practices and speeches inspired by the ideals of eugenics and mental hygiene that stipulated a model of ideal student - white, bourgeois, Europeanized. Science, for some time, has shown itself to be allied with racism, as it has spread and legitimized a supposed social and intellectual inferiority of black people, in contrast to what would be white superiority. It was noticed that through biopower strategies, the practice of medicalization keeps young black people on the sidelines. The mistaken prescription of medication for a large portion of students, especially in public schools, results in the silencing of voices and the docility of bodies that could point to the fractures of a structurally racist educational system. Rebellion and refusal through a context in which black subjectivity is not welcomed, nor space and possibilities, come to be understood as symptoms of pathologies supposedly inscribed in the bodies and minds of the educated black population. Thus, the regulation of behaviors, attitudes and postures through psychotropic drugs make resistance in the face of racism put into operation at structural, institutional, interpersonal and individual levels. Demonstrations with the potential to denounce and confront racism in the school environment are numbed and softened. Furthermore, contradictions and social injustices are totalized and centralized in the subjects in the form of a pathological symptom.