El Ciudadano
Original article: ¿Qué no estamos viendo? Racismo y violencia en nuestras escuelas
By Mauricio Figueroa Sepúlveda and Aléxis Sanhueza Rodríguez, Academics at Catholic University of Temuco, Researchers at Millennium Nucleus MRACE
Recent events have shocked educational communities across the nation, revealing disturbing trends surrounding violence in schools.
On the morning of Monday, July 27, a 7-year-old Dominican student was attacked with a sharp weapon by another student inside the Islas de Chile Primary School in La Granja. The child sustained multiple injuries and was urgently transported to Padre Hurtado Hospital, where she is currently in stable condition.
Days later, on Thursday, July 30, a 15-year-old Venezuelan teenager tragically lost his life after being stabbed outside the Santiago de Compostela Polivalente High School in San Bernardo.
Despite the distinct circumstances of each incident, their occurrence within a short time frame reignites serious concerns regarding the violence permeating our educational environments.
Beyond the specific details of these cases and the responsibilities to be clarified through ongoing investigations, the fact that both victims were migrant students shifts the focus from the violent episodes to the underlying social and institutional conditions that allow such events to unfold.
In light of these occurrences, one pressing question arises: What are we failing to see?
Extreme forms of violence rarely emerge suddenly; they often result from prolonged processes of discrimination, exclusion, harassment, and dehumanization, which, when repeated in daily life, become normalized.
Various studies have indicated that in Chile, many migrant and Indigenous children and adolescents experience different forms of racial violence on a daily basis, which often remains invisible or is not analyzed with the depth it deserves.
Expressions of exclusion related to skin color, nationality, accent, or ethnic origin are frequently downplayed as jokes, leading to widespread silence—both individually and institutionally.
However, to assume that racial violence originates solely within schools is a form of analytical blindness. Educational institutions are not separate from society; they mirror, reproduce, and often intensify the inequalities, prejudices, and violence present beyond their walls.
For instance, schools are influenced by hate speech in political debates, discussions at home, content circulating on social media, and particularly impactful representations promoted by the media.
The media coverage surrounding migration often associates foreigners with crime, security crises, border chaos, or irregular migration, further entrenching processes of criminalization and racialization of specific migrant groups.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable question is not just what we do in response to incidents of violence, but what we failed to notice before they occurred.
What stories do we listen to and which ones do we dismiss? How many times did a racist insult go unrecognized as just a joke? How many experiences of discrimination remained invisible because those who witnessed them lacked the tools to understand them?
The issue is not solely the absence of rules or protocols; often, it stems from the inability to recognize and respond to racism when it becomes normalized.
Sociologist France Winddance Twine describes «racial literacy» as the ability to recognize, interpret, and respond to racism. This capacity is not solely the responsibility of schools; it also demands engagement from public institutions, the media, and ultimately, all citizens.
Strengthening school coexistence remains an urgent task. However, it would be insufficient to think that the solution solely lies with schools. The challenge lies in building a society capable of recognizing how racism and xenophobia are produced and reproduced across various public life spaces before they enter classrooms.
Ultimately, the question may not be what happened in La Granja or San Bernardo, but rather what we overlooked before it happened. Because what a society fails to recognize in time will hardly be prevented afterward.
Learning to see racism is likely one of the most urgent democratic challenges of our time.
Mauricio Figueroa Sepúlveda and Aléxis Sanhueza Rodríguez
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