“Are we racists?" Facing institutional racism in the Public Prosecutor’s Office of São Paulo

• Autor(a) principal: Nudel Radomysler, Clio
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista de Estudos Empíricos em Direito
• Texto Completo: https://reedrevista.org/reed/article/view/235

The purpose of this work was to reflect on the role of the justice system’s institutions in confronting racism. We conducted an ethnography of the Racial Equality Working Group Professor Joel Rufino dos Santos ofthe Public Prosecutor’s Office of São Paulo, a group created to deal with the subject within the MP-SP, between September 2014 and March 2016. The Racial Equality Working Group prioritized the training of its members to identify the reproduction of racism on the daily activities of the institution. The Group also sought to raise the participants’ awareness about their own role on the perpetuation of racism. In addition to training programs, this research discussed important measures to fight racism in the justice system’s institutions: the implementation of racial quotas; the collection, analysis and dissemination of data regarding cases related to the black population; and the establishment of institutional guidelines and specific departments to address this theme. This work also identified numerous difficulties faced by the Group: the strong rejection to the adoption of racial quotas by the prosecutors, the hierarchical institutional structure, the lack of dialogue with social movements, the excessive valorization of the prosecutor’s functional independence, and the inherent contradictions of the MP’s institutional design - the MP acts at the same time on criminal prosecution and on the promotion of civil rights. Despite the progress made by the Group,there is still a long way to go in order to confront the various manifestations of racism within the justice system.