Brazil’s ministry of foreign affairs has been forced to apologise to the embassies of Canada, Gabon and Burkina Faso after three diplomats’ teenage children – all of whom are Black – were searched at gunpoint by police officers.
The incident emerged when the mother of a Brazilian boy in the group posted a security camera video online, prompting outrage – but also a weary recognition that such experiences are all too typical for Black youths in Rio de Janeiro.
The three diplomats’ children were in Rio for a five-day holiday with a white Brazilian friend, celebrating the end of the school year. All attend the same school in Brasília, where they live. It was their first trip without their parents.
Late Wednesday, they were returning from a day at the beach and were about to enter a building in the wealthy neighbourhood of Ipanema when a military police patrol car drew up. Two officers jumped out, ordered the boys to face the wall and searched them at gunpoint.
Fun facts time!
Brazil enslaved more people from Africa than any other country; nearly 5 million kidnapped Africans disembarked in Brazil, more than 12 times the number taken to mainland North America, according to estimates from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888.
Discrimination remains, and Black and biracial Brazilians are more likely to be poor, imprisoned and die violently. Fewer than a third of managerial positions are held by those groups, and they comprise one quarter of representatives in Brazil’s Lower House of Congress.
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-slavery-reparations-legacy-bank-2aa8e0b0635cf1969a017500f6a623f3
