Country: Brazil

Group: Negro/Preto/Afro-Brazilian

Date Finalized: 3/1/2020

Team: Colleen Clauss (lead), Jayline Martin, Payton Thompson

Content Warning: homicide: police brutality, kidnapping, racism, slavery, genocide, infant death, torture

Approximate Time Period: 1530-present

The term “negro” to refer to Afro-Brazilans “is preferred by many affirmative action administrators and black movement actors who define negros as the sum of individuals who self-classify as brown (pardo) and black (preto),” but research shows that the two terms largely overlap in popular use to describe “those at the darkest end of the colour continuum” (Loveman, Muniz & Bailey, 2012). Therefore, this summary covers the group or groups described as preto, negro, and Afro-Brazilan.

In Brazil, people of African descent have disproportionately been the victims of police brutality, violence, and homicide, “especially in large cities such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, and Recife” (Vargas, 2005). A total of 6,220 people were killed by the police in Brazil in 2018, and in Rio de Janeiro in 2003, of 900 people killed by the police, “almost 75 percent…were in the favelas, predominantly Black communities” (Human Rights Watch, 2019; Vargas, 2005). The violence has included an assassination of an Afro-Bolivian politician using bullets linked to the federal police, and “extortions, kidnappings, and fatal beatings and shootings—all enacted by police officers, mostly against people of African descent” (Freelon; Vargas, 2005). Homicides in the country were skewed towards those who were black: “seven out of 10 [homicide victims] were black” in 2015 and “Black people are more vulnerable in virtually every state in the country, regardless of socioeconomic status’ (Reis & Viana, 2017). The government’s response to the extremely high rates of homicide and police killings has been to use more force in “shows of repressive power like the deployment of federal troops to keep the peace in states such as Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo” and to advance policies intended to shield police officers from punishment for homicide (Reis & Viana, 2017; Human Rights Watch, 2019).

The source of the violence seems to be the legacy of slavery in the country. The Portuguese in Brazil subjected the Preto people to forced labor, segregation, torture, killings, overwork, malnourishment, and starvation, resulting in thousands of deaths and an 88% infant mortality rate by the late 19th century (Nascimento, 1989, pg 64). According to critics, over the past century, the Brazilian government has been attempting to systematically oppress and lower the population of Afro-Brazilians through limited social assistance for the impoverished, changes in the census, and miscegenation, which some label as genocide (Nascimento).

We rated the evidence as a 3. The topic was addressed in a peer-reviewed journal and another credible source, as well as thoroughly covered by other less formal news sources. Some label the systematic oppression of Afro-Brazilians and the structural conditons that lead to many lost lives as a genocide (Freelon, n.d., Nascimento, 1989). This is an appropriate example of targeted lethal violence because the large number or killings by the police, though ostensibly necessary for police work, differentially affect the ethnic group.

References

  1. Freelon, K. (n.d.). ‘Genocide of Black People’: The Killing of Afro-Brazilians by Police Is an Injustice Marielle Franco Was Fighting to End. The Root. Retrieved February 23, 2020, from https://www.theroot.com/genocide-of-black-people-the-killing-of-afro-brazili-1825500610
  2. Human Rights Watch. (2019, December 11). World Report 2020: Rights Trends in Brazil. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/brazil
  3. Jackson, Robert H. (2008). “The Population and Vital Rates of the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay, 1700-1767”. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 38 (3): 401–431.
  4. Lippy, Charles H, Robert Choquette and Stafford Poole (1992). Christianity comes to the Americas: 1492–1776. New York: Paragon House. pp. 98–100.
  5. Loveman, M., Muniz, J. O., & Bailey, S. R. (2012). Brazil in black and white? Race categories, the census, and the study of inequality. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(8), 1466–1483. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.607503
  6. Nascimento, A. (1978). O genocido do negro brasileiro: Processo de um racismo mascarado. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra.
  7. Nascimento, A. Brazil, Mixture Or Massacre?: Essays in the Genocide of a Black People. First Majority Press. 1989. Pg. 63-65.
  8. Reis, C. F. de B., & Viana, D. (2017, November 2). The “genocide” of Brazil’s black youth gives Day of the Dead extra resonance | Cristina Fróes de Borja Reis. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/nov/02/genocide-brazil-black-youth-day-of-the-dead-extra-resonance
  9. Vargas, J. H. C. (2005). Genocide in the African Diaspora: United States, Brazil, and the Need for a Holistic Research and Political Method. Cultural Dynamics, 17(3), 267–290. https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374005061991