Structural Racism according to Silvio Almeida

One of the questions that people have been asking since the outbreak of protests is: how did we get here? Is racism delusion, myopia, ignorance or project? To answer these questions, it is first necessary to rescue the narratives that were historically forged.

Silvio Almeida, one of the greatest contemporary intellectuals, looked at this in his work entitled O que é racismo estrutural? - “What is structural racism?” from the Plural Feminisms collection coordinated by Djamila Ribeiro. For a long time, racism was restricted to the sphere of individual behavior, but the jurist and philosopher introduced us to other dimensions such as institutional and structural.

Racism is part of modern history and is related to the formation of the State. According to the jurist, the concept of race was developed by the model of the bourgeois state to elect the universal subject and organize political, economic and legal relations categorizing people into classes in order to preserve the hegemonic group.

Racism has different expressions throughout history, from its biological, scientific and sociocultural character, which is why it is a complex social phenomenon. In Brazil, this process was also related to physical appearance, economic capacity and social circulation.

In this context, as the State is responsible for forming a unit, nationalism tends to hierarchize cultural, ethnic, religious and sexual multiplicities, criminalizing, domesticating or stigmatizing those who do not interest national identity.

From this perspective, the author uses Foucault's lessons to conceptualize racism as a technology of power that operates through control, resulting in the systemic discrimination of subalternized ethnic-racial groups.

We cannot confuse racism, prejudice and discrimination. The first is a systemic phenomenon, the second is a prior judgment of the subject, while discrimination is a differentiated treatment.

It is plausible that some individuals in the dominant group claim to have suffered prejudice or discrimination. However, as racism is a power structure, it only affects subalternized ethnic-racial groups, which is why there is no possibility of sustaining the reverse racism argument, since there is no systemic oppression in relation to the dominant group.

Indeed, blacks become a product of racism, so that phenotype, skin color and cultural practices are characteristics used to create privileges, political, economic and affective advantages in favor of the hegemonic group.

Thus, the jurist explores the differences between individual, institutional and structural racism. In individual racism we saw the pathological, behavioral and immoral bias revealed by the racist.

In institutional racism, there is the massive presence of a certain ethnic-racial group in institutions, which will work to strengthen and maintain their own group. In this form of racism we saw the legislative, the judiciary, the executive, university rectors and large corporations equipped with people from the hegemonic group.

In the structural dimension, the professor clarifies that institutions are racist because a society that legitimizes racism, meaning, the legal, political and economic structures validate the self-preservation of whites, as well as the maintenance of privileges, as they create conditions for prosperity of this group. As a result, institutions violently externalize racism on a daily basis.

As an ideology, racism is constituted as a representation of the social imaginary about racial identities, so that the imperative is to keep the white in the place of a natural and rational leader, while the black in subordinate conditions. Therefore, racism formats subjectivities in social relations so from the point of view of conscience and affections, racism validates who deserves to be considered a subject.

In culture, racism is sophisticated, as it propagates cultural relativism and multiculturalism as a form of domestication of bodies, determining the superiority, value and meaning of the dominant culture acting against other groups whose whiteness creates exoticization and inferiorization.

Almeida emphasizes that the individual who presents themselves as anti-racist cannot argue that racism is structural as an excuse for not reviewing their actions, since accountability is part of the process. Thus, it is essential to realize that there is a dialectic between individual actions and structure.

Regarding representativeness, the author elucidates that it is not enough to resolve racism, because although seeing blacks in decision-making spaces is important, the recruitment of few blacks in these spaces serves purely to reinforce racism, since black visibility is not the same than power. Thus, it is not possible to admit a camouflage of the problem, since racism requires deep and concrete changes so that the scenario of racial inequality is not perpetuated.

For the philosopher, there is an unofficial segregation between blacks and whites, since there is a naturalization of blacks in subordinate positions against a politically constituted white supremacy.

Almeida permeates various dimensions of racism: historical, political, ideological, economic and legal, but we do not intend to exhaust the theme, that is why it is crucial to read his work in its entirety, which incisively, critically, purposefully and beautifully summarizes that the Racism is a huge obstacle of a nation's project.

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