Racial Insult in Brazil

Abstract

In 1988, the fight against racial discrimination in Brazil gained tremendous impetus following the enactment of a law that made racism a crime subject to penal law. Black activists complained about the effectiveness of such a law when 70 percent of all Black complaints were systematically typified by the police as verbal offenses. Based on this, in 1997, parliament reformed the law in order to include racial verbal abuse as a crime. In this article I analyze the complaints forms filed at the São Paulo Police Station for Racial Discrimination, between May 1997 and December 1998. My goals are threefold: to understand the context in which verbal abuse is used; to determine the importance of this type of discrimination; and to evaluate the impact on combating racism in Brazil of making verbal abuse a crime.