Young, Brazilian & Black: A Dangerous Combination
Posted on February 28, 2008

It was a Tuesday during carnival when Maria Cecília, a 24-year- old woman, was killed in front of her house in the shantytown of São Remo in the city of São Paulo last year.

Cecilia, a domestic worker, was with four friends participating in a parade organized by São Remo’s residents when the military police arrived to put an end to the party. On February 20, Cidinha, as she was known, was lethally shot by police officers of the 16th Military Police Company of São Paulo. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated event.

Violence is widespread in contemporary Brazil. Like Maria Cecília, approximately 50,000 people are killed every year in this country, known as the “land of cordial men.” The numbers are worse than in Colombia and comparable with the sectarian violence in Iraq. What many of us do not know is the color of the victims and protagonists of violence in Brazil, which has the largest Black population outside of Africa.

The combination of different factors such as poverty, age, sexuality, gender, location and race determine who lives and who dies in this “racial paradise.” The more subordinate a position a person occupies, the greater the probability that he or she will be a victim of urban violence. For instance, to be young, homosexual, Black and poor is a lethal condition in Brazilian society.

In this context, Black males between the ages of 17 and 24 who are unemployed, without educational opportunity and living in the outskirts of metropolitan areas, are the primary victims of economic and physical violence. According to United Nations Development Program, the Brazilian national rate of homicide is 28 per 100,000. But Black males from age 15 to 24 account for 68.4 homicides per 100,000, compared to Whites who represent 39.3 out of 100,000 victims, a difference of 74 percent, according to UNESCO, a U.N. agency.

Also, it is almost certain that at some time in their lives, Black youth in Brazilian urban centers will come into contact with the criminal justice system. Drug traffic, organized crime and street gangs are some of the causes, but not the only ones. Black intellectuals and activists have constantly denounced the fact that Black males are the primary victims not only of criminals, but also of the police.

Official data from São Paulo’s Security Office has shown that police kill an average of 2 people per day. Between 1995 and June 2006, military police in São Paulo had killed 5,473 people. And Brazil has the second largest young male population behind bars in the Americas. What is the color of victims and agents of violence within this context? Like the U.S., the Brazilian penal state has responded to Black youth’s demand for minimal rights of citizenship with the enforcement of the prison industrial complex and with summary executions.

It is necessary to contextualize this genocidal process against people of color. Throughout the African Diaspora, an entire generation of young Black people has been lost in a systemic form of oppression. How did it happen that Black youth came to occupy the most extreme and dehumanizing position within global capitalism, within this White supremacist world?

Lynching, rape, mass incarceration, unemployment, police brutality, HIV/AIDS and domestic violence, all are systematic practices of abuse historically perpetrated against the Black body. From the plantation economy to current racial capitalism, state power and White supremacy are intertwined factors invested in killing Blacks.

In a country marked by cynicism and hypocrisy regarding racism like Brazil, Black segregation in the favelas (the Brazilian version of U.S. ghettos), mass imprisonment and the killing of Black youth are three important elements of racial domination.

The favela is a zone of occupation where the White order is imposed by the police. Helicopters, sophisticated weapons, outlaw police officers, cameras, reporters and a variety of paraphernalia transform the favela into a true hell. It is in the context of the militarization of public security and the culture of fear manufactured by the press that the favela is reinforced in the White mind as a place of disorder and its inhabitants as potential criminals. The presence of state terror in the favela is rationalized as domination necessary to guarantee harmony and minimize conflicts.

Indeed, the massacre of young Black men is made to seem as a normal part of everyday life and justified as a legitimate war against criminals. The predominant image of the Black male as criminal, ugly, polluted and evil—and Black women as the source of that “aberration”—is the strategy by which White terror legitimates itself and materializes the abuse against the Black body in the favela.

The police are only the most visible part of institutionalized daily oppression. Other acts of institutional, continuous oppression and violence are perpetrated by the media, the academy and society in general. For example, the strong opposition of Brazilian academia and mass media to affirmative action benefiting students of indigenous and African descent has no other explanation than to keep the Casa Grande /Senzala (master/slave) relationship in place.

The excuse is simple: “In Brazil, we do not have racism.”

White supremacist strategies of symbolic and physical violence present a difficult challenge for those committed to racial equality. We have to debunk the insidious myth that in Brazil race relations are different and better then in the U.S. or in South Africa. If there exists an exception within the Brazilian racial landscape, it is in the sophistication of the racial terror that simultaneously disenfranchises Afro-Brazilians and denies the existence of race.

To face anti-Black violence in Brazil is to challenge the partners of  racial domination that celebrate difference and deny that racism exists, all while using race as an important tool of White control over Blacks.


Jaime Amparo-Alves is a Brazilian Black movement activist and journalist. Currently, he is enrolled in a Ph.D. program in the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests are Black youth and state violence in the city of São Paulo.

Jaime can be reached at jaimealves@mail.utexas.edu.