Another Black Worker Killed, Another Reason to Raise the Communist Flag
November 23—Masses erupted in outrage across Brazil after João Alberto Silveira Freitas, a 40-year-old Black welder, was beaten to death by white security guards at a Carrefour supermarket in Porto Alegre, Brazil on November 19. One guard repeatedly punched him in the face and head while the other restrained him with his knee on his back.
A witness said that as the security guards beat him, Silveira Freitas “screamed that he could not breathe.” He lost consciousness and died on the spot.
The video of this brutal racist beating and murder went viral. It sparked mass fury on the eve of Black Consciousness Day, formerly called Quilombo Day. This holiday commemorates Black pride and resistance. The date marks the death in 1695 of Brazil’s most historic Black hero, Zumbi dos Palmares, who led the country’s largest settlement of escaped slaves (quilombo) in the 17th century.
Masses of people gave the day more urgency as they protested at Carrefour supermarkets throughout Brazil. One large group shouted, “The real looters are capitalists!”
President Jair Bolsonaro did not speak, but the vice president, Antônio Hamilton Martins Mourão (who is Black) did. He hastened to say that in Brazil “racism does not exist, what exists is inequality.” Another unsubtle way of saying discrimination.
Over half the people in Brazil are Black and, along with indigenous people, they have suffered the most deaths from racism and the coronavirus.
Black and mixed-race people account for about 57% of Brazil’s population but constitute 74% of victims of lethal violence, according to the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety. The percentage is even higher, 79%, for those killed by police.
Masses have compared this cold-blooded murder in front of witnesses to the murder of George Floyd in the United States.
The French supermarket owners fired the security firm. The bosses fear the masses’ anger and are trying to pacify them.
But many thousands have come out to protest against racism. And the anger of the workers is growing, manifesting itself more and more. The coronavirus pandemic has uncovered the stinking capitalist sewer, but workers are no longer willing to submissively accept attacks against our working-class family.
The conditions are there, but we must not believe that we can end racism under capitalism. Capitalism’s wage slavery needs racism to divide the working class—to pay Black workers less, and to use racist terror to try to prevent our class from uniting to get rid of our exploiters.
We need to channel that mass anger by fighting for Communism, building the International Communist Workers’ Party. We are the only alternative for the workers. We know that taking power away from the capitalists and ending racism will require a violent revolution that puts an end once and for all to the bosses’ system of wage slavery.
Chibata Revolt, Uprising of sailors, Brazil 1910
“In the Chibata revolt, 110 years ago, sailors, mostly Black, completely paralyzed the entire country for five days,” remarked a comrade in Brazil. “The rebellion spread like wildfire. Today we have to win the soldiers to fight for communism.”
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