Pedro Damazio Franco was very happy to summarize Risério’s uproar at Folha: a niche in society has coined a new definition of racism and wants to impose it on society by force. At the beginning of the millennium, something similar happened with racial quotas in universities. There was a solid moral consensus in Brazilian society, according to which it is abhorrent to treat people differently depending on the color of their skin. At that time, as anthropologist Flavio Gordon recalled, fellow anthropologists Peter Fry, Yvonne Maggie, Marcos Chor Maio, Simone Monteiro and Ricardo Ventura Santos wrote “Dangerous Divisions: Racial Policies in Contemporary Brazil, a fundamental book for those who want to understand how we arrived at the where we are.”
There we read the mobilization of human sciences teachers from public higher education in defense of the maintenance of traditional Brazilian morality, that is, the refusal of racial quotas. The book is by 2007, the mobilization is earlier. Reuni, Minister Fernando Haddad’s project to control federal agencies, began to be implemented in 2008. So it’s good to make it clear that the feds that filled the eyes of society, although they were mostly leftists, weren’t this crap today. This is the result of Reuni.
The undersigned against the quotas in 2006
In 2006, the group made a petition against racial quotas which can be read here. There are a lot of people with the same professional profile as the creators, but they made an effort to invite people who participated in civil organizations. There’s a trade unionist. There’s a national directory of the PT… Since then, it wasn’t just the federal ones that changed; was also the PT. It’s like Aldo Rebelo said: a university faction, USP, took over the party. By extension it took over the country’s culture.
The petition also gives an image of the country’s cultural climate. Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, an anthropologist by training and today patron of identity workers at Companhia das Letras, signed. In 2019, the identity mob discovered this and started lynching her. Instead of publicly saying that she changed her mind – it’s normal for people to change their mind -, she made a big text on Facebook, excusing herself from her own responsibility and saying that she was deceived by her colleagues. I believe in the personal honesty of Yvonne Maggie and Peter Fry; therefore, I cannot believe Lilia Moritz Schwarcz. Between 2006 and 2019, the climate of Brazilian opinion changed a lot among intellectuals.
Quotas passed, and then there are the infamous racial courts. Even so, the mobilization of teachers had an effect. They saved children from racialism, as it was originally proposed that each Brazilian, even in childhood, be labeled with a race. (One of Magnoli’s texts in the book referred to was against racialism in schools. The daughter had received a questionnaire and wanted to know if she would say she was hopscotch) They also managed to include the economic criterion in the quotas, alleviating the problem of the non-black poor. .
The quota law provides for revision in 2022, this year. In the climate of the time, no one thought it was nice to say that society would be eternally divided into races.
The perception of climate impacts the climate
It is commonplace in the economy that the perception of the economy affects the economy. If everyone believes – albeit falsely – that a given company will be very successful, that belief leads to the stock’s appreciation. This is good for the company in the short term; but, if there are serious flaws, at some point the truth prevails and actions plummet, or everyone defaults.
With opinions, it’s similar. If you create an echo box where every audible voice says A, whoever thinks B will feel like a minority – even if B is in the majority. Thought A’s esteem will be artificially inflated until God knows when.
I believe that the case of Antonio Risério was the bursting of an opinion bubble. This explosion was only possible, I believe, because of social networks.
As I said here, I was optimistic when I searched for Risério’s name on Twitter and found very different people defending him. Leftist, olavete, ex-olavete, liberal, national-developmentalist… Although Twitter itself summarized the events that treated Risério’s opponents as majority, the research showed the opposite.
Below -lightning signed
Gustavo Maultasch launched the idea of making a petition in defense of Risério. Leandro Narloch supported. Eli Vieira sat down, made it, thought it was great, asked me to cut it… And I went to finish a text on the Paraguayan war and take a siesta. I never saw Gustavo Maultasch and Eli Vieira in my life; I know them because of social media. I woke up from my siesta, and the zape was with messages from people as different as Josias Teófilo and Peter Fry showing the petition in which Folha journalists protested, at the same time, against the publication of texts by Risério, Magoli and Narloch. I hurried to show the staff, but behold, they were already aware and working on the petition. I went running to get the computer and cut the text already improved. More improvements were made after the cut and in the middle of the afternoon of the day 19 in January the text was already circulating on WhatsApp. Eli, who took care of the organization, didn’t want it to be posted right away, but there’s no way: if it’s on zap-zap, one hour it will end up on the social network. And if you go to the social network, it’s more difficult to know the veracity of the signatures sent.
At eleven at night, Eli closed the signatures, no longer able to handle the organization. In hours, Roberto DaMatta, Luiz Mott, Hélio Beltrão, Felippe Hermes, Adriano Gianturco, Mércio Gomes, Cláudio Manoel, Eduardo Affonso, Paulo Briguet, Adrilles Jorge, Flavio Gordon, Francisco Escorsim, MBL activists, in addition to our boss, signed. On the morning of January 20, Saint Sebastian’s day, Eli posted the letter with the signatures on his website and is still trying to organize them.
It was a lightning petition in defense of Risério and against identity. What will happen, we don’t know. But it is good to keep in mind that the opposition to identity is a very broad agenda, capable of bringing together the president of the Mises Brasil Institute and the doctoral student in the humanities who publishes articles in the Diário da Causa Operária.
