A Brazilian anti-racist society

“In a racist society, it is not enough not to be racist, we have to be anti-racist”. Angela Davis in this sentence explicit call us to pay attention on the whiteness dormancy which has created the ethnic-racial hierarchy and structurally does not feel uncomfortable dealing with it until today. Although the author dealt with the American reality, the reflection is fully appropriate for us to think about Brazil as a country.

On the one hand racism is a power mechanism penetrated in the institutions and structure of a State, on the other hand anti-racism is does not ignore racism as part of the political-social-strurure issue. It means to say that an anti-racist structure recognizes that the current society model failed struggling for the black community as well.

Racism presents itself as the shameful legacy of enslavement, it is the result of institutional measures taken by the State in Brazil: the Constitution of 1824 that prohibited blacks to go to school. The Land Law of 1850 overcharged the price of land so that black people, although free, could not buy them; and the opening of the country to European migration, by decree 528 of 1890, offering them land, seeds and money. The discrepancy in socioeconomic treatment between whites and freed blacks was deliberate, since Brazil had the objective at that time to whitewashing the population expressing that Asians and Africans could only occur with authorization.

Therefore, there is no way to talk about racism without talking about whiteness, a term used to explain the identity considered universal as the adopted model, brings better consequences and conditions to those who resemble it.

After all, to discrediting the integration of its blacks, Brazil used miscegenation to continue exonerating itself from its responsibility for historical reparation.

In this sense, this perverse and implicit logic in the imagination of Brazilian society about the racial issue that we see today has its origin, perpetuating the idea that this topic divides us between "us and them", rejecting the importance of the anti-racist struggle as something that finally sends us to the same horizons in terms of opportunities, economic growth, access to quality education and health, among other fundamental issues.

There is a fog covering the advance of Brazil, polarizing discussions that are ultimately of interest to everyone. Certainly, within these difficulties experienced by Brazilians, we can talk about poverty, hunger, employment, violence, sanitation, etc.

However, it is not new that racism crosses all these social markers and affects black people on a larger scale, which is why the anti-racist struggle aims to dismantle scarcity and encourage Brazil to dream again, free from the slavery guilt that haunts this country, leaving instead of this colonial cradle that created a deep racialized socioeconomic gap.