I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve written texts about racism, how many cases involving violence against black people, how many times I’ve had to articulate arguments to understand the workings of racist structures in this country. How many times I had to stop practical life to rationalize and understand the roots of racism. Every day there are reports, cases, records and flagrant prejudices. My social networks could be a great mosaic of this horror, of denunciations, testimonials, reports of racism throughout Brazil.
The news about racial violence arrives. There is commotion, there are beautiful, intelligent and hard texts, but the day ends, and other news overwhelms what was said, and the weather forecast comes, and the dollar rate comes and, in a short time, no one remembers. There, the feeling is created that racism has passed and that we are all human, that now it is time to change the subject and that everything is fine.
But it turns out it doesn’t turn out well. It never stays.
The aggression suffered by delivery driver Max Ângelo dos Santos contains, in addition to violence, cruelty refinements: because it is not enough to be racist, it is not enough to verbally attack with class and race hatred, it was also necessary that the former volleyball player Sandra Mathias Correa de Sá used an instrument of domination, such as a dog’s collar, and turned it into a whip.
Look, this is not a simulacrum of torture from the times of slavery. This is a perverse update of the right to lash. In that aggression, in that nefarious gesture, not only racism is contained, but the desire to annihilate the other. There is in that gesture the colonial DNA being exercised in a direct and criminal way.
So I ask myself, where does all this courage to be racist come from? Where does this supremacist urge come from in broad daylight? Where does this certainty of impunity come from? The answer is obvious: nobody cares.
Understand this “nobody” as a synonym for the authorities, the Judiciary, the National Congress, all the institutions of power that collaborate in this daily horror that plagues black men and women systematically, without respite, without anesthesia. Every day. Therefore, I repeat: people’s pain is in the newspapers, but nobody cares.
The consolation, the words and the embrace of the hairdresser Adriana de Souza Alves for her son Max, after her testimony, is a secular and ancestral consolation. It is a posture that updates the speech and resilience of thousands of black mothers. Difficult conversations that mothers have with their black children, as a survival strategy, but also a love strategy.
#Peoples #pain #newspapers #cares