Some Notes on the Double Negation of Black Life in Brazil

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Article

Neither Humans nor Rights: Some Notes on the Double Negation of Black Life in Brazil

Jaime Amparo Alves1

AbstractThis article examines the challenges of conceptualizing Black existence within the realm of what has been defined as civil society. Rather than entering the Afro-pessimism versus Afro-optimism debate, its aim is to provide ethnographic material to further an understanding of the (im)possibilities for redressing Black injury from racialized categories such as law, justice, and humanity. How might we understand mourning and grieving when the racial alterity of the Black subject positions "it" outside the domains of citizenship and humanity? This double negation—neither human nor citizen—is the basis from which the article provides a critique of the racial terror perpetrated by police-linked death squads in São Paulo, Brazil.

Keywordsontological impossibilities, Blackness, human rights, social death, democracy

What limit must be exceeded in order that the violence directed at the black body be made legible in the law?—Hartman (1997, p. 81)

What if some subjects never achieve, in the eyes of others, the status of the “living”?—Holland (2000, p. 15)

1Universidad Icesi, Cali, Colombia

Corresponding Author:Jaime Amparo Alves, Centro de Estudios Afrodiasporicos/Universidad Icesi, Calle 18 N. 122-135, Cali - Colombia. Email: [email protected]

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Introduction

The title of this article may suggest a nihilist perspective on the contentious and urgent debate around the politics of human rights. The assumption of the concept’s universality is well established, but critiques of its unfulfilled promise ring particularly true for those denied full participation in the human community. Borrowing the title from Eduardo Galeano’s critique of the inter-national human rights system in the wake of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,1 my task is both less ambitious and more straightforward. My case for a double negation—neither human nor citizen—builds on Franz Fanon’s (1963) argument for the ontological impossibility of Black civil exis-tence within the paradigm of civil society:

The two zones [the white and the black worlds] are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of a reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. (p. 39)

Fanon’s five-decade-old assertion still challenges our political imagination and invites us to consider the paradigmatic position Blacks occupy in today’s supposedly post-racial, post-colonial societies.

Critical scholarship on Black suffering has traced a genealogy of the Black structural condition—from racial slavery’s “natal alienation,” to the constitu-tion of modern White civil society, to present-day anti-Black racism—to argue for the fungibility of Black bodies and the centrality of death in defin-ing Black subjectivity (e.g., Hartman, 1997; Patterson, 1982; Sexton, 2010; Wilderson, 2003, 2008). This body of literature, roughly labeled as Afro-pessimist, has suggested that, given the aforementioned mutual opposition, Blackness is ontologically marked as the negation of sociality. Black posi-tionality is defined through the work of death, or, as Jared Sexton (2011) has argued, “black life is lived in death” (p. 29).

Some contend that this framework overly emphasizes the antagonism between Blackness and humanity, to the point that it reduces Black subjectiv-ity to a "death-driven nonbeing" (Moten 2008, p.178). Black subjecthood seems to be simply a by-product of racial slavery, and Black agency (if pos-sible at all) is inescapably reduced to the replication of the social structure. Such critiques of anti-Blackness, Fred Moten (2008) has argued, work in a negative register that ends up denying Black subjectivity and reifying Black suffering. While the Afro-pessimists emphasize the structure of antagonism—to use their lexicon—between humanity and Blackness, whiteness and (social) death,2 the Afro-optimists emphasize the political possibilities that might flow from a refusal to be defined through pathological narratives of being Black.



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This is what Moten has identified as the "fugue state" or the lived "para-onto-logical disruption" of the racial script (p. 179).

While I am uncomfortable with the Afro-pessimist approach’s tendency to overlook the creative (and painful) ways that Black life has been reinvented in the face of, and in opposition to, contemporary regimes of racial terror,3 this literature provides an important critique of Western political thought, in that it pushes forward a radical agenda that demystifies concepts such as freedom, human rights, and civil society. I am particularly compelled by Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) incisive take on the question of Black personhood vis-à-vis Black interpellation by the law in which Blacks are seen as human “only to the extent of their culpability” (p. 24). Thus, I cautiously join this literature in calling attention to the dual process through which the Brazilian regime of domination accepts and negates Blackness: The regime devaluates Black lives through continuous subjugation to death but rabidly promotes Blackness through Carnival, samba, and football. The negation of Black civil life defines and regulates the regime of rights, as illustrated in the disturb-ingly common Brazilian saying, direitos humanos para quem é humano [human rights are for those who are human]. This evocation, often used to justify police killings in Brazilian favelas, just illustrates the “racial common-sense” that informs the logic of justice and punishment: The victims don’t have rights if they are not considered fully human, and Blacks are not quite humans.4

I hope to illuminate this process of double negation through ethnographic encounters with two Black women whose sons were killed by the Military Police in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Their frustration with human rights activists, the state’s withholding of dead Black bodies, and the normalization of police killing as institutional practice to protect “White” civil society is the context within which I explore the Afro-pessimist question on the impossibility of redressing Black social suffering through civil society’s paradigm of rights and human dignity. What are the limits and possibilities of “human rights” in dealing with racialized bodies that are deemed to be outlawed, abject, and non-human? Finally, what are the possibilities for politicizing Black death in our post-racial moment? Dona Maria’s search for the remains of her 22-year-old son, Betinho, and Dona Lurdinha’s5 witnessing of the slaughter of her 25-year-old son, Alex, may help us address these questions.

Dona Lurdinha: My Son and I, Struggling With the Police at 2:00 a.m.

I heard about Alex’s death on the news. The case drew media attention because the kidnapping, torture, and killing of another Black man 1 month




earlier, also at the hands of the Military Police, had been strongly denounced by witnesses. As usual, the television newscast portrayed Alex, the victim, as a criminal suspect whose death was precipitated by his alleged resistance to arrest.6 Military Police officers killed Alex in a favela in Zona Sul, where he lived with his mother. According to the police, he evaded a checkpoint and then resisted arrest and “eventually” died while the police were transporting him to the hospital.

Dona Lurdinha told me a very different story:

It was late at night. I was sleeping when I heard the noise of police sirens at my front door. So I quickly jumped from the bed and went outside. As I was coming, I already heard his voice: “Mãe, mãe [mom, mom]!” So I ran, my heart beating desperately . . . When I opened the window, I saw them beating him in his face, another one throwing his motorcycle to the side, and he kept crying, “Oh mãe, oh mãe!” I don’t know where I got the courage, I just know that I ran out to them, without sandals, wearing my sleeping clothes, and started crying out, “He is my son, he lives here.” But they did not listen to me. I was grabbing the gate, my dog barking crazily. Then one of them said, “If this dog comes down here, I will start killing.” And I had strength just to cry, “He is my son, my son.”

And as I cried out, and as Alex struggled, they beat, beat, and beat him. And it was a lot of kicking boots right here [showing me her side], in his back, a lot of punches in his belly and his face. My son was like you, very thin . . . like, no, you are too skinny . . . yeah, he was taller and with some more weight. So when they beat him, I cannot even tell you . . . [silence]. He fell to his knees, started vomiting . . . I started yelling at them and they told me to “stop crying out or we will take you too.” . . . He started vomiting on the sidewalk . . . one of them grabbed his neck and broke it in front of me. I knew they had broken it because I saw he was trying to grab the gate and his hands stopped in the air . . . All that, right here, in front of me [pointing to the gate in front of us]. Right there . . . Nobody on the street, 2:00 a.m. My son and I, struggling with the police . . .

The police officers grabbed Alex’s body and threw him in the patrol car, leaving his mother crying out to her neighbors for help: “They killed my son, they killed my son!” She ran after them to the police station and learned that they had taken Alex to the hospital. As usual, police procedure for a “casu-alty” entails erasing evidence of police wrongdoing and “rescuing” the vic-tim by taking him or her to the hospital (see Human Rights Watch, 2009). Quite often, those who are “rescued” find death in the patrol car, or in the denial of urgent care in the emergency room.7 While the scope of the com-plicity between the police and medical authorities remains unknown, the expanse between the street, the police car, and the hospital constitutes the



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theater in which other state interventions energize police assassinations. In the case of Alex, this predictable script confirms the modus operandi of the police: He resisted arrest, was seriously injured in a struggle with the police, and was taken to a hospital where he succumbed to his injuries and eventually died. The Medical and Forensic Authority confirmed what Dona Lurdinha suspected: death by cervical fracture. “I knew he was dead. When I saw his neck hanging from his body, I knew.”

In bringing this full narrative to the reader, I don’t mean to suggest an exceptional “event” that negates the normalcy of state violence.8 Rather, I reproduce Dona Lurdinha’s account at length because I believe it helps to deconstruct the sanitized language of order and peace that most often masks the ugly face of the state and hides civil society’s complicity with, and depen-dency on, racialized policing practices. In comparing Dona Lurdinha’s narra-tive with the state’s bureaucratic account, we can read Alex’s death beyond statistics and see it instead as a “political marker of possibilities” of the very existence of the polis as a racialized political community (Vargas & James, 2012).

How many (physical and symbolic) deaths has the state produced through the denial of basic citizenship rights for those individuals struggling to find a place in the anti-Black city? How does one measure the collective physical, psychological, and emotional trauma of targeted killings of members of a racialized community? Dona Lurdinha’s encounters with death—through her son’s murder and her own vulnerabilities as a favelada Brown/Black woman9—illustrate the ordinary letting-die practices that cannot be conveyed by counting bodies10 on the streets. To reduce the category of “deadly vio-lence” to Black men’s bodies found in the streets is to underestimate the state’s ability to inflict death. Not only is the state overtly responsible for killings by the police, it is also complicit in the “production of vulnerabilities to premature death” (Gilmore, 2007, p. 247).

Yet, police targeted killings of Black men, in this context, are of particular interest because they reveal the architecture of a necropolitical governance (Mbembe, 2003) mystified in state fantasies of peace and justice.11 Alex’s beating took 20 minutes, with four policemen taking turns torturing him in front of his mother while she begged for his life. Lurdinha’s account illus-trates the emptiness of law in such racialized regime of rights, where the state only appears through its punitive gaze. How could Dona Lurdinha ask for protection from the very structure that renders Black life disposable? Obviously, she could not claim membership in the world of citizenship, because her pathologized status as a favelada did not entitle her to protection, as the authoritative discourses of civil society presume. As she screamed, cried, and begged for her son’s life, her voice could not be heard. Neither she




nor Alex was entitled to the regime of rights: “I was there, seeing my son being killed. From whom would I ask protection?” she asks. “That night I couldn’t call the police. The police were his slayers.”

Dona Maria: I Want My Son Back!

It had been 2 years since Betinho “disappeared.” He was kidnapped and killed by a police-linked death squad, and his mutilated body was disposed of in a clandestine cemetery. Since then, Dona Maria had been going back and forth across the city, from one government office to the next, dealing with endless paperwork in order to claim her son’s body for a proper burial. After several attempts, we finally managed to set up a meeting with human rights activists and state officials to discuss Betinho’s death. As we entered the state attor-ney’s office, Dona Maria disrupted the meeting in a way neither I nor the other participants anticipated. I could not help but see my almost 6 months’ effort to set up this meeting being dismantled in a few short minutes. When the public attorney, a young White woman, gave us a warm welcome and expressed her genuine interest in helping, Dona Maria collapsed in the chair with a torrent of anger: “Where is my son? I just want you to bring my son back. Where is Betinho’s body? I have heard too much talk and seen very little action.”

An embarrassed silence filled the room. The task force was meeting in a good-faith attempt to overcome the bureaucratic inertia that had denied Dona Maria the right to bury her son and receive compensation in the form of a stipend from the government. In the room were an NGO lawyer, a psycholo-gist from the human rights movement, the public attorney, a representative from the police ombudsman, and a representative from the human rights council. All were White, middle-class individuals who had to confront the questions posed by Dona Maria: “Weren’t vocês [you all] the ones who killed my son?” she demanded. “So, now you bring him back. And I will not accept him in a plastic bag. You took my son alive!”

The police officers accused of assassinating Betinho, the human rights activists, and those representing the state bureaucracy were indiscriminately interpellated by Dona Maria. The distinction between state and civil society was irrelevant in the face of state-produced Black death. The brutality of the police killings and the “soft knife” of the state bureaucracy (Kleinman, 2000) were indistinguishable in the kidnapping, murder, and holding of her son’s body. Accordingly, Dona Maria’s shift from first demanding that the state provide her son with a proper funeral to then demanding that he be brought back to life was not merely a result of psychological stress. It was also an attempt to make Betinho’s death legible in the face of White bureaucracy. Would she be successful?



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That was not the first time, and would not be the last, that I heard Dona Maria publicly demand that state authorities bring back her dead son. In a public hearing at the human rights council, months earlier, she had refused to talk about her son’s body, and instead asked whether we would “bring Betinho back to life.” While the human rights advocates tried to engage with her, she remained indifferent and later, expressed frustration with the long and tiring talks about what she already knew. Her personal experiences had taught her that the state could not foster life; it only produced dead bodies. How could the necropolitical machine of state power produce life?

Dona Maria’s powerful demands contained a deeper meaning than either my activist colleagues or I could grasp in the moment. What was she talking about? Bringing a dead body back to life? I tried to intervene, as I was afraid her outburst would cost us support in navigating the bureaucratic world. These activists could help make her paperwork arrive in the hands of state authorities who had the power to release Betinho’s body from the clandestine cemetery and approve Dona Maria’s monthly stipend.

“Dona Maria . . .” I interjected.

“Stop right there, Jaime,” she said. “You know what I’m talking about. It is not just today that I have been waiting, waiting and waiting. Until when?”

“We will not bring back your son,” the public attorney responded. “No one can compensate for your pain, your health, your peace of mind. But financial compensation is your right and we will fight for that.”

“I don’t care how you are gonna do that. What I know is that they took my son alive, They did not take him dead. These carniceiros [butchers] took Betinho alive, and now he is in a plastic bag there in the clandestine cemetery. I want my son!”

The psychologist tried to calm her down by bringing her a glass of water and assuring her that we all shared her pain and were in solidarity with her suffering. The lawyer presented her with a plan of action, including a special request for the governor to provide financial compensation and a petition to the court to release Betinho’s body. The state attorney asked her to be patient, and my activist friends asked her to be reasonable; the state bureaucracy does not work as fast as we would like, they told her. Finally, the psychologist sug-gested that she participate in a therapy program to cope with anxiety and depression. Frustrated, Dona Maria threw a stack of documents on the table and left the room.




The Invisibility of Black Pain

Was the meeting at the state attorney’s office an example of White cognitive inability—or “white ignorance,” as Charles Mills (2007) has it—to under-stand Dona Maria’s suffering? What does such a cognitive distance tell us about the specificity of anti-Black racism and the structure of White privi-lege? Was Dona Maria losing her mind? Her demand that we bring her son back from the dead disturbed us precisely because she challenged state fanta-sies of law and order, and unveiled the state’s anthropophagic nature.12 The state was naked as a murderous machine, and no one could respond to her inquiry. The bureaucrats’ and activists’ condescending responses to Dona Maria illustrate the unbridgeable gap between her personal experience as a Black, female slum resident—a favelada—and their White, middle-class privilege. While she insisted on laying bare the system of domination that produced her son’s and her own vulnerability to death, they could only see her as a coitadinha [poor little thing]—as if Betinho was just another inevi-table casualty of Brazilian urban warfare.

In Scenes of Subjugation, Saidiya Hartman argues,

The elusiveness of black suffering can be attributed to a racist optics in which black flesh is itself identified as the source of opacity, the denial of black humanity, and the effacement of sentience integral to wanton use of the captive body.

Hartman (1997) asks, “Is not the difficulty of empathy related to both the devaluation and the valuation of black life?” (p. 21). My White interlocutors at the meeting with Dona Maria would state that they had empathy for her suffering.13 Indeed, they tried hard to help her cope with the exceptional pain generated by Betinho’s death. As Hartman has forcefully shown, however, this empathetic response itself cancels Black suffering, as the relational empathy between Black victims and White spectators is only possible through the (dis)possession of the latter’s experience. That is, White empathy is based on the valuation of White humanity and the calculated risk of White bodies. It also normalizes anti-Black violence, in that it entails denial of the implica-tion of Whites in the ordinariness of racial terror (see Hartman, 1997). In this sense, it is the White subject’s tacit denial of its complicity with the structure of privilege that grants power over racialized bodies, and its understanding of racism solely as interpersonal attitudes that allows for the reproduction of Whiteness in our presumed post-racial moment (see Lipsitz, 1995; Mills, 2007; Wiegman, 1999).

When the spectacular practices of death squads torturing, dismembering, and disappearing Black bodies are too grotesque to be ignored, the White subject responds (is confronted) with an empathy that in fact reveals what



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Charles Mills (2007) calls “white blindness,” or a “cognitive distortion” (p. 35) of the social world made by race. The hyper-visible killing of Alex in the middle of street and the kidnapped and hidden body of Betinho were shad-owed by a White inability to understand Black suffering, empathy with the victims’ families notwithstanding. Dona Maria’s unapologetic and seemingly irrational demand that the state bring her child back to life was the only way she could be noticed in a city where Black women occupy the invisible spaces of domestic workers, the unemployed, and the faveladas. That is to say, those individuals trying to help Dona Maria could neither comprehend her lan-guage nor understand the “death-in-life worlds” (Holland, 2000, p. 17) where Black life has historically been confined.

In the Brazilian racialized regime of citizenship, Dona Maria’s suffering can’t be redressed, and attempts to redress it through humanitarian and legal approaches are destined to fail. This is the case not because she asks for the impossible—that the state bring back the dead—but because, as Hartman has shown, the Black body is in ontological opposition to the very definition of humanity around which human rights, civil society, and the rule of law are defined. Both Dona Maria’s and Betinho’s fates were bound to a White onto-logical impossibility that allowed my interlocutors to normalize violence against Blacks, as they condemned and distanced themselves from it.

“Unlivable Life”

I suggest we read Betinho’s and Alex’s fates as part of what Joao Costa Vargas calls “black intimacy with death.” Such intimacy can easily be illustrated in the social indices that reveal a persistent vulnerability to premature death due to homicides, disease, and poverty (e.g., Alves, 2011; Batista & Escuder, 2003; Paixão, 2010; Romio, 2009; Vargas, 2005). Although homicides are by no means the foremost manifestation of racial domination in Brazil, they unmistakably expose the Brazilian necropolitical racial order. From 2000 to 2010, as many as 272,422 Black Brazilian lives were stolen by homicidal violence, for an average of 30,000 deaths per year over the course of a decade. Black vulnerability to homicide is 135% higher than among Whites, and Black young men are by far the main victims of violent deaths (see Waiselfisz, 2012). The police play a substantial role in these statistics. In the state of Sao Paulo, police killings account for as many as one third of all violent deaths.14

And the situation is getting worse. As Brazil emerges as a new global player and prepares to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are undergoing processes of urban warfare that include the displacement of favela residents, police kill-ings, disappearances, and mass incarceration of the Black urban poor. While




statistics unmistakably reveal the “necropolitical” (Mbembe, 2003) face of the Brazilian state, politicizing Black deaths remains one of the main chal-lenges for the victims of state terror in a society in which race is a taboo. Their suffering simply gets lost within the normalizing accounts that render violence in general, and police violence in particular, as a symptom of defi-cient or “low-intensity democracies.”15 Broadly speaking, this framework suggests a linear progression from so-called “dysfunctional democracies,” in which patronage, discretionary power, and human rights abuses abound, to advanced liberal societies, in which the rule of law triumphs. Law and democ-racy are reified as normative universal categories, canceling the founding racial violence they entail (for a critique, see James, 2005).16 State violence, it suggests, can be curtailed through modernization and democratic control of the police force, strengthening popular participation in police oversight and community councils, and adherence to international norms. Yet, the structural position of Black lives within the regime of rights represents a challenge to this approach. As has been argued elsewhere, democracy itself entails a dia-lectical antagonism between an endangered White civil society and a danger-ous racial other (e.g., Martinot & Sexton, 2003; Vargas & James, 2012).

It is in this context, Dona Maria’s frustration with the human rights activ-ists and Dona Lurdinha’s pleading with the four police officers as they killed her son expose the limits of liberal critiques of state violence when confronted with the Black body.17 Agamben’s well-known theoretical claim has been exhaustively used as a model for understanding current regimes of terror. Agamben (1998) uses Aristotle’s famous distinction between zoe (natural life) and bios (good life) to argue that the basis of modern power is the inclu-sion of natural life into politics through its exposition to sovereign violence and that both the camp and the refugee represent its paradigmatic matter. The refugee is the modern homo sacer that occupies a precarious position outside the human and the divine law: His [sic] killing is unpunishable and he cannot be sacrificed (p. 73). The emblematic place of modern biopolitics, according to Agamben, is the concentration camp, for it represents the place where bios and zoe are confronted and produce the sovereign body.

Here, Agamben revises Foucault’s notion of biopower: While Foucault (1990) sustains that modern power is characterized by an epistemological shift from the sovereign’s right to kill to “the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life” (p. 141), which he calls “biopower,” Agamben (1998) argues that modern sovereingty is in fact founded in the very produc-tion of the biopolitical body. “In Western politics, [he argues], bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusions found the city of men” (p. 7). The state of exception is presented, then, as the most peculiar aspect of modern political power. Normality and exception converge in the dialectic



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production of sovereignty and bare life. In doing so, Agamben calls attention to the precarious space occupied by populations that international human rights law and citizenship regimes cannot protect, such as refugees.

While his insightful intervention helps us to unveil the generalized state of exception (“the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics” [Agamben, 2005, p. 14]), by way of conclusion I call attention to the limits of this claim when confronted with the Black experience, as exemplified by Dona Maria’s and Dona Lurdinha’s encounters with the state. If bare life is the unconditional exposition of life to death—and if its inclusion in politics is made through the exception—how do we account for those racialized popu-lations whose life receives the ontological inscription of death? Since when has the exception become the rule for those in permanent exclusion from law and life? How can we account for those who have been so alienated from the national imagined community (see Holland, 2000)18 that they cannot even be included in the juridical category of the refugee?

That is to say, our grammar for speaking about contemporary regimes of power needs to be fundamentally reframed. If the “state of exception has become the rule” in Western democracies (Agamben, 1998), because some lives have been suspended in a permanent ban from (and exposed to the cru-elty of) law, it is imperative to highlight the logic of Black disposability ingrained in the juridico-political structure of modern sovereignty (p. 169). As some scholars have argued, the paradigmatic state of exception is the nomos for those racialized populations ontologically located outside the domain of the law (see Mbembe, 2003; Sexton, 2010; Silva, 2009).19 In rela-tion to this question, analyses of the “original violence” of Black slavery are particularly incisive and invite further discussion on the gendered production of modern sovereignty.20

Before Agamben, Hortense Spiller’s critical work on Black captivities called attention to the racial structure of terror—based on the “cunning differ-ence” between humanity and the Other—that constituted modernity. Spiller (1984) highlights the interstitial zone where (sovereign) patriarchal power transforms Black bodies into flesh and annihilates gender difference through an indiscriminate subjugation to death. The captive Black female body, she contends, becomes the interstices, or “the principal point of passage between the human and the non-human world (p.70).” Spiller argues that the Black female’s “issue became the focus of a cunning difference—visually, psycho-logically, ontologically—as the route by which the dominant male decides the distinction between humanity and the other” (p. 76).

I concur with Spiller’s analysis in my reading of the experiences of black women like Dona Maria and Dona Lurdinha. Their racial/gendered/spatial status as favelada, searching for the remains of their loved ones, is a direct




reflection of the political topography in which the gendered black body becomes the locus for the production of sovereign power and thus the foun-dation of "the city of men".21 “Interstices,” then, serve as a theoretical device to account for the intertwined configurations of sovereign violence - in its gendered, classed, racialized forms - and the nexus between Black death and White citizenry.22 In this sense, rather than a symptom of the low intensity of Brazilian democracy, as the human rights activists believed, the killing of young Black men such as Alex and Betinho is illustrative of its functionality.

Is it not the case that police killings are simply reiterations of the racial order in the necropolitical city? As the ultimate expression of the sovereign right to kill and to let live (Foucault, 1990), killings by police officers give coherence to the foundational relation between White (civil) life and Black (social) death (Martinot & Sexton, 2003). Dona Maria’s call for the state to bring her son back alive—and my interlocutors’ inability to understand her “demand”—reveal precisely these moments in which a reclaimed Black right to existence becomes odd (to the eyes of the White subject) given Black meaningless lived experience. That is to say, the endurance of day-to-day pervasive violence against Black Brazilians, the lack of access to health care, mass incarceration, residential segregation, and police killings are some of the mundane practices that render Black life “unlivable life” (Butler, 2006).

How can Black women demand that the state bring the dead to the realm of life? The challenge of politicizing Black death lies in the fact that those finding death at the hands of the police are already disposable; the racial state produces them as “no-bodies,” as Denise Silva (2003) has forcefully named their status. Therefore, the challenges for redressing Black suffering is not so much a “derealization of loss,” as some provocative accounts of contempo-rary political violence suggest (see Butler, 2006, p.148), nor the (re)emer-gence of the global camp where all of us become “homines sacri” (Agamben, 1998), but rather a Black ontological impossibility of reclaiming membership in the human community. It is one thing to lose the status of humanity; it is another to be by definition outside such a domain. As Sharon Patricia Holland (2000) has pointed out, “what if some subjects never achieve, in the eyes of others, the status of the ‘living?’” (p. 15).23 It may be the case, then, that this ontological impossibility contains promises for reimagining a world in which Blackness can be the basis for a new ethics of life. This new ethics may even require a refusal of a “global humanity”—as proposed by Butler through the recognition of a collective vulnerability to death—and ought to first center the Black paradigmatic experience as the departure point, the interstices, for reinventing life itself.



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And Yet . . .

As I write these pages, Dona Lurdinha continues to take psychotropic drugs to cope with the pain of Alex’s absence. The endless cycles of anxiety and panic endure, and she continues under psychotherapy and says she cannot escape the image of the four police officers “grabbing his neck and breaking it in.” The trial of the police officers charged for Alex’s murder was held in May 2013, and the police officers were found innocent. The judges concluded that they were acting in “strict compliance with legal duty.” Dona Lurdinha describes how Alex’s 4-year-old son, Thiago, kept asking for his dad:

Thiago thinks Alex will arrive at anytime. We say that his father became a little star. Now he has stopped asking, but everyday he used to call me and [ask], “My grandma, did my dad arrive? Is my dad there?” Thiago used to call Alex “turtlehead.” Now he keeps saying, “Where is my turtlehead?”

Dona Maria’s endeavor to bury Betinho continues as well. Having gone through the formal bureaucracies and filed petitions to claim her son’s body and a monthly stipend to pay her rent, she received yet another denial from the government. She had to prove that he was working and contributing to the family income in order to be entitled to the financial benefit. And so, she had to start a new struggle to gather documents to prove that Betinho was work-ing as a car washer at the time he was killed by the police. When she gathered the documents and submitted them to the government office, she received yet another denial. As the trial of the police officers accused of assassinating Betinho had yet to be scheduled, the government could not make a final deci-sion about the compensation, and Dona Maria was forced to keep waiting.

The hardest part was yet to come: The trial was scheduled for November 2011, and the police officers were found innocent for lack of consistent proof linking them to death squads. The public attorney might yet request a reex-amination of the case, but that could take another 3 years. The state occupies the most intimate aspects of Dona Maria’s life by keeping her time and life suspended in an incessant nightmare and an anguished waiting. Left empty-handed, both women’s experiences are reminders of the difficulty of redress-ing Black pain and articulating a language of resistance from within civil society. Yet, while we are left with the unintelligibility of Black suffering from the mainstream human rights approach, these women’s ongoing strug-gles to bring the dead home and denounce state terror are also a reminder (and a call) of the work to be done beyond theory.

It may be the case, then, that recognizing the agency of the (socially) dead opens up possibilities for expanding the horizons of the political and bridging




the “zone of unattainability” (Moten, 2008) between (the fate of) Blackness and life (p. 179). In this realm of possibility may be the promise not only of Black radical scholarship but also of a Black ethics of care that far too often runs into road blocks when we try to put it into practice. In denouncing death as an ordinary experience of Black life, as the Afro-pessimist literature has done, we must affirm that the socially dead are indeed politically alive sub-jects, desperately trying to make sense of their being as they confront every-day manifestations of state terror.

Author’s Note

A preliminary version of this article was presented at the Africana Research Center at Penn State University and the Centro de Estudios Afrodiasporicos/Universidad Icesi.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dona Maria and Dona Lurdinha, who despite their pain in doing so, accepted my invitation to talk about and interpret their encounters with the state. Thanks to Cleyton W. Borges (Uneafro-Brazil) for navigating with me through state bureaucracy and the legal battle in the course of this research. I wish to acknowledge my colleagues at Icesi and Penn State for the insightful conversations around some of these ideas. Simone Browne, Joao Vargas, Charlie Hale, Joy James, Elvia Medonza, Ted Gordon, Omi Jones, and Gustavo Mello, among many others, provided food for thought in the warm conversations around Black social death at the Austin School (Black Studies at UT Austin).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is part of a larger research agenda partially supported by Inter American Foundation Grassroots Fellowship Program, Ford Foundation Fellowship Program and by a 2009 summer grant from the Social Science Research Council.

Notes

1. The article “Ni derechos ni humanos” is available in ttp://amnistiacatalunya.org/edu/2/global/glob-galeano2.html

2. Jared Sexton (2011) has responded to some of these critiques by arguing that Black social life and death are not antithetical concepts and that Afro-optimism is not the negation but rather the affirmation of the Afro-pessimist premise. As



Alves 15

he puts it, “rather than approaching (the theorization of) social death and (the theorization of) social life as an ‘either/or’ proposition, . . . why not attempt to think of them as a matter of ‘both/and’”? (p. 22).

3. Elsewhere, I develop some of the strategies deployed by Black Brazilians to redefine the anti-Black polis. Their practices—disrupting the city’s order with protests, storming state facilities, engaging in “criminal” behavior, and so on—can be read as strategies of urban resistance and survival in the face of racial domination (see Alves, 2013).

4. A recent event is illustrative of the racial logic of justice in Brazilian society: On February 3, 2014, a Black teenage boy was chained by his neck to the lamp-post after being beaten and stabbed in ear by three vigilantes in Rio’s Zona Sul. The justice seekers justified their action arguing that the Black boy tried to mug a pedestrian. People across the country supported the vigilantes and criticized human rights activists arguing that the boy is not entitled to protection because he is not a good citizen. See http://extra.globo.com/noticias/rio/adolescente-atacado-por-grupo-de-justiceiros-preso-um-poste-por-uma-trava-de-bicicleta-no-flamengo-11485258.html

5. The names of individuals appearing in this article have been changed in order to protect their confidentiality, although the cases have been extensively publi-cized in the news. Most of the quotes used here were taped during interviews with Dona Lurdinha. As for Dona Maria, quotes may not be exact, and I present my own reading of the meeting I attended. They are based on notes taken soon after our meeting and double-checked with her and another meeting attendee afterwards.

6. In the language of Brazilian law enforcement bureaucracy, police killing is in line with military protocol and, therefore, an appropriate response to crime. Within the Brazilian justice system, the Police Incident Report [Boletim de Ocorrencia] is issued by the officer on duty at the police station. Therefore, it is the police that testify about the “event.” Usually, the police officers appear in the official records as the victims, and the dead person as the violator of the law. By privi-leging police reports over witness accounts, the official report filed by the police when a suspect is killed after allegedly resisting arrest places the responsibility for proving the victim’s innocence on the family of the deceased. In January 2013, the state of Sao Paulo banned the concept of “killed while resisting arrest” after popular outcry followed the police assassination of favela residents during a wave of violence between September and November 2012.

7. The cases of individuals deliberately left to die in agony after being shot by the police further illustrates the state’s sovereign power to decide who can live, who is already dead, and who deserves to be rescued. To view the most recent cases caught on tape, see http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/multimidia/videocasts/964738-estrebucha-diz-pm-a-baleado-agonizante-assista.shtml

8. Hartman’s refusal to reproduce Frederick Douglass’ (1997) account of his aunt’s beating is a provocative and insightful warning to not “reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering” (p. 3).




9. Dona Lurdinha is a Northwestern Brown woman. Although her son Alex is unmistakably “preto” [dark skin], she is considered “parda” in the Brazilian racial classification system. For the purpose of this article, I use “Blacks” as a political category utilized by the Black Movement. This is consistent with the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics’ national census that regards pre-tos and pardos as Blacks.

10. For a critique of the “counting bodies” approach and the politics of statistics, see Moncada (2010).

11. Foucault’s assertion about the disappearance of spectacle as a form of punish-ment is severely challenged here by police practices of dismembering, scattering, and disposing Black bodies in Brazilian favelas. For a critique on Foucault, see Alves (2013) and James (1996).

12. As for the relation between anthropophagi and racism in Brazil, see Ribeiro (1995) and Paixão (2005).

13. In fact, the lawyer helped me to put together the meeting and carried out an extraordinary work to push forward for a solution to Dona Maria’s case. He also discussed with me some of the impressions on Dona Maria’s interventions as well as on his own impossibility to understand her words.

14. See http://www.istoe.com.br/reportagens/232384_A+PM+MATADORA. As for 2011, the Military Police accounted for 22.3% of the homicides in Sao Paulo. That is, more than one out of five murders were committed by the police. See http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/1040120-um-em-cada-cinco-mortos-em-sao-paulo-e-vitima-depm.shtml

15. Quite often, this literature relies on a normative definition of democracy, even when making a critique of its unfulfilled promise (e.g., Brinks, 2003; Cavallaro, 1996; Chevigny, 1995; Hinton, 2005; Holston, 2009; Leeds, 2007; Pinheiro, 1997, Holston & Caldeira 1999). Guillermo O’Donnell’s (1993) work on democ-ratization processes in Latin America (and his classificatory schema of democ-racy in the continent, ranging from functional to dysfunctional) is usually the underlying model.

16. In this paradigm, the state cannot be comprehended as a racial project, as Black men and women are now increasingly represented in police departments in par-ticular, and in the criminal justice system in general, not only as victims but also as agents of violence (see Sansone, 2002).

17. Here, I join those scholars who contend that Western political thought is deeply ingrained with a conceptual compromise that renders the Holocaust as the paradig-matic event for understanding racism, thereby foreclosing centuries of anti-Black terror (e.g., Hesse, 2004; James, 1996; Sexton, 2010; Silva, 2001; Vargas, 2005).

18. Sharon Patricia Holland’s (2000) reflections on the work of Black death in the making of American identity and Paul Gilroy’s (1987) work on the Britain iden-tity complicate Benedict Anderson’s (1994) framework by exploring the relation between Blackness and nation.

19. Denise Silva’s (2009) reading of Agamben is elucidative here. Because the ban is, in Agamben’s writing, an “act of dehumanization,” and because race is



Alves 17

understood through the logic of inclusion/exclusion, the camp/refugee metaphor fails to account for the work of “raciality” in producing humanity and the state’s right of self-preservation (p. 234).

20. Here, my incipient analysis is informed by Jared Sexton’s critique of both Agamben’s Eurocentric perspective and Mbembe’s blindness to Black gender captivities (Sexton, 2010).

21. Indeed, one of my main challenges as a junior scholar researching Black vio-lence in Brazil has been to find a lexicon that neither overlooks the role of gender in structuring the Black experience nor reproduces the conceptual blindness of liberal political thought that renders the state a racially neutral entity and relativ-izes anti-Black terror as an overstatement of politically engaged Black scholars. The political debate around both affirmative action policies and the concept of genocide to account for the astonishing death rates among Blacks in Brazil illus-trates the political battle among Black social activists scholars and White schol-ars in that country. See Joao Costa Vargas (2012) for a response to mainstream critiques of Black activism in Brazilian academia and Hale (2008) for a case for the advantages and urgent needs for activist scholarship.

22. My interpretation of Spiller's work is influenced by Sharon Patricia Holland (2000) who has argued that the interstice is more than a border between the human and the non-human. It is in fact a "passageway that encompasses the ter-rain between the living and the dead" (p.43).

23. As an exercise of political imagination, the answer to this question may lie in Joao Costa Vargas and Joy James’s (2012) metaphor of the “black rebel cyborg,” an infra-human figure that refuses its status as victim by challenging the politi-cal/juridical order of the polis.

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Author Biography

Jaime Amparo Alves is an Afro-Brazilian journalist and social activist. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and Black Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include black criminal agency and urban survival in Brazil and Colombia.



Some Notes on the Double Negation of Black Life in Brazil

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