Racism or not? The perception of legal scholars on legal cases with racist content

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Gislene Aparecida dos
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Noguti, Helton Hissao, Matos, Camila T. M. B.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista de Estudos Empíricos em Direito
• Texto Completo: https://reedrevista.org/reed/article/view/35
• topic: Insultos raciais; Racismo; Lei Antirracismo; Racial insults; Racism; Antiracism Law

This article presents the results of a research on the perceptions of law students and legal professionals on cases containing racial insults that were judged by the Appeal Court of the State of São Paulo. We discuss the meaning of racism for the law and for sociology. Then, we present our research methods, including the questionnaire, our sampling methods, and our findings. With a sample of 112 completed questionnaires, we conclude that law students and legal professionals do not have clear criteria to guide them in their responses. Instead, their varied and highly subjective interpretations are a result of the difficulties in interpreting racial insults and racial crimes through the Brazilian criminal law. We argue that hiding this subjectivity under the assumptions of positivistic law allows ideas about blacks and racism that persist in the social imaginary to contribute to the misrecognition of incidents of racial discrimination.