Racism and the dehumanization of Black youth.
In our country, racism permeates social relations, but it also permeates institutions, both public and private. Here, institutions are allergic to Black people.
For a long time, the myth that there is no racism in Brazil has been propagated. The so-called racial democracy has always been one of the main arguments to justify this claim. Our country would thus have been free from racial discrimination against black people, seen only in other societies.
But racism not only exists, it manifests itself in the most varied and perverse ways. And, whether directly or in a more veiled manner, racial discrimination is a fundamental factor in understanding social inequality in Brazil.
In our country, racism permeates social relations, but it also permeates institutions, both public and private. Here, institutions are allergic to Black people. Regarding public safety, for example, the young Black population is the biggest victim of urban violence. The number of Black people killed by the police is three times higher than the number of white people.
Police lethality is substantially higher in relation to the Black population. And, so far, what we see is the growth of a public security perspective based on repression and violent response. These are young people violated by the lack of access to education, health, decent housing, and culture, whose lives are cut short by bullets from police and drug traffickers every day.
The problem is that a society that cynically claims the "non-existence of racism" ends up promoting impunity for discriminatory acts, invisibility, silencing, and the genocide of the Black population. Our youth suffer daily, in the peripheries of the country, the effects of the absence of public policies promoting racial equality. Furthermore, it is possible to observe an unfortunate process of dehumanization of Black youth promoted by the Brazilian State.
Our humanity is denied when skin color is the only relevant factor in suffering police violence in the streets, or in occupying the worst jobs – or being the largest share of the unemployed – and thus continuing to occupy the base of the social pyramid. In this sense, it is possible to affirm that social inequality in Brazil is a racial issue. The most basic human rights are gradually denied to us, and this is the main “public policy” addressed to us. The perverse policy that attempts to dehumanize us.
According to the Atlas of Violence (2017), 23.100 young black people are murdered every year in Brazil. This is equivalent to saying that one of our young people, between 15 and 29 years old, is killed every 23 minutes. This is a systematic extermination of our people. It is evident that this scenario will only be minimized when the public authorities cease to be either negligent or a protagonist in this process. We must increasingly occupy positions of power in order to rethink this perverse logic that decimates our culture and our people. We want our boys and girls alive! Young black people alive!
* This is an opinion article, the responsibility of the author, and does not reflect the opinion of Brasil 247.