The subtleties of invisibility and perverse recognition of the black population in Brazil of cordiality

Abstract

When we talk about colonization we tend to generalize it about all colonized territories in the world, however, even considering that any form of violence is violence, as Fanon (2008) would say, we need to consider the subtleties that permeate our “pretuguese” formation (Gonzalez, 2020) here in Brazil. Despite being almost all mixed race, we have absorbed the ideal of European civilization, which makes whiteness in all its nuances valued. In this way, racism in Brazil has the violence of genocide and its cultural characteristic is the sinuous expression of the pseudo-cordial daily life of interracial relationships: where the existence of blackness is either denied, making black people invisible and traversed by the white gaze, or their existence is recognized, existence through fetish. Black people are addressed verbally and gesturally in a racist manner, but these acts are justified as being a joke or an informal affective way of relating. The purpose of this essay is to reflect on how the dialectic of recognition and strategic invisibility of Brazilian blackness is expressed through critical theory, mainly psychology, with the aim of demonstrating that racism is based on an ideology that is so naturalized that it becomes subtle and imperceptible, while sustaining and legitimizing open forms of violence and extermination.