Violência, Saúde E Classes Sociais

Abstract

João Alberto Silveira Freitas, 40, being punched and kicked by two men wearing black clothes. Beside them, a woman filming the beating. Then, with blood already running across the floor, other people appear around the man, while the two attackers try to immobilize him. A team from the Mobile Emergency Care Service (SAMU) tried to revive the man after he was beaten, but he died on the spot (CARTA CAPITAL, 2020).These short editorial lines opening this issue of Revista Katályses, entitled: Violence, Health, and Social Classes, recap the murder of João Alberto, a 40-year-old black man, who "was beaten and killed by two security guards at a unit of the Carrefour supermarket chain, in Porto Alegre" (CARTA CAPITAL, 2020). The homicide was carried out by two suspects, one of whom was a military policeman and the other a security guard at the store. Such savagery occurred on the eve of the Brazilian Black Awareness Day, November 20, and it was not veiled violence. The unfortunate event was filmed by onlookers and shared on social media, later going viral.Is this event an isolated fact in Brazilian society? Violence, driven by social, gender, ethnic-racial, and regional inequality, includes crimes, especially against women, LGTQI + population, black, and indigenous populations, with a strong connection between capitalism and racism. João Aberto's murder is not an isolated event. It is also not coincidental that he was a black man. Callinicos (1993) evidenced that although Brazilian society is constituted mostly by the black and pardo populations, the positions of prestige, command, and power in society tend to be occupied by white people. Black and pardo people are subjected to social and economic insertions with lower social and salary status, are also the preferred victims of police violence and death squads, which can be evidenced in the incarceration and homicide data, as the articles in this issue will discuss. Substantially, the world's violence and, especially in Brazil, has ethnic-racial, sexual, and regional peculiarities. Although its manifestation generally occurs in immediate and particular relationships and contexts, violence reaches a complex and distinctive form of capitalism; racial slavery itself is at the origin of capitalism. Therefore, more than a behavioral and moral manifestation, violence results from a particular mode of production and the respective relationships.Callinicos (1993) shows that racism, from compulsory labor in the Americas, becomes part of the economic and world capitalist system. Therefore, even after abolishing slavery, the wage process maintained the division and fragmentation of the working class, including the division based on racial prejudice. In addition to low wages, this situation promotes the distancing of the class issue when facing social ills and exploitation of work imposed by capital, because "[…] color prejudice in Brazil is the ideology through which racism manifests itself in its various degrees and creates the image of the bad black citizen" (MOURA, 1977, p. 47, ...