ABSTRACT
Considering mental institutions as reproductive of a logic of racist domination and that such logic was (and still is) used to justify the incarceration of the Brazilian black population, this article discusses the relation between racism and institutionalization. To that end, through a review of literature, we present two dimensions in which this relation is acutely expressed: Brazilian scientific racism, the ideology of whitening and the idea that the black race and madness are connected in three periods of mental asylum experiences: in the 19th century, in the National Hospital for the Mentally Ill, with Dr. Henrique Roxo’s experiments; in the first decades of the 20th century, with Dr. Pacheco e Silva and the São Paulo State Mental Health League in the Juquery Hospital; and in the 2000s, with the São Paulo State Psychosocial Census of Mental Hospital Residents. In dialog with a decolonial reading of the Brazilian psychiatric reform, we point to an urgent and necessary implementation of anti-racist practices in the Psychosocial Care Network as a contemporary anti-institutional task, which we call aquilombamento** ** The word aquilombamento derives from the term quilombo, a settlement of fugitive black slaves in Brazil. A number of those settlements continued to exist after the emancipation of slaves in 1888 and remain today as places that preserve unique features of African-Brazilian culture. Thus, aquilombamento is a new concept that means making something similar to a quilombo, so as to stress the empowerment of African-Brazilians and their culture. .
KEYWORDS
Racism; Psychiatric Hospitals; Mental Health