You can’t talk about awareness without talking about weight awareness. The constant burden of doubt, the assumed guilt, the invisible target. The handcuffs changed from metal to social invisibility, to a neighborhood without sanitation, to a school without structure, to a curriculum with no more than human resources, to a “stray” bullet that always finds the same target. Racial control was never abolished; It has been modernized, made more palatable, and watered down with sermons about merit and opportunity that easily forget that the beginning was never the same.
There are those who say that the past is over. That the mill remains in the books, and that the slave quarters are a museum. But control just changed her clothes. Whereas previously there were foremen and whips, today there is a grossly selective and artificial approach. Violence is no longer just an explicit spectacle, but has become an administrative procedure, a bureaucracy of exclusion.
The 2025 Violence Atlas arrives with its cold, burning numbers: 28.9 homicides per 100,000 blacks in 2023. And among non-blacks, 10.6. A black person is 2.7 times more likely to be murdered. It is not statistics, it is a collective biography, it is a map of fear, it is the geography of death that recognizes faces before shooting. The lives of 35,213 black people were interrupted that year. Thirty-five thousand two hundred and thirteen stories will not reach the end.
In the Northeast, the disparity was even higher: 41.7 homicides of blacks compared with 11.6 of non-blacks per 100,000 population. Nearly four times. And in some states five times. These are numbers that do not fit into the charts, they extend to the streets, alleys and headlines that are no longer shocking because they are repeated so often.
Not only has Zombie been killed in 1695, dismembered and exposed, but his questions remain fresh: Who decides who lives? Who decides who dies? Who decides who deserves a second chance and who deserves permanent handcuffs? The answers are in the data, in the search lines on Saturdays in prisons, in the mothers who learned to fear the phone at night.
The black consciousness that is celebrated, or should be celebrated, is not a victim. It’s clarity. She rejects the comfortable anesthesia that turns structure into shell, which she calls “complex”; Which is actually quite simple: a country that has never made peace with its racial makeup. He preferred to forget, erase, and move forward carrying on his back a violence that cannot be named but is repeated.
Awareness is the first building block that must be removed. And after him will come others, and there will be many more. It is necessary to dismantle, brick by brick, this building of exceptions that insists on camouflaging itself as part of the natural order of things.
Editor Michael Fransa asks each participant in the Folha de S. Paulo Politics and Justice space to suggest a song for readers. And in this text he chose Raymundo Fabricio Albuquerque It was the song “Birds” by Imagine Dragons.
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