Brazilian Dystopia
Remember, it can always get much much worse
To my detriment I subscribe to The Washington Post and a few other mainstream news publications. Mostly to see what the media hive mind is putting out, but sometimes even I am astounded at what makes the news. Here is an article on the latest offense against the Gods of speech.
Convicted for making racial slurs, she faces 8 years in Brazilian prison
The Washington Post
By Terrence McCoy and Marina Dias
What a start to an article.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Day McCarthy has made hateful comments. Her targets have frequently been children, particularly the children of celebrities. She has called one girl “ugly.” Another child “disgustingly skinny.”
And in one racist utterance that outraged this deeply diverse country, the Brazilian social media provocateur once took aim at the adopted Black daughter of two White celebrities, calling the 4-year-old girl a “monkey.”
“I say what’s on my mind,” McCarthy, who identifies as half Black, said in an interview. “I’m a polemicist.”
Brazil now has another name for her: criminal.
In America, the risk to one’s livelihood and reputation can be steep for offending the Progressive Gods with wrongspeak. But at least it doesn’t come with a prison sentence. (Yet) Understand that there is no such thing as hate speech, only speech they do not like.
Seven years after her bigoted attack on the Black girl, a federal judge in August convicted McCarthy, 35, of the crime of racism and handed her the type of penalty traditionally reserved for violent offenders and drug traffickers: eight years and nine months in prison. McCarthy, who lives in Paris and rarely posts online these days, is appealing for a reduced sentence, and no arrest warrant has yet been issued.
The severe sentence, the longest ever meted out by the Brazilian justice system for the crime of racism, illustrates a mounting willingness in Brazil and across much of the world to criminalize racist speech and jail those who use it. In recent years, South Africa sent its first person to prison for racist speech. A court in Belgium ordered one man to spend 15 days in jail for sending racist messages to a television host. And earlier this year, Spain gave eight-month prison sentences to three men who yelled racist taunts at a Brazilian soccer player.
While not a surprising outcome from the country that criminalized homophobia and transphobia, this is still another example of how important free speech protections are for the United States. It is seldom noted how many countries have criminalized speech they do not agree with.
Few countries are pursuing with greater vigor the criminal prosecution of those who use racist language than Brazil, once touted by its elites as largely free of the racial divisions bedeviling others in the hemisphere, such as the United States. But a racial reckoning sparked by the 2020 George Floyd protests has prompted Brazil to account for its history as the top destination for enslaved Africans during the transatlantic slave trade, and the country has assumed an increasingly hard-line position against racist speech, which, unlike the United States, it considers a crime.
Between 2020 and 2023, the number of criminal prosecutions was up more than fivefold, according to government crime statistics, rising from 794 to 4,871. There is now a specialized military police unit in the largely Black state of Bahia that patrols for racists and people accused of racial intolerance. The public ministry in Bahia state has also empowered a prosecutorial team to focus exclusively on prosecuting bigotry.
“The gravity of the crime of racism in Brazil is so great that people can be arrested on the spot,” said Lívia Vaz, who directs the team. “When I started, it wasn’t that way. The police would go to the scene, and no one was arrested. Now they are.”
Criminal courts, she said, have traditionally been hesitant to convict racists, much less send them to prison. “It usually ends up being a penalty of community service,” she said.
But that, too, has begun to change.
St. George Floyd(pbuh) ushered in a racial hysteria that we are just getting over. Orwellian doesn’t even begin to describe the scenario of being arrested “on the spot” due to allegations of wrongspeak. I’m sure this isn’t weaponized by some to settle old vendettas or prior grievances with a neighbor or business owner.
Their first encounter with racism
McCarthy’s victim was no ordinary child. She was Títi, daughter to television stars Bruno Gagliasso and Giovanna Ewbank. The celebrity family — three children, two adopted from Malawi — regularly graces magazine covers and television specials. Títi is so well known that in the Brazilian press she goes by that name alone.
She was adopted in 2016. Ewbank first met her while in the Malawian capital of Lilongwe to produce a television report for TV Globo. One day after filming was over, she went to an orphanage to donate some diapers. At that point, as she recounted in interviews, she had no desire to be a mother. But that changed when the orphanage door opened, and there was Títi.
“I had found my daughter, and my daughter had found me,” Ewbank recalled in a 2019 TEDx Talk. “The only thing I knew with certainty, absolute certainty, was that I wanted to protect and love her for the rest of my life.”
Ewbank and Gagliasso declined to be interviewed or respond to written questions for this article.
As the couple grew their family — adopting another child from Malawi, Bless, and conceiving a biological child — they became vocal advocates for racial justice, condemning structural racism in a predominantly Black and mixed society where economic and political power is concentrated in the hands of White elites. In interviews with Brazilian media, the couple spoke of grappling with that racial dynamic inside their own household.
“We’re aware that we, as White people, have an eternal debt to Black people,” Gagliasso told the newspaper O Globo. “In our daily life we try to bring up issues like discrimination, adoption, racism through books and conversation.” His children, he said, were being taught about prominent American civil rights leaders.
Remember our assortment of US celebrities who collect foreign kids like Pokémon cards? Now picture them with the power of legislation to put folks in jail for words.
Where racism isn’t protected speech
Brazil defines freedom of expression more narrowly than the United States. Here, threats against the Brazilian democracy and government institutions are considered illegal. So are personal attacks that offend someone’s honor. Racist speech, too, has been illegal here for decades.
So when McCarthy said her attack on Títi was protected by free-speech rights, the argument gained little traction. No one in Brazil took up that argument online. Even free-speech advocates didn’t buy it.
“The United States has protections for offensive discourse that Brazil has chosen to punish,” said Jamil Assis of the Sivis Institute, a free-speech advocacy group. “And for us, this is justifiable: Human dignity comes first, human life comes first and, in the case of discriminatory speech, a grave punishment is warranted.”
How far off until they make it a death penalty offense?
Last month, the couple celebrated another successful prosecution of a Portuguese woman who made racist comments against their children in Portugal in 2022. The woman was given a suspended eight-month prison sentence in what the couple said was the first time in Portugal that such a penalty had been given to someone accused of racist speech.
“We know that this victory happened because we’re famous and White,” the Brazilian couple wrote on Instagram on Nov. 15. “We cannot stop — especially if our privilege makes a difference in this fight. This is our role, and this is the role of Whiteness.”
You don’t have to agree or even like what the Brazilian social media influencer said about the little girl. But to read statements like “This is our role, and this is the role of Whiteness,” or “We’re aware that we, as White people, have an eternal debt to Black people,” and take seriously that these celebrities are not doing this for the attention is ridiculous. Just not said is how this is a yellow brick road straight to authoritarian hell.
To envision the Progressive Left in America having this power to prosecute makes one shudder.
It's almost impossible to be jailed for saying something false. For example, saying that Armenians control finance, or that the Napoleonic Wars never happened, or that Swedes are disgusting feral creatures who belong in a zoo. It's words that are true that are the ones that really threaten the regime.