Abstract
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign was nationally polarizing. The regional, economic, and racial breakdown of voting patterns in the 2018 presidential election reflected this polarization (Harden, 2018; Carvalho & Santos, 2019). Perhaps the clearest expression of polarization, however, was Bolsonaro’s own insistence on discursively emphasizing spatial-racial divisions within the country. Bolsonaro deprecated queer communities, women, immigrants, and racialized populations, and promised to encourage Indigenous genocide should he be elected. Indeed, much of the attention he received during his campaign was for his unapologetically violent attitude toward a number of demographic groups. In this essay, I point out how Bolsonaro politically legitimized himself, in part, through his demonization of Black Brazilian communities. More specifically, Bolsonaro cast rural quilombo and impoverished urban Black communities as internal threats to national stability, which he then promised to neutralize.
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