The Criminalization of People of African Descent in Brazil

Abstract

This chapter discusses the history of the criminalization of the Brazilian Black people and, through history, tries to demonstrate alternatives routes of exit from this status quo. In Brazil, 54 percent of the population are people of African descent, and the Black consciousness expects the African world to conduct the anti-racist revolution collaboratively. While Brazil was under a slave system in the beginning of the 19th century, the ideology of Pan Africanism was being developed intellectually on other “beaches of the diaspora.” However, only in 1950, when world-famous American dancer Katherine Dunham was prevented from staying at the Hotel Esplanada in Sao Paulo did the “elite sectors of national politics” begin to recognize the “concrete examples” of racism in Brazil. The “racist motivations” are never clear. Another question is how the difference between massacre, the genocide of Black people is debated without questioning the racist foundation: that is, to kill the Black man in order to annihilate the Black race.