Census shows that sewage reveals racism, just as racism comes from sewage

Image: Minervino Júnior | CB

Leonardo Sakamoto, on his blog

It’s not just racism that comes from the sewer. Data from the 2022 Census, released this Friday (23), by IBGE, show that sewage also indicates racism. Structural, in this case.

Black people (black and mixed race) represent 55.5% of the Brazilian population, but 68.6% of those who live in places without adequate sewage disposal.

Meanwhile, white people make up 43.5% of the country, but 29.5% of those who do not have decent sanitation. And we, the yellow people, are 0.4% of Brazil, but only 0.1% of those who do not have adequate sewage.

Indigenous people complete the list: 0.8% of the population and 1.7% of those without sewerage.

Proper disposal means both sewage collected in streets and avenues and septic tanks.

The IBGE points out that there is a proportionally greater presence of black and indigenous people in the Northeast and North regions, where basic sanitation services are more precarious. Remembering that the dynamics that forged Brazilian regional inequalities also include a lot of prejudice.

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But that’s not all: “In all of the 20 most populous Brazilian municipalities, the population of white color or race has more access to water supply, sanitation and garbage collection than the population of black, mixed race and indigenous people. ”, says Bruno Perez, IBGE analyst. In other words, the pattern of white people receiving more services than black people repeats itself.

According to the IBGE Synthesis of Social Indicators, released in December last year, among black and brown people, 40% were poor in 2022 – a level twice as high as the rate for the white population (21%). In other words, poverty has skin color in Brazil and suffers from the consequences of this.

Brazil has never managed to socially and economically integrate the black population. The descendants of those enslaved workers at the end of the 19th century continued to be treated as second-class citizens, suffering all types of discrimination, receiving much less than white people for the same job, facing the worst working conditions – even when they were not killed by bullets. of drug traffickers or militiamen or executed by police or military personnel on the outskirts of large cities simply for being the “wrong color”.

They were also not, for the majority of the time, among the public authorities’ priorities. After all, the interests of the State are usually served by governments and parliaments not by the number of individuals in a social group, but by the size of their portfolio.

Brazil being a country with a black majority reinforces the absurdity of them being a minority in the National Congress, in state and district governments, in ministries and in courts. But also in the presidencies and councils of large companies, in the rectors of universities, in the leadership of political parties. And, of course, the right to have the shit drained decently, avoiding illnesses and headaches.

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