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Ministry of Human Rights received 1,019 complaints of racial injury in 2021

In the year that celebrates 50 years of Black Consciousness Day, data from the Ministry of Human Rights show that in 2021 alone, 1,016 cases of racial slurs against blacks and browns were reported to the ministry. The states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais are the ones that had the most complaints, and registered, respectively, 205, 161 and 152 complaints each.

According to the Ministry, in the entire past year, 476 complaints of racial injury were received.

According to the law professor at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Elisa Cruz, the understanding of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) and the bill approved in the Senate that equate the crime of racial injury to that of racism, will increase the cases related to these crimes.

“This increase will happen, because to this day we have many more crimes of racial injury than racism. One of the main reasons, even according to researchers, is that the crime of insult has a lighter penalty than that of racism. This is also a reflection of structural racism, because the non-recognition of a racist act as such shows how much we need to evolve.”, he says. Also according to Elisa, there was a failure in the understanding and differentiation of the two crimes.

“It is very important to explain this differentiation. The crime of racism is objective, it happens if the behavior involves discrimination based on color and race, whereas the insult is if this discrimination causes an offense to the victim. The main difference in the equivalence is that injuring now cannot be time-barred, that is, there will not be a maximum time for that crime to be reported, and there is an aggravation of the penalty.”, he explains.

According to the National Council of Justice, last year alone, 1,826 cases for the crime of racism were registered in the country. According to the Public Security Institute, in 2019, there were 1,706 victims of injury due to racial and color prejudice in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Of these, 844 suffered racially motivated discrimination, with 766 (90.8%) self-declared black.

In addition to being the majority of victims of discrimination, the black population is the one that suffers most from the impact of the economic crisis. Data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics released this Friday (19), black and brown people are 66% of those who lost income from work in 2020. Since the beginning of the historical series of the IBGE survey, in 2012, this inequality in the labor income of white-skinned people remains at the same level, practically unchanged between 1.7 and 1.8 times above the income of black and brown-skinned people.

Reference: CNN Brasil

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