The Anti-Black City

“While Black Lives Matter still resonates in the United States, the movement has also become a potent rallying call worldwide, with harsh police tactics and repressive state policies often breaking racial lines. This book delves into the dynamics of racial violence in Brazil, where poverty, unemployment, residential segregation, and a biased criminal justice system create urban conditions of racial precarity. This book offers race as a vital new lens through which to view violence and marginalization in the supposedly ‘raceless’ Sao Paulo. Ironically, in a context in which racial ambiguity makes it difficult to identify who is black and who is white, racialized access to opportunities and violent police tactics establish hard racial boundaries through subjugation and death. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in prisons and neighborhoods on the periphery of this mega-city. The author documents the brutality of police tactics and the complexity of responses deployed by black residents, including self-help initiatives, public campaigns against police violence, ruthless gangs, and self-policing of communities. This book reveals the violent and racist ideologies that underlie state fantasies of order and urban peace in modern Brazil. Illustrating how ‘governing through death’ has become the dominant means for managing and controlling ethnic populations in the neoliberal state, the author shows that these tactics only lead to more marginalization, criminality, and violence. Ultimately, Alves’s work points to a need for a new approach to an intractable problem: how to govern populations and territories historically seen as ‘ungovernable.'”–