The place of memory in anti-racism movements in the US and Brazil

Government decisions about what to remember and what to forget have the capacity to redefine power structures, shape opinions, and change the history that is handed down from generation to generation. The symbolism and the emotions that connect us as a society are an indissociable element of an effort to combat racism. As such, official decisions are an important tool to combat racism and violence. Governments can reshape race relations by recognizing historical crimes, honoring victims, and giving voice to diversity through official symbols of national heritage.

This past year, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement triggered widespread demonstrations in the United States. But it also had a significant impact in Brazil. Brazil was the last nation in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, and that noxious legacy continues to percolate. Brazilian society has been marked, like the United States, by mass incarceration and police brutality, in a context of structural racism. The brutal deaths of young Afro-Brazilian men at the hands of police and, more recently, Carrefour supermarket security guards, have generated widespread revulsion, triggering protests and calls for a boycott of the supermarket chain. Protesters have drawn, implicitly and explicitly, on the BLM message as an organizing principle. 

Even though antiracism measures are garnering broader popular support, and protests inspired on the BLM movement have occurred in a number of Brazilian cities, memory policy has not been a central element in the public debate over race. Nor is collective memory seen as central to advancing an anti-racist agenda. This contrasts with the United States, where the BLM movement made symbols and images in the public sphere a central focus. Removal and renaming were demanded by petitions, in graffiti and speeches, and even via legal action. Some museums and towns made the changes before protesters could take matters into their hands. There is still a long way to go in the United States: the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists 1,800 Confederate symbols still remaining on public land. But the BLM protests had a huge effect on the politics of memory, raising the debate over shared memory and official narrative, and 93 Confederate symbols have been removed, relocated, or renamed since George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in May 2020.

Memory policies are all government actions that regulate, finance, delimit and guide the creation and management of museums, their collections, memorials, monuments, celebratory dates, public homages, archives, official art display and names of public spaces and buildings. This ensemble plays an important role in shaping shared memory and official narrative. It tells us about which achievements and persons our society admires and remembers as heroes and founders, and which figures we prefer to forget.

Memory revision is a shared concern in both US and Latin America. In the yearly 1970s, “new museology” was shaped by a new vision of memorialization that would play a role in social development and in healing the wounds of slavery, indigenous genocide, and dictatorship. The rise of leftist governments in South America during the 2000s, especially in Brazil, gave momentum to existing efforts to build participatory heritage and community museums that would explore new narratives.

As the concepts of immaterial heritage and cultural landscape became widely accepted, governments became involved in giving official status to traditional cultural expressions that had previously been perceived as irrelevant or “lower” forms of religious, gastronomic, architectural and artistical expression. As my own work has shown, an effort began to shift memorial policies away from practices focused solely on the protection of baroque churches and other colonial buildings, and bring, for example, quilombos (runaway slave communities) and terreiros (meeting places for Afro-Brazilian cults) into the official cultural heritage. Nevertheless, Brazil’s national museum policy defended cultural diversity but did not seize the opportunity to form large indigenous or Afro-Brazilian collections in museums, revisit the memory of massacres and political repression, replace monuments more broadly, or rename spaces or even modify the acquisition policies of national museums. 

Brazil’s unprecedented racial protests this year have not been accompanied by widespread calls for a review of Brazil’s historical monuments, or any deeper effort to address the inherited symbols of historical racism. One of the few initiatives in this regard was a social media push calling for the removal of a few iconic representations of the racial legacy of the colonial period, like the statue of Borba Gato, a slave-hunter, in São Paulo. That statue, and a huge monument to the bandeirantes (slave hunting pioneers) near the iconic Ibirapuera park, have been spray-painted in protest. In June, an Afro-Brazilian member of the state assembly put forward a legislative proposal that would forbid public tributes to defenders of slavery. But protestors have not systematically organized to demand that the government take sculptures down or rename streets and public buildings honoring racists and perpetrators of racial injustice.

Without such a reckoning with memory, it is difficult to see how Brazil can overcome the legacies of racism, or move forward toward a democracy that is truly egalitarian and inclusive. 

^{Image: Statue of the slave-hunter Borba Gato in São Paulo, Brazil.
Photo: Gustavo Vivancos. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0}