Anti-racist perceptions about the 2023 anti-democratic acts in Brazil

Abstract

This essay analyzes the racially related issues around the terrorists who vandalized the buildings of the powers of the Brazilian State on January 8, 2023, in the country's capital, Brasilia, the class and race relations in the performance of the means of repression of the State, and still encourage the hypothesis that people from the countryside, middle-aged, white and from the middle class had and still have different treatment by security agencies when compared to citizens from the Minorized Majority. Finally, it complicates the analysis by pointing to the racial pasteurization of terrorists by the press associated with financial capital. For this brief and interpretative essay on the Brazilian reality at the time, we used three authors and their tools for exploring contemporary reality: Muniz Sodré, Brazil, Byung-Chul Han, South Korea; and Achille Mbembe, Senegal. Thus, the analysis of the episode was developed from the perspective that it is inserted in a territory of governance and geopolitics dominated by US interests, that there is a Brazilian national construction based on what Muniz Sodré classifies as “fascism of color,” and that society is uncivilized by possible mediations of the corporate media associated with neoliberal interests and turbo-capitalism; that, according to Achille Mbembe, this whole process of advancing communication technologies and neoliberal domination promotes the hyper-humanization of some and the dehumanization and brutalization of others (all non-whites). Also, consistent with Byung -Chul Han's perspective, the psychopolitics associated with neoliberal social mediation technologies are new power techniques applied in that episode by the financiers of terrorist acts.