On Cruelty
By: Alice Maria Gomes
Tags: Necropolitics, Racism, Violence

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Day by day it is very common to hear people saying that there is an increase of violence, but if we analyze history and world’s structure we can notice, as Achille Mbembe has said, that violence and necropolitics have always been present in our society, but they are taking to a more cruel level with the addition of the state of exception and state of siege, which can legitimate a huge number of violations and cruelty around the world.

The death of George Floid, a black man that was brutally killed by a white cop, in the U.S.A. has brought up again the debate about racism and brutality in our society, the terrible images of him being suffocated until death became very popularised with his last sentence “I can’t breath”, which was used in a large number of protests, not only in the U.S., but around the world. Worldwide, cruelty and violence are always present in the daily routine, mainly of people who are historically stigmatized, as etinics minorities, poor people, black people, indigenous people, people who live in favelas and peripheral zones, etc. They not only suffer from acts of violence but also from the process of legitimation of violence and abuses against them, and from the implementation of necropolitics in governments and the acceptance of this for the society, which can cause the subordination of these groups.

Besides that it is totally necessary to raise the debate on the banalization of brutality and the spectacularization of barbary. Some months ago I was at my doctor’s office and there was a television on and people were watching, glazed by all that information of prisons, murders, shootings, etc — important note: it was only 7 a.m. and I felt as if that was their breakfast. Televisions, newspapers, videos, etc are notifying violence, violence and more violence, and people consume that as if it was normal, without asking themselves “ok, so why’s that happening?”. All this seeming apathy can be strongly prejudicial and bring irreparable losses, lives lost — as we have seen that people recorded the facts but didn’t do anything to interrupt the actions, resulting in death.

In the book Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe centralizes his work on the discussion of how states and governments have a decision power — be it direct or subtle — to interfere not only in life, but especially in the death of individuals. Through what he defines as sovereignty, many governments and groups decide who can live and who should die, hence generating a policy of discarding so-called not so important or even socially undesirable segments. Thus, he invites us to reflect in which ways state’s racism can create death politics and has the legitimacy to implement measures that discard lives daily.

In conclusion, I believe that only when we admit and face the problem of structural racism in our society and institutions, will we somehow be prepared to take a next step in fighting racism. As long as we remain ignorant about the fact that racism shapes all social relations and spheres, and about how we need not only to decolonize physical places, but also to decolonize minds, we are not going to make any consistent and significant improvement in this scenario.