In Brazil a black man is killed every 23 minutes
Where is the global outrage?
What if I told you there is a city, a world famous city, with a police force that kills more people in a month than Minnesota police has killed in 20 years? What if I told you there is a country, not some backwater state, but a major economic and cultural player, where a black man dies at the hands of the police every 23 minutes?
The city is Rio de Janeiro, and the country is Brazil.
As demonstrators around the world take to the streets to protest the killing of George Floyd, the international battle cry of black people worldwide is trending again: black lives matter. Of course they do. But some black lives seem to matter more than others. Even within the fight for racial and social justice there are some glaring inequalities.
If I asked you about a Brazilian boy named João Pedro, would you know who he was? What about a little girl named Ágatha Felix, ever heard of her? I could tell you about their lives, their dreams, aspirations; I could tell you little Ágatha, 8, took ballet and English classes, I could tell you João Pedro, 14, loved playing football and to fly his kite. Nothing remarkable about that, children’s lives are not supposed to be remarkable, they are just supposed to be normal. João Pedro was murdered by police officers…
