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Brazil is days away from defining who will be its next president: if Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, a favorite in the polls, returns to power, or if he re-elects Jair Bolsonaro, who accentuated the polarization in his four years in office. At the end of a campaign plagued by disinformation and violence, France 24 analyzes the issue of racism that affects the black population and that, whoever wins, they will have to face a scourge that affects the social foundations of the Latin American giant.
In Brazil, discriminatory treatment and excessive use of force leading to disproportionate deaths of people of African descent or African migrants persist despite “piecemeal progress” in the fight against systemic racism.
These are the conclusions of a UN report published in September 2022 on structural racism in some countries of America and its impact on black communities.
The report cites the Brazilian Public Security Forum, according to which almost 80% of the victims of police operations in 2020 were black people.
“Brazil has always been a racist country,” explains Lourenço Cardoso, professor at Unilab University and author of the book ‘Branquitude: Estudos sobre a Identidade Branca no Brasil’ (Studies on white identity in Brazil), in dialogue with France 24.
The academic describes a country in which racism has always been “structural and institutional”, affecting all spheres of society, from political power to Justice, through education, employment, access to decent housing and health.
But Lourenço Cardoso points out that there was a before and after with the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro to the Presidency in 2018.
“The current far-right government in Brazil is promoting a more direct type of racism,” he says, before declaring that “for black people in Brazil, what is at stake with the elections on the 30th is a matter of life or death. “.
Violence against black people in the Bolsonaro Administration
Since the election of the current head of state, the black population of Brazil has experienced an increase in violence, while black organizations and movements denounce that racism has practically become a “state policy”.
In the last four years, the cases and examples of this brutality have been numerous: the death of João Alberto Silveira Freitas, murdered in November 2020 by security guards at a Carrefour supermarket in Porto Alegre; the impunity that persists in the case of the murder of Marielle Franco in Rio de Janeiro in March 2018 or the murder of Moïse Mugenyi Kabagambe, a refugee of Congolese origin beaten to death at the end of January 2022 in Rio de Janeiro, when he went to claim payment of his salary at a restaurant where he worked. And more recently, in May 2022, 25 people were murdered in Vila Cruzeiro, a marginal and predominantly Afro-descendant neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro.
Data from the Atlas of Violence 2021, which compiles figures from 2019, show that of the 45,503 violent deaths that occurred in Brazil in 2019, 77% of the victims were black youths, which, according to the organizations, demonstrates a lethal and intentional ferocity towards the black population. Lourenço Cardoso denounces what he calls a “genocidal policy”.
Suzette Lima Kourliandsky, president of ALMAA (Global Actions for Latin America and Africa) and a doctoral student at Jules Verne University in France, says that under the Jair Bolsonaro Administration, the state of Rio de Janeiro, for example, “has become militarized” to the point of becoming a “militia state”.
An accusation voiced by many. In his book ‘The Republic of the Militias’, the journalist and politician Bruno Paes Manso argues that in Rio de Janeiro, the militias descended from the “Death Squads”, whose victims are mostly black, are supported by Jair Bolsonaro and impose terror over more than half of the territory, as well as over political and national life.
The trivialization of racist discourse and acts
In addition to the cases of violence, as denounced by social movements, President Bolsonaro has also contributed greatly to the normalization of racist discourse. In 2017, he said that Afro-descendants “do nothing”.
“I don’t even think they are good for procreation,” he added after visiting a quilombo, a community founded by runaway slaves or refugees, in the interior of Brazil.
Bolsonaro embodies what Brazil has always been
In the first three years of the Bolsonaro government, from 2019 to 2020, there were 94 racist statements by public officials, many of them by the president himself. These figures come from a survey carried out by the NGO Terra de Direitos.
But according to journalist and anthropologist Jaime Alves, the Brazilian president “is not a political accident.” For him, the head of state simply embodies “what Brazil has always been.”
Suzete Lima Kourliandsky confirms this and comments that Bolsonaro represents the rejection of the middle classes and the elite with respect to the inclusive and egalitarian policies put in place by the Workers’ Party (PT) of former president ‘Lula’, such as the system of quotas adopted to favor access to university for Afro-descendants, indigenous populations, or the social rights established by former president Dilma Rousseff for domestic workers.
The myth of Brazilian “racial democracy”
Brazil has the second largest black and mestizo population in the Americas after the United States: between 50 and 54% of the population is Afro-descendant, that is, more than 100 million people out of the 214 million Brazilians. If violence and racism against these populations have increased under the Bolsonaro years, these phenomena were certainly not born with him.
During the three centuries of slavery in the Americas, Brazil introduced four million Africans until 1850. By comparison, the United States received some 400,000 Africans during the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade. In 1888, Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish the slave trade.
But during the 20th century, there were no specific racial laws or policies such as segregation or apartheid, unlike what happened in the United States or South Africa. This is why many Brazilians perceived their country as a “racial democracy” for a long time after the abolition of slavery.
Márcio André, a doctor in political science, recalls that it was the black movements that, throughout the 20th century and until today, have not stopped denouncing structural racism and have broken the myth of Brazilian “racial democracy”.
But this myth, however, “persists”, according to Márcio André, which makes the fight against racism “complicated” because many Brazilians, including black people, continue to think that they live in a country where there is a certain racial harmony.
“For them, racism is not the problem. The poor, who are generally black, do not see their poverty as a racial problem, the lack of access to education, to health services, they do not associate it with a racial problem or as a result of racism”, sums up the academic.
Yet for most black Brazilians, the stakes in the upcoming election are crucial. All experts on the subject agree that the structural racism that permeates all areas of Brazilian life will not end with the election of the opponent to the current president. But many hope that at least some essential public policies for the most vulnerable black populations, eliminated in recent years, will be reactivated.
