The Bolsonaro government and the black resistance
In recent years, during Bolsonaro’s government, racist ideas have been the basis of the most reactionary policies. Racial violence is the basis of the discourse of the Brazilian extreme right based on the defense of an even more bellicose public security, which defends police operations and massacres as if it were something positive of heroism in the fight against crime. The discourse of “a good criminal is a dead criminal”, “CPF canceled”, and which place a conflict between “good people”, “bandits” and the “left that defends criminals”, is a racist discourse that places black bodies as criminals, seeking to legitimize and normalize the murder of black people.
It was the black movement that called for the first acts in the pandemic, against genocide, it was the front line in the fight against hunger through solidarity actions in the peripheries (…)
Economic policies, privatizations, and neglect during the pandemic have hit the black portion of the Brazilian population hard. It is no coincidence that over the last four years, the black population, especially black women, has always remained in an absolute majority against Bolsonaro, according to opinion polls. It was the black movement that called for the first acts in the pandemic, against genocide, was on the front line in the fight against hunger through solidarity actions in the peripheries, and consequently was in the fight against the Bolsonaro government.
Public safety at the heart of the game
Today, Bolsonarism is still alive in society, it is impossible to defeat it without waging a hard ideological fight and also without having a concrete advance in the real world in the conditions that allowed the growth of reactionary ideas. We will use the topic of public safety as an example. A terrain dominated by the discourse of the extreme right, and which was a central problem of the PT’s first mandates. The UPPs, the use of the National Force, the mass incarceration of the black population, the drug law, were mistakes that served to feed the idea of militarization of society, and when they failed, served to strengthen the ideology of the extreme right.
It is necessary to combat the idea that a good criminal is a dead criminal, showing that the death penalty, greater police lethality and extensive policies do not solve the problem of lack of security
In this new mandate, it is necessary that Lula and Minister Dino treat the issue of public security with a different look, because the problem is increasingly complex. At the same time that it is necessary to combat the idea that a good criminal is a dead criminal, showing that the death penalty, greater police lethality and extensive policies do not solve the problem of lack of security, it is also necessary to have an effective public security policy in the real world, which seeks to reduce the strength of organized crime. of the militias, as well as reducing the numbers of murdered and feelings of insecurity, and finally also reducing mass incarceration.
The Lula government and the black population
The new Lula government, which will soon complete one year in office, is filled with a lot of expectations on the part of the black population, the social sector that most demonstrates support for the government.
This support and expectation is justified by seeing some measures during the first terms of the PT, especially from President Lula himself. Income transfer programs, such as Bolsa Família, as well as social programs such as Zero Hunger, Minha Casa Minha Vida, Luz para Todos, among others, have reached the majority of black families in the country, not to mention economic and income development, and the laws on access to education, especially the quota law, which was fundamental in changing racial consciousness in our country. However, at the same time, the PT governments made mistakes on the issue of public security, which need to be overcome.
For the government to emerge victorious from the battle for national reconstruction, it needs to fight racism and racial inequality, and this will only be possible by breaking with the logic of giving in to the Centrão and the national bourgeoisie. Without the implementation of the electoral program victorious at the ballot box, without qualitative improvements in the economy, without structural changes, the Lula government will become weaker and weaker in the fight against the extreme right, and distances itself from the black population. Without concrete measures to combat racism and racial violence, without policies to confront the ruling class, it is not possible to truly build democracy in the country.
A New Moment in Black Protest
We are living in a new moment in the struggle against racial inequalities, or as Florestan Fernandes would say, in the Brazilian black protest. Although the national political situation is still defensive for the working class in the country, we see a significant upsurge in the anti-racist struggle. There is, in fact, a structural repositioning of the place of anti-racism in the Brazilian class struggle. This did not happen by chance, but was a process built over the last five decades of the black movement, which qualitatively broadened the questioning of the myth of racial democracy, which functioned, throughout the twentieth century, as a fundamental ideology of bourgeois domination by mitigating class and race conflicts.
This new stage of the Brazilian black protector continues to stimulate reactions in the streets, new forms of political organization, electoral phenomena, cultural movements and especially ideological disputes about the direction of the black movement, something still open.
The bourgeoisie, through companies and the mainstream media, seeks to capture the feeling of black identity that exists in society and use it in an exclusively identitarian way. As if the reduction of racial inequality could only occur through the inclusion of black subjects in spaces and institutions that promote this same racial inequality. It is the politics of representation for representation’s sake, or an empty identity. At the same time, we also see sectors of the bourgeoisie and the extreme right that advance in their openly racist discourse against the black population, while others from this same group seek to rehabilitate the theme of racial democracy under the banner of “we are all Brazilians”. The fact is that nothing will be the same as it was before and the Brazilian black movement needs to relocate itself in this dispute. Truly denouncing the center of racial inequality, elaborating effective public policies to combat racism and seek to build a political project for the country for the black people and the Brazilian population as a whole.
On the 20th, it is a day to take to the streets in a march against racial inequality and racism. Denouncing racial violence, raising the voice for a progressive black minister in the STF, raising the agenda of fighting the privatization of prisons and stating that with racism, there is no democracy.
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