When they see us

Leitura: 8 min

Foto: Divulgação

When they see us, Netflix, 2019.

I’m sharing here one of the most recent and important audiovisual references for you to watch and understand a reality: Black bodies are the recipient of the terror white people need to aim at any villain.

In Holland, there’s a figure of a black man called Zwarte Piet. Or Black Peter in English.

This shit went down so hard that the Supreme Court decided that, at Christmas, people couldn’t paint their faces black to embody Black Peter anymore, the so-called blackface. And who is this Black Peter?

He is a character who seems to be a SERVANT to Santa Claus that, when Santa comes to town, a white man comes along with him painted in black, behaving in a humiliating and caricatured way, and if the kids have been good, Santa Claus will give them a present, but if they’ve been bad,

Black Peter will punish the little ones.

We’re not talking about the nineteenth century. This lasted until the last decade, in Holland that you swear to be a liberal country, only because you can smoke that big doobie in the street.

The black person, being the recipient of bad feelings.

The individual who’s gonna bring punishment, pain, fear. The child grows associating THE BLACK MAN TO DANGER.

There’s no way. You grow up in such a culture, being reminded every year that a black man walks in the shadow of Santa Claus to punish you, CHILD, with no critical thinking, and this is planted on you, you’re going to associate black people to danger.

And, of course, the white man to goodness.

Leave Holland, let’s go to Louisiana, South of the United States.

After the war that led the Confederates to their defeat, Black people, no longer handcuffed, started to be considered dangerous, because white people said they didn’t know what the blacks would do without being controlled, with no command, no chains, and no owners. The projection of evil, of danger, on the black body.

One of the first crimes that were charged, or attempted to be charged, on a black man was rape. Because the white woman, protestant mother, guardian of the sanctity of Christian marriage, monogamous, pure, was vulnerable and fragile against the black “beasts”.

And black women were whores, prostitutes, who carried razors with them, they could steal, kill, break into houses. That was the widespread thought. When released, black people couldn’t enjoy human rights or even a reputation. They couldn’t go in a store and order flour to make bread, even if they paid for it, much less on the cuff, they couldn’t even ENTER THE STORE, because if they gained that space, they would steal and kill the owners.

So much so,

That when black people started to consume to live, to eat, segregation was established. Blacks in Black-Only stores. Whites in the White-Only ones.

Segregation in the United States IS BORN FROM THE FEELING THAT THE BLACK PERSON IS DANGEROUS. And this causes racial hate. First, they were “apes”, “mules”, and slaves, now they are legally raised to the condition of PEOPLE and not THINGS, they would never be accepted in the society THAT WAS BUILT UPON THEIR BODIES. At this point, it was clear that, if the black person was not a slave, they wouldn’t be accepted in society. As Malcolm X would say, there wasn’t a prosperity project for the black human. If it weren’t for the fight and the laws, black people would have been slaves up to the present day.

Black men couldn’t even look at a white woman in the south of the United States. If they were caught, they could have been hanged with the accusation of being rapists.

Evidence?

The single tear of a white woman, equally racist, equally interested in the extinction of black people, was enough. It’s necessary to stop with the myth that white women, during and after slavery, were victims of the white man. They were the crown jewels of this system. The gold, the richness, and the privileges obtained with slavery dressed their bodies, decorated their heads, ears, necks.

It was Ruby Hamad, journalist, and doctorate student at New South Wales University, who said that the tears of a white woman impact society, because the image of the “damsel in the tower” rests on her, waiting for her knight to rescue her. The complaints of black and racialized women are no match for the tears of a white woman who claims to be in danger.

It is a delicate topic within the lines of white feminism, where thousands of women think they reached the summit of understanding the world for being feminists, but when they get there, they meet black and racialized women saying they are still oppressors.

White women were the supportive way of the white man. They still are nowadays.

The bodies of hanged black men, or black women, ALWAYS raped and murdered, did not cause a commotion. Because even if they were free, they were not people, they were things. The dispute was on a symbolic level.

The black person cannot appear to be human.

They cannot be nerds. They cannot consume Dior. They cannot enter ZARA to buy clothes. They cannot drive a car. They cannot be “irreverent”, remembering the case of Hélio Martins, who was filmed two weeks ago saying he was, indeed, a racist, and that he hated a black child who, according to him, was “too irreverent, full of attitude, a punk”, the black person cannot be someone.

The question that still screams belongs to Bell Hooks: “Ain’t I a woman?”

And a woman, with all that is implied? All the complexities?

The black person is not limited to their color, but to their humanity. And no radical feminism can handle it, because by saying that gender comes before the race, they throw away all of the struggle and the lives of black men and women who fought for black people to be seen in all of their diversity.

Cut to Brazil.

By looking up the words “black” “accused” “unfairly”, I got 67 results, all in Brazil, from 2018 up to now. Accusations of robbery, theft, burglary, embezzlement, rape, murder, EVERYTHING without proof. Only the words of a white person on the other side.

And that is enough for the police to be mobilized and arrest anyone.

THERE ARE PEOPLE IN JAIL for accusations without any proof by white people.

Earlier this year a black man was forced to take off his clothes at Assaí supermarket in Limeira, in the countryside of São Paulo. Luis Carlos da Silva, 56, was accused of theft by the security guards of the supermarket.

A black surf instructor was unfairly accused of bike theft in June. Matheus Ribeiro made a police report against the couple who accused him of the crime, both white. The police apprehended the suspect, a white man, Igor Pinheiro, 22, resident of Botafogo. The white man has a police record of 28 crimes.

In the same month of June, employees of a store at Shopping Center Pantanal, in Cuiabá (MT), accused the civil servant Paulo Arifa of having robbed a pair of shoes, which he had just bought.

A young black man, in 2020, wrongly accused eight times, was found not guilty by the Superior Court of Justice after misrecognition. When we talk about face recognition, 70% of the cases point to black people.

Recently, in September, a poor black marketer from Petropolis was addressed on the charge of a theft he hadn’t committed, and he was placed for recognition next to other white men. This was the scenario that led an innocent youth to prison, where he remained for 15 months without a single proof against him.

The act, considered structural and institutional racism, made the public Defender’s Office of Rio de Janeiro (DPRJ), assisting in the case, file an investigation request so that the State compensates the accused man for moral damages caused by mistakes in the investigation, in the trial and the conviction.

In September last year, Fernando dos Santos, a young black man of 26 and no criminal record, was sentenced to eight years in prison (closed regime) for the crimes of robbery and criminal conspiracy. Fernando, who is a PE teacher and an educator at a social project in the south zone of São Paulo, was accused of taking part in the robbery of a Philip Morris’ truck in São Caetano do Sul, on October 30th, 2019.

These examples are only a few of them.

But if you stop to remember, even the film The Green Mile was about a black man wrongly accused and arrested for rape and murder by a white woman.

This is not to say that black people, such as white ones, don’t commit crimes.

The human being is capable of that.

The point is that while some are criminalized before any crime, others, even if they steal the Maracanã stadium, will never be considered dangerous.

Maybe you do not see race in Bolsonaro’s government. But white supremacy is right there. Everything in the Brazilian State is the result of white supremacy. The white person reaches power, whether it is at the State, or at the leadership of PSOL, and they make decisions, they take charge.

You can’t see anything when the eyes are blurred.

But when you see clearly, you will see that the same whiteness that sends the war tanks to the favela, is the one that suffocates Negro Belchior and other black people at the left-wing.

Carol Conka doesn’t deserve forgiveness. Nego do Borel doesn’t deserve to be investigated.

If they made a mistake or committed a crime, they can’t be judged as humans but are lynched as white people do, and still, there is this desire in the DNA to beat them up yelling: “you fucking niggers”.

Admit it. You, white woman, you, white man, are not interested in solving any crime if there is a black person involved. What you really want to see is this person being quartered. This is in your blood. It comes from your ancestors.

My friends, being anti-racist at these times demands recognition and therapy from you. Because things are so rooted that when you defend the black body and their integrity in society, and demand JUSTICE, people said I defended Nego do Borel, and then a white woman, from PSOL, called me a rapist.

Everybody is sickened. Thinking they are going to set Brazil free, they will actually conquer new spaces of power, new slave masters and misses, wearing a bag with the face of Marielle printed on it.

The black body is criminalized.

Even if they don’t do anything. We need to talk about that, every day, and disarm ourselves. Black people are not dangerous, they are not criminals, they are light, life, and the future.