Abstract
We aim to reconstruct, with the voices of mothers of young black people killed in police actions, the subtraction of their children’s lives in continuous policies that undermined their existence by denying them basic rights and citizenship. Six mothers participated in this research. The conversations with them, after a careful approach, began with the triggering question: “How would you like to tell your child’s story?”. To support our analyses, we take as central the theoretical and political articulation of the notions of black genocide and necropolitics. This article shows that, between the birth and the interruption of life by bullets that pass through the body as a predestined target, racism builds trails of precariousness of life that makes it increasingly more abject, vulnerable, and disposable, leading to premature death, even if preventable, of young black people, mainly, living in suburbs and slums. In this discussion, we foster a less compartmentalized view of multiple genocidal policies, bringing to the dialogue other public policies, in addition to public safety. We approach a continuum of production and legitimization of deaths of young black people, centering our analysis on the forms of social and institutional erasure of these young people, which occurred before physical death, to disqualify their lives. These processes contribute to the public security policy to exterminate the lives of young black people without causing widespread social upheaval, due criminal investigation, and, thus, the accountability of the State, since they were already mutilated and dehumanized lives in their existence.
Keywords:
Racism; Black genocide; Black youth; Black women; Public policy