We Are All Equal Before the Law

Abstract

One constitution follows another in my country and all of them place emphasis, when they deal with individual rights and guarantees, on accentuating the equality of all Brazilians without racial distinction. Thus, they decree the legal annulment of racial differences, to cleanse the brutal slaver tradition which, still today, inhabits the historical subconsciousness of our country. For more than four centuries Black people were an article of trade, an instrument of labor and an object of domination by a society that denied them, explicitly, their very right to the human condition. This guilty subconscious is reflected in all pertinent legislation, beginning with the Golden Law (Lei Aurea) of 1888, which abolished slavery. The idea is to demonstrate that there are no whites or Blacks, but only Brazilians, not classified by racial origin. The current Constitution, decreed by the Military Junta on October 17, 1979, does not shirk its duty of noting this permanent preoccupation of a society still stained by the odious recent tradition. In its Chapter IV, which deals with individual rights and guarantees (Article 153), it declares, textually, in paragraph 1: