Racism is a silent organizer of social relations and its impact is like a spectrum: if on the one hand everyone claims it exists, on the other hand few confirm having seen it. Easy to recognize in verbal aggression, but hardly recognized as a catalyst for various social conflicts, such as lethal violence against black people. In Brazil, racism is maintained through a sophisticated mechanism of “deracialization” of reality, in such a way that, using irony: even when the victims are recurrently black, the crime is never based on race.
By the end of 2022, the analyzes will certainly allude to the countless cases of lethal violence involving black people. January began with Moïse Kabagambe, a Congolese refugee beaten to death in a kiosk in Barra da Tijuca, in Rio de Janeiro, after charging 200 reais for daily work. The generalized shock was due both to the intensity of the attacks and to the place where they took place: on the edge of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the municipality.
In response, a large demonstration was called. On a Sunday, on the beach, in the sun. While, on the sand, bathers enjoyed the Carioca summer, on the asphalt, representatives of various social and religious segments affirmed: “It was a crime committed by racism”. In testimony at the police station, those who killed him stated that they had not.
In February, two more cases: a man died shot by his neighbor when he was mistaken for a thief in São Gonçalo; and a candy salesman was killed while working at Estação das Barcas, in Niterói, by an off-duty military policeman, later indicted for qualified homicide for futile reasons.
In March, three young people were drinking at a bar in Gamboa, in Salvador, when they were killed during police action. Another young man, aged 17, was killed in April, as he left a charity event for children in the community of Dourado, in Cordovil, Rio de Janeiro, and had his body thrown into a ditch.
In May, after being approached by the Federal Highway Police of Sergipe while riding a motorcycle, a man was placed in a police van, and, after inhaling gas, he died as a result of “acute failure secondary to asphyxiation”, according to a published report.
In common: all black. Every month, new cases appear in the national news, and many others that did not generate the same public commotion, but which add to the official statistics on violent deaths in the country.
A repeating cycle
But, there is nothing new, 2022 reproduces previous years in which attacks took place in supermarkets, snack bars and malls in large urban centers, slums and peripheries. They change scenarios, maintain lethality against black people. And, as in every year, demonstrations are organized, without the numbers of violence being reduced. Thus, deaths follow one another, cause commotion, occupy spaces in the mainstream media, sometimes generate demonstrations, investigative reports and are soon forgotten.
In December 2022, few will know the names of the victims from the beginning of the year. And, in January 2023, the annual indicators are restarted.
Beating, murder by mistake, alleged involvement with crime, wrong place at the wrong time, excessive approach, different reasons that, at first glance, contradict the idea that racism would be the reason for the deaths of indistinctly black people. After all, anyone regardless of race could be in the same situation.
It would be a coincidence if, in Brazil, the chances of a black person suffering lethal violence were not 2.6 times greater than that of white people, or if black people had not been 76.2% of the victims, according to the Brazilian Yearbook of public safety, published in 2022. And, if we count only young people between 15 and 19 years old, this percentage rises to 80%.
Black women are equally vulnerable, whose homicide rate was 4.1 compared to 2.5 for non-black women, making their chances of violent death 1.7 times greater.
We seek to justify these data based on indisputable events, such as the condition of vulnerability in which peripheral black populations find themselves, exposure to crime and social insecurity. The focus on social reality pulverizes the reading of the causes, highlighting the epiphenomenon and hiding the driving element: racism, which, in cases of lethal violence, is always called into question.
This is due to two factors: the first resides in an ideal of nation, still in the beginning of the 20th century, when between the impossibility of whitening the population and the pessimism of the acceptance of theories of degeneracy, Brazil opted for praising miscegenation as a constitutive of their identity. So, the ideal of brunette and the narratives of racial democracy were crossed by the belief in the non-existence of race. In reality, for a silencing about the existence of race.
Another factor was the necessary historical shift produced in the study of race relations. In opposition to the analyses, produced throughout the 1950s, which explained the condition of black people under the justification of color prejudice, a set of studies was established from the 1970s onwards that showed racial inequalities.
While prejudice was associated with individual and subjective practices, locating the asymmetry between blacks and whites in a social system of construction and reproduction of inequality, verifiable from data analysis (schooling, employability, housing, among others), allowed not only the understanding of the structures that produce racial inequality, but, above all, the claim for reparation policies.
However, racism, as a system of production of relations of power and subordination, does not consist only of objective dimensions. With the recent references to structural racism, we once again observe its diffuse effects.
Racism does not require objectification: people are not objectively killed for being black, they are killable for being black. Racism needs no rationalization: it is based on representations that blacks are dangerous, aggressive, violent, suspicious, guilty, disposable.
Racism is strengthened in its invisibility, even more than in its visibility.
Defusing your bomb is a complex exercise that demands looking into the abyss and allowing it to look back. Recognizing race as an organizing element of reality is recognizing racism at the base of inequalities, but above all as a structurer of our system of social representations. Naming allows facing.
And, in the case of lethal violence against black people, victims of wrong approaches, confrontations and mistakes, or against young people who die as a result of racialized genocide, or against people who succumb in massacres carried out in slums and peripheries, it is fundamental recognize: it is not an approach, it is not criminality, it is not poverty, it is not confusion. It’s racism.
And, while this text is concluded, probably, one more black person will be killed, without the reason being racism.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
