Necropolítica e racismo: a produção do corpo negro como vida matável

Abstract

This paper investigates how the Brazilian State participates in producing conditions of death for historically marginalized populations, focusing on the analysis of necropolitics in the contemporary Brazilian context. It begins with Michel Foucault's biopolitics, understood as a rationality of power that shifts the axis of classical sovereignty from "the right to take life or let live" to "the right to make live and let die," and with State racism as the mechanism authorizing the differential exposure of certain groups to death. Frantz Fanon's contribution allows for an understanding of the subjective and historical effects of this process within the colonial context, through concepts such as the epidermalization of inferiority and the zone of non-being. The analysis then advances to Giorgio Agamben's concept of the state of exception, whose notion of bare life describes subjects exposed to sovereign violence without full legal protection, although without thematizing the racial selectivity of this exposure. It is from this gap that the central axis of the work develops: Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics, which shifts the focus from the management of life to the sovereign administration of death, showing that race constitutes the principle that distributes — rather than merely intensifies — the exposure of certain bodies to elimination. This qualitative, bibliographic-documentary, and analytical-critical research articulates this theoretical foundation with recent empirical data (2014–2024) on police lethality, mass incarceration, selective police stops, and maternal mortality in Brazil, with a primary focus on Rio de Janeiro and punctual comparisons to São Paulo and Bahia. The results confirm that Brazilian necropolitics cannot be reduced to a single institutional mechanism, but constitutes a multidimensional rationality, simultaneously sustained by material structures and symbolic representations, which produces the Black body as historically constructed as killable.