New Lulas government takes steps to fight racism in Brazil

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On January 1, Brazil’s new president, Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, walked up the ramp to the presidential palace, in front of nearly 200,000 cheering supporters.

Traditionally, the new president walks alongside the incumbent leader, who then hands him the presidential sash.

But former President Jair Bolsonaro left Brazil for Florida two days before the end of his term. So instead, Lula was accompanied by a group of people chosen to symbolize the diversity of Brazil. They were a cook, an indigenous chef, a factory worker, a teacher, a disabled activist and a child.

Aline Souza, a black recycling collector, placed the presidential sash on Lulas’ shoulders.

It was a profound statement, coming after the Bolsonaro administration, under which human rights policies were rolled back, indigenous and black communities marginalized and threatened, and racist and xenophobic attacks increased.

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It’s so exciting, said social scientist Helga De Almeida. It is the return of our democracy. The inauguration was so representative. With a diversity of people. We haven’t seen anything like it in the past 4 years.

Lula kept his promise to bring diversity to his government. Eleven, or nearly 30%, of ministers in the Lulas cabinet are women, the highest number ever. The same number identifies as black or brown. Lula created 14 new cabinet seats, including new ministries of Indigenous Peoples and Racial Equality. In his first two weeks in office, he has already made strides in pushing back against Brazil’s systemic racism and Bolsonaro’s cuts to social programs for marginalized communities.

It’s a moment to celebrate, said Karine de Souza Silva, a black professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina who was a member of Lulas’s foreign relations transition team. “Throughout Lulas’s campaign, he promised to rebuild those social policies and deepen racial equality policies.”

Lula appointed prominent indigenous activist Sonia Guajajara to lead the new Ministry of Indigenous Peoples. Anielle Franco, his new minister for racial equality, is the sister of Marielle Franco, a black lesbian city councilor from Rio de Janeiro who was shot dead in 2018, sparking a wave of Black Lives Matter protests across Brazil and across the country. world. When Marielle died, Anielle founded the Marielle Franco Institute, to bring her memory and her fight to life.

Franco and Guajajara were sworn in on January 11, just three days after thousands of Bolsonaro supporters invaded Brasilia, ransacking government buildings including Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace in an attempted coup. state against the Lulas government. Franco and Guajajara descended a winding ramp, hand in hand, as drums beat an Afro-Brazilian rhythm welcoming the orix Xang, the spirit of justice.

“Today’s ceremony has a very special symbolism,” Franco said during his first speech as minister. “After the attacks suffered by this house and the Brazilian people last Sunday, we set foot here as a sign of resistance to any attempt to attack the institutions and our democracy. Fascism, like racism, is an evil to be fought in our society.

During the ceremony, Lula signed the country’s new racial crimes law, which punishes individual crimes of racial slur (including racist verbal abuse) with prison terms of two to five years. It further states that if racist acts are committed by more than one person, the penalty will increase by 50% for each person involved.

We have to create a new culture. Because those of us who feel racism, who feel it daily. Those who are scared, you need real action, black attorney Fabiano Machado da Rosa told Band News.

Anielle Franco says her new ministry will be an important step towards institutionalizing the anti-racist political struggle and elevating the issue of racism into public debate in a way that Brazilian politics has never seen.

It is not an easy task. In Brazil there is a myth of racial democracy. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Racism in Brazil is endemic. It’s everywhere. It’s every day, Reginete Bispo, a black movement member and sociologist, told me in 2020, after security guards killed a 40-year-old black man by choking him to death outside a supermarket. Racism in Brazil is recognized worldwide, as it is one of the countries that kills black people the most.

Analysts say Bolsonaro only made things worse. During his administration, he helped empower racists and white supremacists. Some of the top members of his cabinet released videos featuring Nazi symbology and imagery. The number of neo-Nazi cells in Brazil grew by almost 60% in his first two years in power.

We must do what Germany did after World War II. We must de-nazify Brazilian society, said Silvio Almeida, a prominent black lawyer and Lula’s new human rights minister, last month.

To do this, he said three key elements must be incorporated into future policies: tackling racism, increasing the political participation of unrepresented groups, and tackling poverty and growing inequality.

Thirty-three million people do not have enough to eat in Brazil. One hundred and twenty million people are food insecure. Millions of people are unemployed, Almeida said. This is the most fundamental point. We have to deal with it, because people have to be alive to keep fighting.

It’s bread and butter Lulas. During his first two terms, from 2003 to 2010, he lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty through a set of anti-poverty programs he called Zero Hunger. He promised to do it again.

And Brazilian poverty is not color blind. Three-quarters of Brazil’s poor are black or brown. Black unemployment is well above the national average. More than three-quarters of homicide victims in Brazil are black. This is all the more shocking given that black and brown Brazilians make up more than half of the country’s population.

“So-called abolition has only exchanged slavery for racial discrimination and social exclusion,” Black Workers Party MP Benedita da Silva wrote in November. “In addition to structural racism, institutional racism and racial prejudice have been fed back into family education and schools to reveal the brutal force of discrimination and violence that kills the black population, especially its youth.

But, she wrote, now with Lula “we can have real hope that policies against racism and the promotion of racial equality will resume.”

This turnaround is also expected in the education sector, which has seen deep cuts under Bolsonaro.

During previous Lulas governments, he created nearly 200 private and federal university systems and campuses, greatly expanding access to university education for marginalized and black communities in Brazil. In 2011, a year after he left office, 70% of public universities had affirmative action programs.

I benefited directly from the public university, Priscila Marinho told me in October at a rally for the Lulas candidacy in Recife, Pernambuco. I also did a Masters, and I had this opportunity thanks to the Lula government.

Things are likely to get even better, said Joo Feres Jnior, a political scientist at Rio de Janeiro State University who specializes in affirmative action programs. He says many of his former colleagues, including his academic adviser, have now taken up posts in the new Department for Racial Equality.

The possibilities look better than they have ever been, he says.

But there are concerns about the amount of public funds that will be allocated to the fight for racial justice within the Lula administration.

“The important question is how much will be invested in the Ministries of Racial Equality, Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights? said Ailce Moreira, a black indigenous journalist and member of the Black Evangelical Movement, which fights racism in religious institutions.

Representation and reparations are done through the creation of ministries, she said. “Inclusion and social transformation happen with investment and allocation of resources.”

The struggle for racial equality will face conflict and difficulty. The Lulas government is made up of a broad coalition of 16 different parties across the political spectrum, and racism in Brazil is systemic.

“This has existed in Brazil since colonization, more than 500 years ago, Souza Silva said, but the fact that the state is making this profound statement is a moment to celebrate and it gives us hope. It is important that the State is committed to defending our lives and our claims.

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