Discourse on Racism in Brazil
Freedom and Its Meaning

Are Black people in Brazil really free? Historian Luciana Brito takes a look at the consequences of slavery that have left their mark on Brazilian society to this day. Clearly, the struggle for freedom for all is not yet over.

By Luciana Brito

In 1988, the press and the central government in Brazil celebrated the centenary of the abolition of slavery with a series of events, commemorations, publicity campaigns and other things claiming to celebrate the “freedom” of Brazil’s Black population, which was decreed on 13th May 1888. Notably, the celebrations of the anniversary of slavery’s abolition mainly focused on Princess Isabella of Brazil, the daughter of then Emperor Pedro II (editor’s note: she is considered to be the promulgator of the decree to free the slaves). Thus, the Black population of Brazil owed their freedom to her, the princess, and ought to show their gratitude for it as publicly as possible and in many different ways. This is just one narrative among many that reinforces the claim of an alleged “racial democracy” behind which, despite its blatancy, the racism that creates such great inequalities in Brazil can hide.

The Unfinished Project

To counter the celebrations and the version of history that said that the liberation of Black people was solely due to the benevolence of the white princess, Brazil’s Black movement developed its own interpretation of the freedom project, which it considered unfinished. In May 1988, demonstrations “against the farce of slave liberation” took place all over the country. It was an attempt by the movement to challenge the version of history that negates the actions and protagonism of Black women and men who fought for their own freedom in the Brazil of slavery.

The liberation of slaves was also exposed as a farce considering that the day after the decree, Brazil’s Black population was without paid work, health care, education and access to land and there were no plans to provide these newly emancipated people with living conditions suitable for full citizens.

After the abolition of slavery, they lived in an in-between world, a contradictory state that in practice had little to do with full citizenship. While the lives of Black people had previously been marked by enslavement, they were now subject to structural racism that affected their lives both in their daily routines under unequal social conditions and in the form of political measures that criminalised and curtailed the rights of Black women, men and children. For the Black population in Brazil, freedom is still something that is under development; it is the result of constant struggles.

Brazil was the last country in the Americas to officially end slavery. Not until 1888, even after emancipation in the USA in 1865 and in Cuba in 1886. At the same time, the legend, assumed to be true in some parts of Brazilian society even today, that Brazilian slavery was generally milder compared to that in the United States, spread. The fact is that in the 400-year-long transatlantic slave trade, Brazil received the most enslaved persons: 40 per cent of the around five million trafficked from Africa to the Americas. By comparison, the USA received around 400,000 African persons in the course of transatlantic human trafficking (according to the Slave Voyages website). Until 1888, Brazil was in fact completely dependent on slave labour. It was not until the very end of the nineteenth century that the imperial government began to “whiten” Brazilian society – the so-called branqueamento – which encouraged the immigration of Europeans as paid workers.

Pathways Out of Inequality

Moreover, immediately after the abolition of slavery, the Brazilian Penal Code of 1890 created measures to criminalise the everyday lives of Black persons. Racist inequalities are not the sole legacy of slavery, but the result of constant policies to promote these inequalities, which disenfranchise and criminalise Black people. Capoeira was criminalised, as were African-style religious expressions or any activity that was not work – such as spending time on the street, certain forms of dance or folkloric singing. All of this was legally deemed “loitering” and thus branded as an offence.

The first social organisations of African people on Brazilian soil date back to the end of the sixteenth century: quilombos, settlements of people who had escaped slavery, together with Indigenous people and poor whites. The Quilombo Palmares, which existed for about a century, went down in Brazilian history as the longest lasting settlement of this kind. As an attempt to constitute an alternative society to the colony, as historian Beatriz Nascimento puts it, Palmares was an important point of reference for the experience of life in freedom and community. For Nascimento, this Afro-Brazilian form of social organisation, in which African social, cultural and political references are mixed, still represents an important legacy for Afro-Brazilian populations in the twenty-first century, namely one that teaches the possibility of an own way of life.

With the possibility of acquiring freedom, as provided for by the laws of the colony and later the Brazilian empire, African and Afro-Brazilian women started their own economic activity trading on the streets as so-called ganhadeiras. Purchasing their own freedom could take years, sometimes decades, and was linked to further conditions by the respective rulers.

Fragile Value

The definition of freedom certainly had different connotations, moved at different levels and obeyed different factors and conditions. A freed woman could still be shackled to captivity under certain circumstances if her children continued to be enslaved. Similarly, the freedom of an enslaved person could be bought at the cost of enslaving others. The exchange of one’s freedom for that of an enslaved person was a procedure recognised by the laws of the empire and not uncommon.

Even under the “Law of the Free Womb,” which granted freedom to children born to enslaved women after 1871, freedom could still be restricted in practice. The law stipulated that the free child, referred to as “inexperienced,” remained under the guardianship of their mothers’ former owners or the state until the age of 21. This led to many Black women going to court to demand the exercise of their motherhood and guardianship of their children who were free on paper. This is another example of the restrictions on freedom in the system of enslavement.

The lesson that remains from slavery and the immediate aftermath is that individual freedom is fragile when lived under a social and political system that does not guarantee civil rights and citizenship for all. In 2020, the death of US citizen George Floyd, which was neither the first nor the last case of police violence in the world, reignited the debate about living conditions of Black people in the Americas after the end of slavery. Are Black people really free?

Freedom as a Societal Foundation

In Brazil, almost three times as many Black people are killed by violence than white people and statistics show that almost 80 per cent of those killed by firearms are Black. In Salvador, the state capital of Bahia with an 80 per cent Black population, police kill only Black people, according to a survey by the Security Observatory Network (Rede de Observatórios da Segurança). The living conditions of women are also different. Data from the Brazilian Violence Atlas show that violence against white women has actually decreased, while violence and homicides against Black women have increased in Brazil in recent years. Likewise, Brazil is the country where the most transgender people are killed worldwide, 82 per cent of whom are trans Black people, according to ANTRA, the National Association of Transvestites and Transsexuals.

Data pointing to the gap in inequality between Blacks and whites in the country also show that the situation worsened during the pandemic. The majority of those who died of COVID-19 were Black. Also mostly young children under two years of age of Black or Indigenous people fell victim to COVID-19.

One of the clearest examples of how Brazil is still far from combining freedom with civil rights and democracy is the recent increase in the number of cases of domestic workers freed from slavery-like labour conditions. In recent years, there have been increasing reports of women who had been forced to work in captivity for decades without the right to remuneration or other labour law protections. This freedom, which has still not reached the homes of the Brazilian elite, continues to shackle the country to the days of slavery.

Freedom as the basis of human civil society and democracy still has a long way to go in Brazil. But just as conservative sectors of society keep renewing their demands for the restriction of rights, the social movements working to guarantee these rights are also adapting their political demands to the current conditions of Black people, Indigenous and white women, LGBTQI+ and precarious communities in the cities and in the countryside. They demand the realisation of the dream of their ancestors: the hard-won freedom for all persons in Brazil that is guaranteed to all citizens, democratic and inclusive.