Abstract:
The article proposes a reading of the controversy concerning the ritual sacrifice of animals in Afro-Brazilian traditions drawing from the notion of “religious racism”. The authors make a case for the partiality (in other words, the “whiteness”) of liberal notions of “(in)tolerance”, focusing on racialization and white normativity as devices for a deeper understanding of Extraordinary Appeal - RE 494601. Engaging with such a perspective, they point out that the repression and criminalization of traditional food practices in terreiro communities, which conform a circuit of life (re)production in the African Diaspora, reveal the State's necropolitics as a mode of selective distribution of death having black people as its main victims. Thus, the paper concludes that the impact of the Constitutional Court’s recent ruling, resulting not only from a conflict of moralities but also from a conflict of nomoi, depends on the narrative that situates it and on the constitutional commitment to a structural anti-racist agenda.
Keywords:
Religious racism; African-Brazilian traditions; Terreiro comunities; Constitutionalism; White normativity