An African aphorism says that "if words burn your mouth, the cure is silence". It applies well to the verbal intemperance of the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, a repeat offender of said crimes. In the most recent one, irritated by the questions about his favoring evangelical stages on New Year's Eve on Copacabana beach, he came out with "what prejudiced people are these?" He referred precisely to the "people" from whom the creation of the beach party at the turn of the year comes, a transposition of the tribute to Iemanjá on February 2nd to New Year's Eve in Rio. However, the aspiring governor, with the same inconsistency with which he slips from Bolsonaro to Lula, has already promised a statue to Tata Tancredo, Umbanda leader, promoter of the party in the 1950s. The incident mirrors worse things. On the one hand, the people's last free territory, the beach, has been appropriated by elites, governments and rioters: the declassified struggle is an aspect of the class struggle in the country. They become militias all the way to the seaside. On the other hand, the politician's "burnt mouth" is guided by the old discriminatory discourse of organic intellectuals in power. As the incensed Roberto Campos wrote: "Much of our underdevelopment can be explained in cultural terms. Unlike the Anglo-Saxons, who preach rationality and competition, our cultural components are the Iberian culture of privilege, the indigenous culture of indolence and the black culture of magic" (Folha, 25.Aug.96). News of the day Receive the main news published in Folha daily in your email; open to non-subscribers. Otherwise, the journalist Fernando Pedreira: "A growing and irresistible wave is coming from the North that is lapping the country, taking its culture, its politics by storm (...) A new Brazil would finally be born, more Brazilian, that is, more Latin-American, Cucaracho, warm, proudly and openly black, Cuban" (JB, May 12, 1996). During the FHC government, Pedreira became an ambassador for what he considered a "latrine" at UNESCO, the UN's cultural body. In two decades of affirmative action, these wide-open windows of prejudice have closed, waiting for the time to tear up the costumes. With the moral degradation of the proto-fascist wave, repressed racism returned. In Hebraica in Rio, a room full of wealthy people educated at good schools burst into laughter when Bolsonaro said that quilombolas weighed a thousand pounds. The then candidate's children would never marry black women, because "they were well educated." The prejudice that appears in the mayor's faniquito caters to a type of "people" on the electoral rise: Pentecostals. In fact, today they are more concerned about their accounts at Banco Master. But it is strategic to design a valued identity profile and at the same time contain autochthonous forms of subjectivation. Hence the racist denial of concrete possibilities of people or any other historicity. Neocolonial deafness aside, however, the phrase by abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco still resonates: "Black people gave Brazil a people." Not an indeterminate "people", but a people with another civilizational pattern, who arrived here as a multiple of nations in the African diaspora. Nation, said the Frenchman Ernest Renan, is a "spiritual principle". This is how the principle of maternal waters receives its name from Iemanjá, patron saint of the people's beach. LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.
