When politicization is on the rise, there is an easy way to distinguish between the man of fiber and the coward: just ask what price a man pays for his position. Does a federal professor with a public exam, who stands in front of the computer repeating identity slogans on a social network, pay anything for this? Nothing; quite the opposite. He plays for the crowd. You know very well that the federal government can do nothing against your salaries. Who can, in fact, are the identity collectives.
How does a collective operate? Look at teachers who are unyielding to dogma. The professor may even be left-wing, he may even agree with many things about identity – but if his ideas step on a single toe, he will be in the crosshairs. Once in the crosshairs, a particular act can trigger collective action. They create petitions defaming the professor, accusing him of having committed the crimes that are collectively imputed to men, white heterosexuals, if he is those three things at the same time. Such crimes are sexual harassment, racism and homophobia (which the STF decided was a crime). As Gabriel Giannatasio, from UEL, is all three at the same time, he had to defend himself against this type of coordinated action. That right-wing historian who works in Londrina did well. On the other side of the country, in Salvador, a black professor, racialist, with a background in leftist movements, but a militant anti-PT, went through a similar situation, except for the accusation of racism. This is Fernando Conceição, professor of Communication at UFBA. He also did well and managed to keep his job.
Typically, at least before Bolsonaro’s election, the collectives would have full institutional support. The department, the faculty management and the rectory would make life easier for the collectives and make life difficult for the professor. To get an idea of the day-to-day life of a non-aligned academic, I ask the reader to think about the relationship between Felipe Santa Cruz’s OAB and the anti-PT lawyers you know. Now imagine that these lawyers have to look at Felipe Santa Cruz and his allies every day. It is easy for a minority political current to capture organs through elections. In the case of federal agencies, these bodies affect the lives of academics much more than the OAB does that of lawyers.
In the meantime, this interference ends up causing an increase in adhesions to the minority stream. It ends up being a magnet for cowards. Blending into the persecutory mob, the cowards know they won’t be on the side of the persecuted.
The newest target
For Professor Rafael Ruiz, the moment has burst. He is a professor of American History at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifeso) and sometimes writes articles for this journal. Spanish by birth, with many decades in Brazil, his area of study forces him to know the history of the Mayan and Aztec empires, as well as the activities of the Guarani who roamed between Paraguay and São Paulo. Looking at his curriculum, we can see that the concern for the rights of the Indians was present in the academic trajectory of this Spaniard who chose Brazil to live.
Rafael Ruiz is not engaged in politics partisan; prefers to deal with literature or, at most, with the political problem that he saw in front of his eyes at Unifesp: intolerance of difference.
Seeing the circulation of the open letter in defense of Antonio Risério , which is precisely in favor of a cause that mobilizes him, he could keep quiet to avoid problems. However, he acted as we would expect from the author of these words: “what is most surprising is the silence (accomplice?) […] of so many free and democratic institutions that always before raised their voice to defend freedom of expression, opinion and thought […] and now they remain silent, as if it were the movie The silence of the innocents. What happened to all of them? Aren’t you afraid that censorship will be reinstated in the country?”. He did not remain silent and signed the letter. And the time has come to pay the price.
Intimidation without reason
The Academic Center of Unifesp History wrote an open letter of repudiation against the professor. It can be read in full here. In it, the “Unifesp Academic History Center strongly repudiates the racist content of this letter [em defesa de Risério] and calls on the entire student community, student organizations and, mainly, the UNIFESP History Department, to take a stand against the aforementioned documents, emphatically condemning the support of a professor from our department to the arguments exposed in both publications [o artigo de Risério e a carta], which are, at the very least, conspiracyists and dishonestly nurture racist, revisionist and liar movements, after all, as we know, reverse racism does not exists”. As usual, nobody pays attention to the cases brought by Risério; instead, it repeats the dogma that “reverse racism does not exist”. (Razzo has already dealt with the matter and I have nothing to add now.)
Furthermore, they call the letter written by Eli Vieira and me, and signed by more than 800 people. This is defamation. It is a case of prosecution, and it depends on our goodwill not to sue. You can read our letter here. It is not racist at all and is founded on the post-war consensus around human rights. So that there is no doubt as to the defamatory nature, it is stated that “full support is essential for organizations that daily combat criminal attitudes and speeches, conveyed even in the letter of support to Antônio Risério”. It is possible to have goodwill if the anonymous and the two students take back what they said and apologize to Prof. Rafael Ruiz.
To make matters worse, the letter does not reveal an acceptable level of historical knowledge for higher education History students. It makes the institution of slavery appear to be a racist (white against black) and capitalist invention, when it is not. Slavery existed on every continent, practiced by people of all colors against people of the same color. Slavery is infinitely older than capitalism: it is likely to be as old as humanity.
It is to be hoped that academic historians are not denialists of what the historian Tidiane N’Diyae called it “concealed genocide” in the title of her famous work, which deals with the Arab-Muslim traffic of pagan black slaves, who were castrated before being exported. The identity narrative that restricts Western whites to blame for the slavery of blacks deserves to be called denialist, since this term was created in the post-war period to refer to the genocide of another people, the Jews.
The reaction of the department
It remains to be seen whether the Department of History will, out of lukewarmness, pass the receipt of intellectual baseness and moral. As there are no face-to-face classes, they will not be able to invent accusations of sexual harassment against teachers. If the department lowers its head, it is certain that these anonymous difficult to scale (note that a lot of entities sign, and only two people with proper names do) will appear with more notes against whoever violates the dogma at the time. (And new dogmas always appear – last year were you obliged to say that a man gets pregnant? If you hold your hand, they ask for your arm. They don’t leave you alone.)
If the department doesn’t lower its head, what are these anonymous cowards going to do? Fire the entire department? This has no precedent, not even at the time of the PT.
But the fundamental question may be: if the teacher lowers his head, will he still be able to feel respect for himself?
