O racismo mata!: uma sociologia forense do genocídio da população negra brasileira

Abstract

Since the colonial period, the black Brazilian population has struggled against the processes of death and violence produced by structural racism. Such processes forge what Abdias Nascimento called the Genocide of the Brazilian Negro in the 1970s, punctuating its colonial roots and eugenics character in the post-abolition republican turn. Following the leads of Abdias, but also the struggle for the right to life and human dignity by black subjects and collectives throughout the history of Brazil, the present research has the genocide of the black population in social theory as an object of analysis. It then seeks to analyze if/how different social theories have dealt with the racial and colonial character of the genocide that involves the black population, especially those produced in the Social Sciences. For this, a combined literature review (systematic and narrative) was carried out to investigate the discussion in the Social Theory of Genocide (Genocide Studies), in the Social Theory of Racism, in the Social Eugenics Theory, in the Social Theory of Death and, still, in Contemporary Social Theory produced in Brazil. Thus, the resulting theoretical cartography shows that despite its contributions to the conceptualization and typology of genocide, Genocide Studies have been insufficient in the racial and colonial understanding of genocide, even ignoring the relevance of eugenic theories. On the other hand, eugenics social theory was a precursor of genocide theories, inaugurating a scientific understanding of racism and proposing different forms of eugenics (positive, negative, preventive, matrimonial, among others) to achieve racial hygiene, genocide. In turn, it is possible to understand the faces of genocide from other nomenclatures as revealed by social theories of death, although in general they tend to neglect the relationship between death and racism. Despite this, the black intelligentsia has tried to debate the genocide experienced by the black population since the process of slavery and colonization of the Americas to the present day. In this sense, I point out a typology of genocide experienced by the black Brazilian population that goes through physical genocide, social genocide, symbolic genocide, and political genocide, which are related and feed back in the face of socioeconomic, environmental, symbolic and political inequalities that forge racism. I also discuss the construction of a political-affective hygienist culture that trivializes the genocide of the black population because its construction is linked to a project-desire of a white Nation. Finally, I write the final considerations in the form of a Letter-Manifest for the institutions and researchers of the Social Sciences that have neglected not only the subject of study, but, above all, a reality that afflicts us since the tomb ships of the transatlantic traffic. The research points out the importance of Social Sciences to engage in the social, political and symbolic analysis of death and genocide that involve the black population and their interfaces with eugenics, death, racism and violence, especially in the Brazilian reality whose hygienist-eugenicist culture presupposes the naturalization and legitimation of genocidal practices of segments of the national population, which historically have been denied the right to life, human-dignity and citizenship. It is hoped that this research will contribute to the development of a forensic sociology that highlights the eugenicist-racist character of death and genocide and helps to understand the technologies-mechanisms through which the mass hygienism-annihilation of the black population by operational forms that directly and indirectly lead to death.