Government defends Anielle Franco and reinforces the thesis of “environmental racism”

One day after Minister Silvio Almeida, of Human Rights, came out in defense of Minister Anielle Franco, of Racial Equality, for associating the tragedy of heavy rains in Rio de Janeiro with “effects of environmental and climate racism”, the government itself decided to come publicly justify the ally’s thesis.

In a long text published on the website of the Secretariat of Social Communication of the Presidency of the Republic (Secom), the government seeks to explain “what environmental racism is” and how it supposedly “impacts more vulnerable populations”.

“The statement by the Minister of Racial Equality was the focus of several reactions, some with the aim of disinformation about the term ‘environmental racism'”, explains the government when defending the minister’s thesis (see in full).

The text recalls an expression created by the American chemist Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr. in the 1980s with an analysis of the black Brazilian thinker Tania Pacheco. The thesis talks about the impacts of “environmental racism” in favelas, indigenous and quilombola communities and lists measures to combat it.

“In Brazil, in cities and urban centers, environmental racism has a significant impact on the population living in favelas and outskirts, where historically there is a majority of the black population”, says an excerpt from the text.

The thesis was amplified by Minister Marina Silva, of the Environment, who said that “environmental racism” is a reality to be faced due to “extreme climate events” that “hardly” affect “black people, women, children and young people ”.

Minister Sonia Guajajara, of Indigenous Peoples, followed the same line and stated that tragedies such as flooding and others caused by climate change most affect the homes of people who “have color and class”. “Denying this only serves to maintain reality,” she added.

The thesis that “environmental racism” affects only black and young people, however, is contested by São Paulo state deputy Guto Zacarias (União-SP), who published on social media a list of four white people of varying ages who were victims of rain in previous years, when the expression was not used to justify deaths.

“How many innocent people will lose their lives so that the political elite can invest in decent housing, land regularization, infrastructure and basic sanitation? Structural racism does not exist. Structural demagoguery, yes,” she fired.

In addition to Zacarias, the economist and master in philosophy from the University of São Paulo (USP), Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca, also criticized the use of the expression to justify the effects caused by the rains in Rio de Janeiro. According to him, treating this structural problem in large cities as just “racism” keeps society away from developing solutions to avoid new tragedies.

“Instead of discussing urban infrastructure works, new housing – which have nothing to do with skin color – we are going to discuss racism in society, a discussion whose mandatory conclusion, we already know, is that it is ‘structural’ and therefore will only be resolved with the end of capitalism. It was so much easier to improve urban drainage”, he wrote in an article published in Newspaper last Monday (15).

For him, Anielle Franco’s speech merely repeated “commonplaces of progressive discourse”.

“The script is so lazy that it is already beaten: identify any social problem that is the result of poverty or inequality. Note that, as black people are poorer on average than white people in Brazil, this problem disproportionately affects more black people. Okay, you discovered a new type of racism. Do black people have less access to air travel on average? Air racism. Do black people have more economic difficulty buying a smartphone? Telephone racism. The solution to the problems may be further away, but you will have more engagement on the networks than if you discussed basic sanitation and income distribution”, he said in the criticism.