Being black in Brazil: the murder of João Alberto S …

From Rio de Janeiro.In recent days, in the midst of permanent tension in politics, with unemployment breaking absolutely all historical records and the resumption of the deadly effects of the coronavirus (last Friday in Rio and São Paulo, the public network was on the verge of collapse, and the private sector came close to the same picture), Brazil found itself faced with a problem often denied by its elites and conservatism: the structural racism that prevails in society.

The debate resumed after the brutal murder of João Alberto Silveira Freitas (Photo), a 40-year-old black man, by two guards (one of them a member of the military police) in a chain supermarket crossroads, in Porto Alegre, extreme south of the country.

Images recorded as Silveira Freitas was beaten and suffocated shocked the entire planet. First, because of the brutality. And secondly, because it is a commercial chain spread across countless countries that in Brazil has a history of violence against black customers.

There is a palpable hypocrisy just like Brazil is a country whose population made up of a mixture of origins lives in serene harmony.

This is true of the wonderful mix of origins that has formed Brazilian society. Brazilians are descended from Europeans and Africans, Arabs and Japanese, Europeans and Asians.

The colony of Japanese descendants living in the province of San Pablo, for example, would form the second most populous city in Japan.

But there is a segment of the population that clearly suffers from all the evils of structural racism: that made up of Black or mixed-race Brazilians.

In 1888, Brazil was the last country on the American continent to abolish slavery and one of the last in the world. The effects of this very long period of wickedness continue to hang in the air.

Currently, descendants of slaves constitute the majority of the population: of the country’s 212 million inhabitants, at least 54 percent are black or mixed race.

They are also those who die the most from gunfire: 74% of violent deaths in Brazil are blacks and mestizos.

No more segregation: the family income of whites and whites is almost double that of black families.

The unlimited brutality of the action that assassinated Silveira Freitas not only highlighted the protests of movements claiming rights to the Afro-descendant community, but also gave weight and space to complaints in the whole world, from Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, to prominent figures in politics, the arts and sports, in addition, of course, to social movements from the far corners of the world. world.

What is most terrible is knowing that, far from the cameras of a Carrefour, identical or very similar images are repeated every day in the favelas and the miserable suburbs all over the country.

Data shows that every 23 minutes a black man violently dies in Brazil.

The odds of a white teenager suffering at the hands of the police for a black teenager suffering are one in five. In other words, 80 percent of violence has a predetermined direction. How to deny such an image?

However, and as might be expected, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his deputy, retired General Hamilton Mourão, have dismissed the allegations of racism.

The author of the text stumbled by Bolsonaro tried to be creative: “I am color blind,” read the president, to say that he does not distinguish between color.

Already Mourão, a very clear portrait of Brazilian interbreeding, assured that “racism is something that exists in the United States. Not here”.

If so, how do you explain that in one report, when he declares himself a “son of an Indian”, he immediately mentions one of his light-skinned grandsons, whom he describes as “an improvement of the race”?

The double attempt to reject the obvious, by both the president and his vice, only reinforces something very concrete: denying that there is racism in a racist country, besides being stupid. , exactly reinforces the segregation installed in the structure of society.

The most terrible thing is that they both repeat what millions of Brazilians say, protected by this false denial of their own racism.

Until when?