Affirming Blackness in a “Colorblind” Anti-Black Nation: How Brazilians Negotiate Police Killings of Afro-Brazilians

Abstract

The historically dominant ideology, racial ambiguity, has structured Brazilian beliefs, opinions, and worldviews. Its antithesis, racial affirmation, has gained wider acceptance on a national scale due to Brazil’s Black movement and affirmative action policies. Which racial ideology do Brazilians employ within the context of police killings of Afro-Brazilians? Do Brazilians emphasize racial stories and ethnoracial categories of ambiguity or affirmation? I use computational text analysis and qualitative interpretation of Twitter data in Portuguese from 2019 to 2021 to analyze five prominent Brazilian cases of racial violence—Pedro Gonzaga, Ágatha Félix, João Pedro, João Alberto, and Kathlen Romeu. These cases create opportunities to examine the contours and tensions of Brazilian racial ideologies on social media. Across the five cases, I find Brazilians primarily use the ethnoracial category negro and foreground stories of racial affirmation. These racial stories align with the frames and identities the Black movement has struggled to promote for generations. In contrast to earlier scholarship that notes the ineffectiveness of the Black movement in Brazil to create a mass movement or a popular negro identity, I find the Black movement’s framing and ethnoracial category resonate with urban Brazilian Twitter users.