Black-Blocking Rio: Dislocating Police and Remapping Race for Brazil's Megaevents: A Conversation with Vargas’ “Taking Back the Land: Police Operations and Sports Megaevents in Rio de Janeiro”

Abstract

This article traces the origins of shifts in policing practices and racialized imaginaries in Brazil, since 2013, in the wake of large-scale social protests that rocked the country in June of that year, and following the roll-out of a new set of public works, security and morality megaprojects. It begins by highlighting the contributions of João Vargas' scholarship to the understanding of the imminently racial character of lethal state violence in Brazil, around practices of police killings of black youth justified as “acts of resistance,” the media's visualization of danger in favelas as a militarized “state of emergency,” and housing practices that continue to segregate race and concentrate poverty. Generating new analyses that trace extensions or dis-locations, since 2013, of some of the practices described by Vargas, this article examines (1) the shift from bandido (drug gang member) to vándalo (racialized rioter/looter) as “enemy number one” of the police, (2) the rise of the Black Bloc as target of state security discourse haunted by imaginaries of African diasporic radicalism as well as youth anarchy, and (3) new public mobilizations around and against the “public morality” and “shock of order” campaigns launched against black delinquency and prostitution in consumer spaces.

Keywords:

• Brazil
• police
• protests
• race
• morality
• social movements
• youth
• media
• sexuality

Notes

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