One year after the election of the first black bench of the Porto Alegre City Council, composed of four councilors and this councilor who speaks to you, preliminary conclusions can be drawn about the importance of this representation in institutional policy as part of an analysis that deserves to be compiled nationally. level, observing the different experiences of blacks in the legislature.
In his famous book Structural Racism (Pólen, 2019), Professor Silvio Almeida speaks about two important effects of representation in the fight against racial discrimination: first, the possibility of opening up the political space for our demands, especially when it keeps these representatives connected with a collective political project; and, following this process, the struggle to dismantle the discriminatory narratives that for so many years justified our absence from the power space. These hypotheses are presented with the awareness that black representation does not mean a black power constitution, that is, they are aspects of an ongoing political struggle in which the outcome is not determined a priori.
Reaffirming this point, I think that the big responsibility of the new generation of Brazilian black leaders is to expand the advancement of our political representation, but without adapting to the rules of the establishment, which is not conducive to improving the living conditions of black people. …
To those who feared our identity or the essentialization of the political struggle for our mandates, we responded with a universal agenda.
Here I will briefly highlight the precious reflections that activist Kiang Yamahtta Taylor expresses in her book Black Lives Matter and Black Liberation (Elefante, 2020). The author scathingly criticizes the form and content of the integration of black women and men into the US political system. In his opinion, this process was used by the bourgeoisie as a weapon to reduce the impulse of the black movement’s radicalism and to promote the logic of replacing collective references with individual aspirations. Currently, there are several US cities in which “black power” has established itself, be it mayors, legislative majority, prosecutors, judges or police chiefs. However, as we see with every wave of black protest, this gradual strategy of taking over institutions did not diminish the structural racial inequality that underlies imperialism, it only revealed tactics that were different from the struggle of blacks.
Taking this experience as one possible reference for our reflection, we know that this is not just a problem, especially in the midst of a national situation that combines health, environmental and economic crises with advances in institutional authoritarianism. It is in this reality that I ask myself every day: how to make our presence a tool for changing the living conditions of our people? How can we make our presence effective, especially in the state capital, which according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) Human Development Index for Urban Human Development is the most racially segregated in the entire country?
In this sense, I said that our main achievement so far has been to consolidate the anti-racist political agenda in public debate in our city. While the black group is still in its infancy in form – we are far from articulating the style of the black faction in the US Congress – we are building commonalities in parliamentary action and constant communication with social movements, especially black and peripheral organizations. with a popular identity and anti-capitalists.
During this year, our work has evolved centrally through a program that combined the fight against hunger and food insecurity with the advocacy of income redistribution policies for the more than 160,000 people living in poverty in the city; fighting to strengthen community services (health, transport, education and social assistance) against privatization and labor instability; and protecting the environmental value of black and indigenous peoples’ culture and heritage in a context where discussions on the Urban and Environmental Master Plan are ignored in favor of corporate interests.
This is the program of the opposition of the mayor’s office of the ICBM, which harbored pocket budgets and radical neoliberals in their government. These politicians have always treated black and peripheral actors as passive agents or objects of patronage and paternalistic practices, one of the most categorical examples being the complete destruction of the Participatory Budget in the last four administrations of the right and center-right. Soon our presence became an insoluble problem for them. Despite a clear boycott of the demands we make – from the simplest, in the form of hundreds of requests for providence, to approved projects, such as the extraordinary spin-off policy that our mandate has endorsed in the House in the form of a draft mayor’s appointment – we force ourselves to be heard through the relationship between mandates and people’s self-organization.
If the balance of power in the institutional structure still does not allow us to achieve more than one-off victories, as in the case of the recent approval of bills proposed by the Institute Mariel Franco, this agenda has mobilized dreams, awakened the political imaginations of our communities and gave importance to our presence in institutional politics. This is an accumulation of forces in the opposite direction of the adaptation that Taylor criticized in the case of the United States.
Finally, it is important to note that this practice does not “only” visualize the black population. For those who feared our identity or the essentialization of the political struggle for our mandates, we responded with a universal agenda, seeking to prove that the black political project in a society based on structural racism is a project for the majority. or is it a real program of social justice and democracy that our people have never experienced. We are still fighting, Axé!
