This doctoral research brings as main object the perceptions of teenagers about school failure and racism. With this, we aim at understand how the tonic of racism operates when dealing with success and failure from the perspective of teenagers in the final series of middle school. For the research, a case study was conducted from two public schools located in Rio de Janeiro and the Baixada Fluminense municipalities with teeneagers from eighth and ninth years of the middle school, with 13 to 15 years. The research has as characteristic to be a case study with qualitative approach and analyzed from the data obtained in the observations of the school routine, in the questionnarie and in pedagogical workshops with teenagers. We aimed at understand how students perceived racism in their school and everyday experiences, their understanding of school success and failure, and the influence of support networks and their incentives as a key in the school success experience. It was observed that racial violence is consolidated through silence and the use of the tone of voice as an instrument of power, superiority and oppression for those who occupy a hegemonic place. Black students make silence as a survival strategy, while creating secure situations to talk about racism. The tonic of violence of racism is expressed through the curses in the moment of conflicts or nicknames that are naturalized as a joke and affection. The racial democracy myth is swept under in the ideology of equality and religious perspective. The family, in the representation of the maternal figure, mainly, continues being the main support network in the construction of the empowerment of the school success, nevertheless, the novelty is the use of the Internet like way of support in the moments of difficulties and of familiar absence between the low-income students. We conclude that the non-critical view of teenagers on racism and the debate about school success and failure is consistent with the logic established in a society based on racial hierarchy and under the effects of coloniality. The existence of a racial myopia, that is, the difficulty of seeing the plots of racism or the embarrassed view on it generates advantages and disadvantages that is the proof of its functionality.