Will the privileged sleep in peace? – 02/01/2024 – Policies and Justice

Gilberto Gil, in a song recorded by Chico Buarque, tells us that it is always good to remember that an empty glass is full of air. Without the intention of making the basic error of explaining poetry, especially one by master Gil, this verse resonates with what critical studies of whiteness seek to announce. There is no absolute absence without a dominant presence. If there is a lack, there is a stay; If there are disadvantaged people, there will always be privileged ones.

It is in this spirit that, together, we run the Observatory of Whiteness. When we understand whiteness as the place of racial privileges, which was historically constructed as the highest point in the racial hierarchy, with the power to classify others, attribute raciality and stigmatizing subjectivity to those considered non-white, we join the currents that comprise racism. as a structuring of symbolic and material inequalities that promote a body of privileged people who will not renounce their place at the top.

Therefore, we were born to offer Brazil a new repertoire of analyzes of its deepest issues. Centralizing whiteness as an object of scrutiny means not only delimiting a field of action, but making a resounding declaration that white economic, legal, political and cultural power will no longer be able to sleep in peace. You will be under constant observation and questioning.

However, more than announcing the white privilege of an insistently unequal country, it is necessary to unveil mechanisms, the details, the pitfalls, the transfigurations, understanding the complexities and vicissitudes present in these long-term stays in spaces of power. As an example, last November, we revealed that white men in São Paulo received more financial support from the State to carry out research on the environment than all researchers in the northern region, where the Brazilian Amazon is located and is the region with the highest concentration of black researchers on this topic.

The intrinsic link between racism and climate injustice has been forcefully highlighted by Brazilian civil society. The strong participation in the last COPs, especially COP28 held last month in Dubai, the profusion of technical reports, studies and essays that unequivocally demonstrate the relevance of articulations between markers of difference, such as income, region, gender and especially race in the repertoire of interpretations about climate justice is abundant, but it is still in the southeast, in the hands of white men, that most of the resources are.

It is this type of incongruity that we want to reveal and demand radical transformations. We have insisted that awareness of inequalities, followed by inaction that maintains and sustains privileges, is a continuous act of a white supremacist agenda that perpetuates those who consider others – in the Brazilian case, the black and indigenous population – in the worst socioeconomic indexes. Thus, it condemns the majority of the population to a disastrous fate.

When we revealed the anti-quota groups, through the analysis of public speeches, bills in federal legislative houses and in press editorials, we sought precisely to understand how those who could not bear to see their spaces of privilege articulated themselves, such as the most prestigious courses at universities , go through a successful process of deracialization. Because they do not see themselves as carriers of race, but as universal subjects, they never understood that a space with 90% of people belonging to the same racial group is, in essence, a racialized place.

The supremacist agenda will not gently cede its secular spaces. From our perspective, a new dawn depends on breaking the narcissistic pacts of whiteness and non-renewal with the old power that seeks to remain in the sun. We are committed to promoting a political platform that dreams – and commits – to formulating a State that transgresses the current state of affairs, with a utopia of an inclusive nation on the horizon.

The editor, Michael França, asks that each participant in the “Politics and Justice” space at Sheet Suggest a song to readers. In this text, the one chosen by Manuela Thamani and Thales Vieira was “Empty Cup”, by Gilberto Gil and Chico Buarque.

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