The deepening of racial inequality

On November 20 of 2019, the Planalto Palace – the official residence of the president Jair Bolsonaro – did not schedule a ceremony to celebrate Black Consciousness Day, a standing tradition in past presidencies since the re-democratization. The day before, in the House of Representatives, the ruling congressman Colonel Tadeu (Social Liberal Party of São Paulo PSL-SP) broke a commemorative plaque of the date, which denounced police violence against the black population. The congressman justified his act by stating the plaque represented an offense to police officers.

The scenario of omissions and direct attacks against the black population continued its course in 2020, with discriminatory policies that affect various fields of dispute. Members of the government, such as the former Minister of Education Abraham Weintraub and President Jair Bolsonaro, have made statements considered racist. The government has appointed Sérgio Camargo as president of the Public Entity for the Promotion and Preservation of Black Culture in Brazil (Palmares Foundation). In the past, Camargo declared that there is no “real racism” in Brazil, and on the anniversary of the Law that abolished slavery in the country (Lei Áurea), criticized Zumbi dos Palmares, a national symbol of the fight against slavery.

The discriminatory speeches delivered by the highest levels of the Brazilian government express the country’s perverse situation.  Racial violence is patent in Brazilian daily life. According to the Brazilian Forum for Public Security (FBSP), 2019 alone registered 11.467 accounts of racial offenses and 1.265 cases of racism. The first legal attempt to curb speeches that reproduce the logic of subjugation of human beings based on race, ethnicity, or culture dates back to 1951, was the so-called Afonso Arinos Bill. Later, the 1988 Constitution established racism as a non-bailable and imprescriptible crime, punishable by imprisonment. Despite the high number of complaints and the statutory provision of punishment, recent research shows that the judicial system imposes interpretive barriers to recognize racial violence, alleging in many cases, the lack of evidence or the absence of proof of intent to discriminate.

Besides being targets of discriminatory speeches, the black community also faces unequal treatment in public policies. This year, the situation decayed due to the pandemic and the deepening of vulnerabilities among historically discriminated groups. Several studies show a higher incidence of coronavirus within the black and other underprivileged populations, which indicates that policies to fight the pandemic should give more attention to these groups in their formulation. However, that did not happen. The proportion of deaths among the black population remains 40% higher compared to whites. Due to government omissions concerning the health crisis, a group representing quilombolas (traditional black communities) filed a lawsuit with the Federal Supreme Court. As argued by Márcia Lima, researcher of the AFRO-Cebrap group:

Covid-19 in Brazil affected those categories who are silenced, erased, and deprived of access to minimum resources. Quilombolas and indigenous people, who struggle for recognition and maintenance of their territories have faced the absence of policies and the underreporting of cases, two potent forms of invisibilization. The imprisoned population and the homeless, for not having any visibility in the eyes of the Brazilian state social policies, remain silenced and face a moral judgment, that decided who deserves to receive care and who deserves to live at this time”

Racial inequality becomes even more explicit when discussing public safety and police action. According to the FBSP, in the police interventions that resulted in deaths, 79.1% of all victims were black and brown. The data indicate that the mortality rate of black people by the police is 183.2% higher than that of white people. According to Paulo César Ramos, also an AFRO-Cebrap researcher:

There is no public agenda to confront racial violence, nor racism within the policies of public security. And neither there is a policy to confront violence within the policies of racial equality”

Despite fewer people circulating on the streets during the pandemic, police lethality has increased considerably in São Paulo. In Rio de Janeiro, even though there was a suspension of police operations in communities during the pandemic, police lethality increased in the period compared to the previous year. Several young black men make up this sad picture of deaths. They stand alongside the international outrage against police violence in the United States and the profusion of anti-racist and pro-democracy protests in Brazil, which were also violently demobilized by the police.

You can find a selection of informal and formal acts by the federal government that express the deepening of racial inequality in Brazil between 2019 and 2020 below.