By ANDRÉ RICARDO DIAS*

Considerations on the reified idealization of black people through identity discourse

The case of the harassment allegations against Sílvio Almeida offers us the opportunity to analyze two victim positions found among social subjects who are subjected to discriminatory forms of violence, as well as their implications for current debates on social identities. The first would be the victim who is not implicated in the violence suffered – here, in the sense of the complaining functioning of the resentful person, a position in which the subject attributes the cause of his or her ills solely to the other – regardless of whether or not he or she suffered the aggression.

It is important to clarify that from a psychoanalytic interpretation perspective, it does not matter whether the violence actually occurred or not, since the essential thing is that this paralyzing affect is maintained cyclically. The other, the victim, let's say, undisputed, who, by the way, in such situations – the victim of harassment, of rape – is the first to be suspected and discredited.

And this is how activists from various segments of minorities (we will call them hegemonic identity activists, without addressing the political and economic aspects involved here) positioned themselves immediately after the first accusations against the then Minister of Human Rights were made public. Before arguing against this reifying idealization, I would like to recall the case of a participant in the last edition of Big Brother Brazil, a black man, who referred to black women as “monkeys.”

There has been silence on this subject to this day. Now let us consider the problem of reification. In general, this concept designates “reification” or, in our case, precisely the transformation of man into an object. This path involves idealization, the construction of a one-dimensional black man, reduced to such a condition, the image and likeness of the black identity created largely by the academic identity movement. We will discuss this later.

These cases demonstrate the impasse in which our militancy finds itself, now not always exactly on the left of the political spectrum. Firstly, we call the self-centered discourse around homogenizing forms of social identities identitarian when, for example, the condition of race and gender comes to disregard the class factor, in addition to the multiple determinations that shape us as individuals living in society.

This type of discourse, which is prevalent among our activists, has its origins in North American pragmatism, with its practical and discursive emphasis on the socioeconomic complexities intertwined with issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, etc. Hence the need for such movements and diverse theories to coin terms such as intersectionality, whiteness, decoloniality, among other concepts that attempt to forcefully link together diverse determinations that would “intersect” in the clarity of a good critical dialectical analysis.

Leaving the theoretical treatment to roughly, let us return here to the critique of reification. We say that exempting the victim of racial violence, of which we know well that the former minister and the former BBB are potential targets, from accountability for their actions in everyday life, means reproducing a double prejudice. In its double face, by depriving the condition of subject in the face of the denial of “agency”, that is, of autonomy and accountability, in favor of a commiserative deference that in no way means elevating the victim of racial violence to the condition of subject.

Now, regarding the accusations against the minister, what clouded the understanding of the activists when faced with that situation? Why was the possible victim surreptitiously discredited, this time, by segments that publicly fight against violence against women? I am referring, among other things, to public figures whose comments supporting the minister can be read in posts on his Instagram profile to date.

The fact that the main victim is Anielle Franco, a woman who carries within herself conditions that make her an example of a woman violated by our murderous and exploitative patriarchy, points to the seriousness of the theoretical and militant framework that guides those political segments.

Perhaps there are two reifications at stake: that of Brazilian racism, which subjugates skin color to a phantom that is reflected in the real violence of concrete social relations, and the reification of the “cause,” which would also reproduce a biased racism that takes black people as an exception not only to point out the particularity of being black in Brazil as a device for denunciation, but to demarcate a stabilized identity with a view to maintaining the position of victim. It would be necessary to understand in the name of what gains the latter remains active, if we agree that we are on the crest of this paradox.

The fact that public opinion has fallen for the lies of the lawyer who requested, in a procedural tone, evidence for a crime of sexual harassment, who, it must be said, is a successful lawyer in the use of his well-known discursive and oratory tricks, shows that we have fallen into the trap – this one – of victimhood. Here is the resource used by Almeida when he publicly positioned himself in his defense as a black man who was a victim of racism.

The same resource that exempts the participant of a far-reaching television program from responsibility when he mortally wounds black women, repeating loudly and clearly a nefarious insult that brings back social traumas of racism (the author here was called a “monkey” during his school life) that is socially abominable today.

At the level of hegemonic identity militancy, the outcome of the Silvio Almeida case will surely be the same as that of the episode involving the aforementioned participant in BBB24: there will be no courage to go beyond the complaining discourse towards justice, because there, we will find little beyond the uninvolved position of the victim in his lament to aeternum which, in such cases, is a cloak to cover cowardice.

* André Ricardo Dias is a psychoanalyst and professor of philosophy at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Sertão Pernambucano (IF Sertão PE).

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