Store in Salvador stops selling ceramic slaves after criticism

The Hangar das Artes store, located at the Salvador airport, even put up for sale, for R$99.90 a unit, at least seven ceramic souvenirs with images of black people represented as chained slaves.

This Wednesday (9), the Public Ministry of Bahia ordered the notification of the store’s representative to provide information within five days, counting from the date of receipt.

In a publication on social networks also this Wednesday, the store said it was wrong and classified the exhibition as a misfortune, “even taking care in the selection of products to be marketed”.

The products were removed from the shelves after the repercussion of the case.

The establishment received a flurry of criticism after a passenger exposed on social media, on Sunday (6), a photo of the window with the representations as handicrafts under the identification “ceramic slave”.

The image was recorded by historian Paulo Cruz, 39, when he returned with a couple of friends to Rio de Janeiro, where he lives. He was on a ten-day trip to see his family in Bahia, where he hadn’t set foot in more than two decades.

“At Salvador’s international airport, the store @hangardasartes displays figures of slaves for sale on its shelf. CHAINED. At the port of entry and exit of the blackest city in the Americas. The price of our history, genocide and pain? R$99.90 “, published.

“While waiting for the flight, we entered the store, when we came across those pictures on the main shelf,” said Cruz, who is black. “At first, it was a shock. Afterwards, the feeling became one of indignation.”

According to the passenger, the images had an approximate size of 15 to 20 centimeters. “I just wanted to get out of there. I didn’t get to question anyone, because there were only two salespeople, one of them black. I can imagine the embarrassment”, she said.

The case had repercussions on Monday (7) after the original publication was reproduced by activist Antônio Isupério, who shared Cruz’s complaint with his more than 85,000 followers on the social network Instagram.

“Can you imagine that you could have a doll of Jewish children in ‘ovens’ to be sold as props? So, that doesn’t happen because the repudiation of Nazi violence is already in the public domain, while we n*gros are still in the process of conquering of our humanity”, wrote Isupério.

Lívia Vaz, prosecutor in the Justice Department to Combat Racism at the Bahia Public Ministry, raises a similar question. She asks whether sculptures of white bodies in chains, wearing robes with the Star of David, would be marketed as decorative objects.

“Why naturalize when it comes to black bodies? In Brazil, the last country in the West to declare slavery abolished, there is an essentially anti-black necropolitics, which involves not only physical extermination, but various forms of symbolic death”, he commented.

In addition to publishing the note with an apology, Hangar said it had removed all parts from circulation, but, according to the company Vinci, which manages the airport, the request came from the concessionaire responsible for the terminal.

Also on Monday, the store published a retraction note in which it said that the sculptures were images “of the Old Black, spirits that present themselves under the archetype of old Africans who lived in the slave quarters, mostly, as enslaved” and stated that, even so, that was a wrong way to represent them.

The president of the AFA (Brazilian Association for the Preservation of Afro-Amerindian Cults), Leonel Monteiro, says that, although in life the entities called pretos velhas may have been enslaved, on the spiritual plane, the imagery representation of them is of free people.

“Structural racism on the part of Brazilian society manifests itself in several ways, one of them as religious intolerance, but in this case, it portrays the way of thinking that this type of thing is normal. Even worse, cultural,” said Monteiro.

The store was criticized by the president of the Human Rights and Defense of Democracy Commission of the Chamber of Salvador, Marta Rodrigues (PT), and by councilor Sílvio Humberto (PSB), who defended a boycott of the store.