Racism, necropower and the normalization of police lethality

Abstract

Despite the fact that almost 134 years have passed since the abolition of slavery in Brazil, social inequalities are still largely caused by race: while they have less access to housing, jobs and education, blacks suffer to a much greater extent from marginalization, incarceration, police violence and homicides, especially among young people. This socially normalized violence allows us to hypothesize that there is no public interest in promoting rights or protecting black people; moreover, that there is a policy aimed at their subordination, characterizing black people as killable bodies, excluding them from public policies, as if they did not belong to society. This type of social practice promoted by State agencies is called necropolitics. This research aims to analyze necropolitics for black youth. We will seek to treat the concept of necropolitics, aiming to demonstrate that the State uses racism as a form of domination to determine life and death policies for the black population. The State makes itself present to blacks in the form of institutionalized oppression, especially in the form of the police. In the end, we intend to demonstrate that there is a lethality played by the State that, using biopower, exterminates black lives.