BLACK YOUTH FROM BANGU.
A PLACE OF NARRATIVES AND MEMORIES
Youth; blackness; narratives; Bangu, memories; leadership.
In presenting the reality of black youths in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, Bangu neighborhood, we must reflect on how discrimination, inequalities, and lack of access to opportunities, whether in the educational or professional sphere, and the lack of recognition of citizenship rights engender and foster social subalternization. The research aims to conceptualize the youths from the perspective of black young people and high school students, facing the youth violence that permeates this locality on a daily basis. Thus, we aim to look at this place through the experiences of these youthful black groups, not solely through mortality rates. The black youth of Bangu takes on the central role in the political and identity construction of the neighborhood. The study presents 13 high school students. The methodological criterion for the selection of these students was their self-declared racial identity and the desire to participate in the research, presented to all classes of the educational institution. The qualitative methodology used sensitive listening (Barbier, 2002) as an instrument, based on the narratives of interviews and group discussions grounded in a shared understanding of racism and violence. The movie M8: When Death Rescues Life (directed by Jeferson De, 2020) served as a catalyst for this debate. In subsequent meetings, the students produced educommunicative material shared on Instagram within the school routine and in the Bangu territory. Results: the research highlighted the interest of the youth in racism/violence topics; provided the creation of reflective content in the language of the youth; facilitated the expression of emotions and 'aquilombamento' (communal bonding); was well-received by the school management, which allowed the study to be conducted as an extracurricular activity and verbally expressed the institutional need to address anti-racism themes in the school.