"In schoolbooks, there were never any black children," says Gabrielle Marquez, an 18-year-old student who admits she felt underrepresented in school materials. Today she studies medicine but admits that she often "felt like I couldn't make it" to finish school.
Her feeling is not unique. There are 34 million school-age Afro-descendant children in Latin America, yet even so, statistics indicate that 7 million of them will drop out of the education system before finishing elementary school ─ double the regional average compared to their peers of non-African descent.
"Textbooks are one of the many pedagogical tools available to teachers and students," says Germán Freire, senior human development specialist at the World Bank and author of a new report. The books "allow us to understand the type of visions, prejudices or omissions that affect the school experience of Afro-descendant children and adolescents," he explains
The World Bank report, Afro-descendant Inclusion in Education, continues an exhaustive research work on Afro-descendant populations in Latin America carried out in recent years, and reveals new data on the quality of education and the educational returns for this population. In addition, the report delves into one of the possible reasons for exclusion - racism in education - by identifying exclusion from education as one of the main factors that makes the regional educational crisis more profound for the Afro-descendant population.
All this is verified in interviews with Afro-descendant children and adolescents who share their reactions and tell their experiences in their own words.
Neither teachers nor schoolbooks
Racism, whether explicit or implicit, is a major factor behind the exclusion of Afro-descendants given that children and youth receive negative messages and stimuli about themselves and their life prospects.
"Most of the teachers are white," says Maybell Serrano, a 14-year-old student, reflecting on an image that appears in a schoolbook. An unsupportive faculty and a small number of teachers of African descent-who could be more sensitive and serve as role models-limits academic achievement in these populations.
Also, depictions in schoolbooks often do not promote recognition of the identity of Afro-descendant communities; on the contrary, they contribute to fostering stereotypes and typified representations of these communities.
The World Bank report includes a review of 5,121 images from 40 primary and secondary school textbooks from 10 Latin American countries. Afro-descendants were represented in only 15 percent of these images, mostly in activities associated with music, sports, and rural, manual or industrial work.
"School textbooks in the region rarely represent the contributions and aspirations of the Afro-descendant population," says Freire. "More often, they tend to reinforce visions that may not be negative in themselves, but that reproduce a limited and stereotypical view of their contributions to society, and that impact the aspirations and perception of opportunities of Afro-descendant boys and girls."
Roniel Mesa, an 18-year-old student, says that "it all starts at school". And he explains it clearly: "The books need to change so as not to repeat the same stereotype". He concludes that with that small change from one generation to the next, a permanent change will be achieved.
Changing the way textbooks deal with race relations and racism is a first step in the larger process of developing an anti-racist educational agenda. "That I can give a book to my niece and she opens and sees a black woman, a lawyer," Marquez proposes.
