{"id":23398,"date":"2015-08-01T11:02:04","date_gmt":"2015-08-01T14:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rioonwatch.org\/?p=23398"},"modified":"2017-07-19T17:21:42","modified_gmt":"2017-07-19T20:21:42","slug":"black-justice-collective-panel-discusses-legal-system-and-racism-in-brazil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=23398","title":{"rendered":"Black Justice Collective Panel Discusses Legal System and Race in Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas\"PT\"<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

On Tuesday, July 21, the Caixa de Assist\u00eancia dos Advogados do Estado do Rio de Janeiro<\/a> (Rio de Janeiro State Lawyers’ Assistance Treasury) hosted the first panel in a series of dialogues organized by Coletivo Justi\u00e7a Negra-Luiz Gama<\/a> (JNLG, or the Luiz Gama Black Justice Collective) that discussed racism, public security, and affirmative action in Brazil. Over 80 people attended the event, many of whom were young lawyers, as the collective offers job training and English classes to young black Brazilians entering the legal field.<\/p>\n

The panel included former Human Rights Secretary for the State of Rio de Janeiro and current professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) Jorge da Silva<\/a>, activist\u00a0public intellectual and journalist Carlos Alberto Medeiros<\/a>, and lawyer and coordinator of the collective\u2019s judicial career training course Giovana Mariano de Jesus. Bruno C\u00e2ndido Alves, lawyer and Director-General of JNLG, moderated the panel.<\/p>\n

A representative of CAARJ, Renan Aguiar, opened the event and welcomed the young lawyers to the CAARJ auditorium. The collective\u2019s vice-director, Jamile Sepol, then introduced JNLG and its work. \u201cThe objective of our collective is to promote the economic and intellectual empowerment of black youth in particular. The goal of this panel project, dialogues, is to contribute to the intellectual emancipation of young black men and women through training in politics with an emphasis on racial issues, both historic and contemporary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sepol went on to draw parallels between the 1888 abolition of slavery and the adoption of the 1988 democratic Constitution by reading a well-known samba from the Mangueira Samba School<\/a>: \u201c100 Years of Freedom, Reality or Illusion.\u201d The samba questions whether the everyday social conditions of blacks in Brazil changed after emancipation<\/a>, and Sepol contends that legal victories like the constitution and affirmative action have still not led<\/a> to a racially equal Brazil.<\/p>\n

After C\u00e2ndido introduced the speakers, Mariano de Jesus gave the first talk on the collective\u2019s namesake, Luiz Gama. Gama was born in 1830 to Lu\u00edsa Mahin, a free black woman and abolitionist, but was sold into slavery at the age of ten by his white father after his mother had fled to Rio de Janeiro following the Mal\u00ea Revolt<\/a> of 1935. Gama learned to read and write, secured his own freedom, joined the navy, and audited courses at S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s law school. He became a r\u00e1bula, <\/em>a type of semi-professional practicing lawyer without a university degree, and eventually worked to free over 500 slaves<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gama died in 1882, 6 years before the abolition of slavery, and Mariano de Jesus used his story to highlight both the need for more blacks to go into law and to emphasize that activists may not see the change that they work so hard for. She closed her talk with the final scene from the movie Selma, imploring the audience that \u201cthere is soil, and that soil has already been sown, and today we are reaping the fruits of that sowing, but there is still ground that needs to be seeded, and we can be the ones to spread those seeds. Some of us will harvest the fruits, and some won\u2019t, but others will, so don\u2019t stop sowing the seeds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following Mariano de Jesus\u2019s talk, moderator C\u00e2ndido called for the collective to address the intersections between racism and sexism. He noted that the namesake of the collective is a man, but the symbol for the group is a black figure of Justice with her scales, and Afro.<\/p>\n

\"JNLG<\/a><\/p>\n

Da Silva followed, drawing much of his talk from his book, 120 Years of Abolition<\/em><\/a>. Da Silva, whose background is in public security, focused on structural racism: \u201cOne thing is individual racism, suffered by me, by her, by him, by someone, by someone Jewish, by an indigenous person, by a woman, by a homosexual. That is to say, one thing is individual discrimination. This is also important, but we should concern ourselves with something called institutional racism, structural racism, because structural racism is almost invisible, you almost don\u2019t perceive it.\u201d He jokingly used Brazil\u2019s numerous corruption scandals<\/a> to underscore the pervasiveness of structural racism, since almost everyone involved in them is white.<\/p>\n

Da Silva returned to a serious and motivational tone: \u201cThis issue [of structural racism] is a political issue, it is not a legal\u00a0one. Why? Because laws and the legal system are human constructions, human constructions by people in power, and rarely is a black person in a position to design\u00a0and implement laws.\u201d<\/p>\n

Medeiros, the final speaker, also addressed the difference between law and practice by comparing the socio-racial histories of the US and Brazil. A central theme of Medeiros\u2019 talk was the false way in which Brazil sought to imagine itself a racial democracy<\/a> in stark contrast to the \u201cparadigm of discrimination\u201d that described the US throughout the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0century. While blacks were legally obligated to give up their bus seats to white passengers in the Jim Crow South, societal pressures throughout much of Brazil expected blacks to do much the same, since \u201claws are often merely state-sanctioned customs.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Medeiros, this idea of a racial democracy served to preserve Brazil\u2019s own form of white supremacy. \u201cThis idea was extremely harmful because in a certain way it guaranteed the continuation of discrimination. It\u2019s very simple, we don\u2019t have racial discrimination, so if I, a white racist, discriminate against a black man I\u2019m not committing racial discrimination because that doesn\u2019t exist in Brazil. And once more, something that doesn\u2019t exist shouldn\u2019t be combatted.”<\/p>\n

Medeiros used the example of police killings<\/a> to underscore this point. While the Black Lives Matter movement has emerged in the US to decry the racial biases of police and are exerting political pressure at the national level<\/a>, Brazilian media and policymakers have\u00a0largely ignored what Amnesty International<\/a>,\u00a0local groups<\/a>, and a recent Congressional inquiry<\/a>\u00a0have called a\u00a0genocide against young black Brazilians<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Coletivo<\/a><\/p>\n

The panel ended with the members of the collective descending\u00a0in front of the crowd for a round of applause. The young lawyers stood in front of their professors and mentors, who in turn seemed ready to guide the next generation of leaders combating racism in Brazil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas On Tuesday, July 21, the Caixa de Assist\u00eancia dos Advogados do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro State Lawyers’ Assistance Treasury) hosted the first panel in a series of […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":23450,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1290,1333,329,1329],"tags":[400,2467,812,354,129,809,124,1189,1568,30],"writer":[1716],"translator":[],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-23398","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-civilsociety","8":"category-event-reports","9":"category-solutions","10":"category-by-international-observers","11":"tag-affirmative-action","12":"tag-black-lives-matter","13":"tag-empowerment","14":"tag-law","15":"tag-leadership","16":"tag-public-security","17":"tag-race","18":"tag-racism","19":"tag-training","20":"tag-urban-violence","21":"writer-stephanie-reist"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23398"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=23398"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=23398"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=23398"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=23398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}