By denying racism against whites, the left abandons equality

One of the advances promoted by Western civilization was the idea that all individuals have the same value, without distinction of race, and that the law must treat them in the same way. Founded in Christian theology, the idea gained new strength in the period of classical liberalism, in the 1700s, and led to the abolition of slavery and the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration, drawn up by the United Nations in 1948, begins by stating that “every human being has the capacity to enjoy the rights and freedoms set out in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, whether of race, color, sex, language, religion, political opinion or of any other nature, national or social origin, wealth, birth, or any other condition.”

This is how the law typifies the crime of racism in Brazil. The current version, approved in 2023, provides that it is a crime to “injure someone, offending their dignity or decorum, due to race, color, ethnicity or national origin.”

But, depending on some left-wing groups, this conception of racial equality will be erased from the map.

This was clear in the reaction to the case of Marcelle Decothé, then advisor to the Minister of Racial Equality, Anielle Franco. Marcelle managed, at once, to attack white people, people of European descent and people from São Paulo in a single message posted on her Instagram page on September 24th. The advisor was fired. The Public Ministry opened an investigation. Parliamentarians asked her to face justice for racism.

Meanwhile, most of the groups that claim to be anti-racist rushed to dismiss the accusation against Marcelle. According to them, racism against white people is a logical impossibility because racism is a “power relationship”, as he wrote Monica Cunha, councilor in Rio de Janeiro for PSOL.

According to this reasoning, when a black person discriminates against a white person, the victim is only paying for their sins (or those of their ancestors). The idea is the result of the notion of “structural racism”, recently imported from the United States by Brazilian progressives and popularized by radical academics such as Silvio Almeida, current Minister of Human Rights. It turns out that, unlike what happened in Brazil, the United States actually had a system of official segregation between blacks and whites that lasted until the end of the 1960s in some states.

The NGO Gender and Number, for example, he wrote that the idea that white people can be victims of racism is, in fact, dangerous. “’Reverse racism’, in addition to not being possible, is a dangerous idea because it ignores that racism is a power structure that keeps black people at the bottom,” wrote the organization, which received resources from George Soros’s Open Society, at least twice in the last five years. There are also those who defend the idea of ​​free, such as the professor at UFC (Federal University of Ceará) Lola Aronovich.

Turn inside to the left

The concept of structural racism and the notion that white people cannot be victims of racism, however, contradict the historical position of the Brazilian left itself.

Writer Bruna Frascolla, who has a doctorate in Philosophy and columnist for Gazeta do Povo, recalls that, in his first stint as President of the Republic, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva prepared a manual in which he warned about racism against white people. “The booklet included prejudice against white people as racism, condemning the expression ‘settler’, which is used in the South to refer to descendants of German and Italian rural immigrants and has a pejorative connotation”, Bruna says.

Amid the debate over Marcela Decothé’s case, UFBA (Federal University of Bahia) professor Wilson Gomes — who is black and leftist — criticized the idea that black people should have carte blanche to discriminate against white people. “There is nothing, in any acceptable definition of racism, that a priori excludes that white, Asian, indigenous, Arab, Jewish and gypsy individuals may be targets of racism,” he wrote.

For Bruna Frascolla, the denial of “reverse racism” is a symptom of a larger problem: the speed with which the identity agenda (which emphasizes racial, gender or sexual orientation identity) has advanced among the so-called Brazilian intellectual elite. At universities, in particular, excessive politicization has given rise to courses such as “gender studies”, which offer few useful skills for the job market.

The number of students seeking federal universities has decreased in the last five years. Bruna has no doubt that the adoption of the identity agenda is part of the explanation for the phenomenon: “The consequence [da militância nas universidade] it’s irrelevance,” she says.

In a way, it is true that there is no such thing as reverse racism. The reverse of racism is tolerance. And racism continues to be discrimination based on race.