React or Be Killed

Abstract

This conversation places a historian from the Brazilian political organization Reaja ou Será Morto / Reaja ou Será Morta (React or Be Killed) in dialogue with other members of that group to reflect on how the study of history on the one hand and the struggle against racist police brutality and the possibility of creating a world without such violence on the other might inform each other. The interlocutors explore historical continuities in policing Black communities, and in what they have identified as genocidal violence against Black Brazilians, as well as in anti-Black racist notions of public safety that have become imbricated in the way the state functions. With their Pan-Africanist community school, Escola Winnie Mandela, with their militant commitment to autonomy, and in the face of persistent neglect by the state, members of Reaja suggest that theirs is already a world without police.

White Americans' blame attributions and empathy towards Black victims of police violence: How pejorative stereotypes ‘engulf the field’

“…Third, future research might productively consider how the processes we studied (participant stereotype endorsement and victim stereotypicality) associated with stereotyping—traditionally considered a basic psychological phenomenon that operates across cultures—relate to responses to police violence against relevant marginalized racial or ethnic groups in societies other than the United States. In support of this contention, social scientists have begun to document elevated incidences of police violence against men of colour in Brazil (Santos et al., 2020), Canada (Wortley & Owusu‐Bempah, 2022) and Australia (Cunneen, 2017). Indeed, in July of 2023, there were widespread riots in France after the police killing of 17‐year‐old young man of North African descent referred to as Nahel.…”

Penal state power in Latin America: Cases, concepts and questions for the political sociology of penality

“…In this article I elaborate key dimensions of penality in contemporary Latin America. Since the inception of Latin American states in the 19 th century, following formal independence from colonial rule, penal techniques and discourses have played a central role in imposing and maintaining vertiginously unequal societies along ethno‐racial lines, among other lines of social exclusion (Aguirre & Salvatore, 2001; Holloway, 2001; Santos et al., 2020). Social relations have been profoundly shaped through the present day by western European colonization from the late 15 th through 18 th century, economic regimes heavily dependent on the forced labor of Indigenous and Afro‐diasporic peoples (e.g.…”

“…Importantly, since Brazil's return to electoral democracy in the 1980s, Afro‐Brazilians have been increasingly incorporated into the national culture and identity in which projections of the country as “racial democracy” and “emerging world power” have gone nearly hand in hand (Smith, 2016, p. 6). Yet, as federal level leaders implement social reforms to explicitly incorporate “Black political subjects” (Paschel, 2018) into the body politic for the first time, many authorities especially at the local level continue to engage in “a routine politics of gendered, racialized terror,” including through the systematic killing of Black people (Alves, 2018; Santos et al., 2020; Smith, 2016, p. 6).…”