The myth of racial cordiality and the anti-racist strategy in Brazil

Abstract

The present work proposes to discuss how the legacies of coloniality reverberate intensely in Brazil until today, especially with regard to racial tension. From the categorization of human beings based on skin color, which emerged from the colonization of the Americas by Europeans, non-whites individuals remained in a situation of significant social vulnerability. Skin color constitutes a strategic rhetorical synthesis to, since the colonial period, orchestrate the social structure in order to favor the physical archetype of the colonizer in positions of political and economic prominence. For this reason, places in the lowest social strata were reserved for the black population, in addition to being subject to all kinds of vulnerabilities, especially in terms of guaranteeing and implementing social rights. However, despite the Brazilian empirical reality, there is a discourse that denies these facts, as a strategy to delegitimize any development of policies aimed at racial inclusion. These arguments are ideologically based on a supposed racial cordiality, which goes against the history of oppression that subalternized racial groups have always experienced in Brazilian history. Thus, the objective is to demonstrate that racial democracy is a myth and that the anti-racist discourse is a necessary strategy to promote a reduction of inequalities and historical reparation in Brazil.