“They keep teasing each other”: youth, racism, and the everyday production of inequalities at school

Abstract

This article analyzes how high school students make sense of racism and other forms of prejudice in everyday school life, taking the expression “just joking” as an analytical key to understand processes of trivialization, silencing, and reproduction of inequalities. The study derives from a doctoral research project carried out between April and September 2025 with a first-year high school class in a state public school in Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, organized under a full-time education program. With a qualitative approach informed by action research, the study combined participant observation, field notes, a questionnaire, pedagogical interventions, and semi-structured interviews. This article focuses on the narratives of ten students, articulated with records of everyday school life. The analysis draws on studies of youth, youth cultures, recreational racism, school violence, and intersectionality. The findings indicate three combined movements: prejudice reframed as “joking”, silencing expressed through statements such as “it goes unnoticed”, and fragile institutional responses summarized by “there is no way to prove it”. They also show that race, gender, and sexuality intersect in the production of hierarchies and unequal recognition. Listening to youth, therefore, makes normalized violence visible and reinforces the school’s pedagogical responsibility for anti-racist and democratic practices.