November 24, 2020

The mourning on Black Consciousness Day in Brazil

topic:	Slavery
located:	Brazil
editor:	Ellen Nemitz

November 20 marks the symbol of the fight against slavery in Brazil, Zumbi dos Palmares, who was killed in 1695. But the Black Consciousness Day, this year, was not marked by the usual celebrations, instead by the mourning over a violent murder. One day before, a 40 year-old black man, João Alberto Silveira Freitas, was beaten to death by two security guards after being involved in a discussion at the supermarket Carrefour, in Porto Alegre, south Brazil.

The case is being compared to George Floyd’s murder, even though the rector of Zumbi dos Palmares University, José Vicente, considered the Brazilian case even more brutal. People on the internet became divided between those defending the Black Lives Matter slogan and those trying to justify the crime based on his alleged criminal history and denying the racism. Protests took the streets and the Carrefour stores throughout the country. This is not the first time the company is involved in violent occurrences.

Among the racism deniers is the vice-president of Brazil, who analysed similarly to police, saying there is “no evidence of racism so far.” "Racism doesn't exist in Brazil. That is something they want to import here," said the General Hamilton Mourão. The argument is that the violence would have happened to anyone, black or white. However, the reality says the opposite, through data or examples.

As a Vice article depicts, this was not the first time a black person was victim of a disproportionate reaction when – sometimes falsely – accused of crimes, such as robbery. Journalist Edmund Ruge uses two cases of boys tortured in supermarkets, one to death, to show that what happened last week is not new. Actually, statistics show that black people make up almost 75 per cent of lethal violence; on average one black young person is killed every 21 minutes in the country, according to the Brazilian Public Security Forum. "Violence has been consolidated as one of the main indicators of racial inequalities in the country,” said sociologist Márcia Lima to El Pais.

Psychologist and social researcher Altieres Frei described in his thesis how a group of black and poor boys and girls are treated in a supermarket: “There was ‘invisible ballet’, as I like to define it, with a group of young individuals going to get part of the shopping list in a supermarket aisle being followed by uniformed security men or undercover ones, while the other part of the group would choose the best cost vegetables at the time and another ‘ballet' would be formed, with employees of all sectors staring at them.”

As society achieved civility, the naturalisation of violence is not acceptable at all. Or it should not be. The society in which filming an aggression is more important than interrupting it; that justifying murder or rape by the victims' personal acts is a society lost in its values. Quoting the tweet of the writer Ale Santos: "How many black will need to die in supermarkets for the society to realize the culture of lynching propagated under the speech of 'good bandit is dead bandit’ in a country that racially draw the characteristic of this ‘bandit’?"

Image by Orna Wachman

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