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PORVB

This document discusses symbolic violence and how it perpetuates racial inequality in Brazil. Symbolic violence refers to implicit biases and casual racism that exists in public ideologies and daily interactions. While overt physical violence was more common historically, today symbolic violence maintains racial hierarchies and power dynamics through microaggressions and assumptions that target people's racial, ethnic, or social identities. A key example is how black women are often assumed to be servants in upscale buildings due simply to the color of their skin. Though unspoken, symbolic violence can be as impactful as other forms of oppression in reinforcing social boundaries and quality of life.

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664 views2 pages

PORVB

This document discusses symbolic violence and how it perpetuates racial inequality in Brazil. Symbolic violence refers to implicit biases and casual racism that exists in public ideologies and daily interactions. While overt physical violence was more common historically, today symbolic violence maintains racial hierarchies and power dynamics through microaggressions and assumptions that target people's racial, ethnic, or social identities. A key example is how black women are often assumed to be servants in upscale buildings due simply to the color of their skin. Though unspoken, symbolic violence can be as impactful as other forms of oppression in reinforcing social boundaries and quality of life.

Uploaded by

krazyGHplayer
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as RTF, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Racial inequality, racial discrimination, racially charged media practices, hate crime.

These things are all too familiar to us. But how these "racist" formations linger in a supposedly "post-racism" society is a bit of an enigma. Although a vast amount of e plicit physical and psychological violence too! place during the colonial period "and continued long after#, it is clear that these methods of domination are, for the most part, not feasible in the contemporary state of Bra$il. These forms of interracial violence may persist on a micro level through small interpersonal%local interactions "i.e. "small town"%neighborhood hostility, anecdotal incidents, etc.# and also on a larger scale "i.e. biased police violence, displacement of indigenous peoples, etc.#. &owever, these e amples play only a marginal role in the perpetuation of racial hegemony in Bra$il. A number of factors contribute to the racial tension, but it is arguable that the most signifiacnt of these is the peoples' "blac! and white# complicity in the system that facilitates it. This leads to an entirely different category of violence !nown as symbolic violence - the "censored, euphemi$ed" violence that e ists in the public's ideologies and ta!es place in the day-to-day interactions between people "Bourdieu ()**+()(#. The implicit "symbolic" nature of symbolic violence in no way diminishes the magnitude of the real-world impact it has in society. ,ymbolic violence functions in the same way as any other form of violence in that it "violates boundaries and infringes upon the right to and quality of life" and wor!s to establish and maintain identities and power relations between

groups ",ymbolic -iolence+ *-.#. ,ymbolic violence often manages this without tripping any social cues and neither the perpetrator nor the victim are cogni$ant of the transgression ta!ing place. /ther times, only the victim will recogni$e the racial implications of a situation while the violator remains completely oblivious. 0n this case, the weight of the circumstance often lies soley on the victim, who is left without many options to alleviate this pressure. To This concept is not restricted to race, however, and can apply to any and all varieties of social identification and the intersectionalities thereof. A high-profile e ample of this would be the casual debasement of blac! women to roles of servitude. 1hen a blac! women is seen using a public elevator in a high-end apartment, she is immediately sub2ected to the 2udgement of onloo!ing whites and their attempts at rationali$ing her being there. ,omeone might as!, "0s the service elevator out of order3". Although there is no mention of the woman's race, it is not difficult to detect the profound racial implications of the question. The woman's s!in color, being the only apparently suggests that she, for whatever reason, does not belong

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