Emanuelle F. Góes*

[Posted on NACLA Report on the Americas Volume 54, 2022 – Issue 2 Taylor & Francis Online]

The Covid-19 pandemic has further exposed how structural violence based on race, gender, class, and geography in Brazil threatens the lives of Black women.

They said the virus was democratic. This was the rhetoric we heard in Brazil at the beginning of the pandemic: that everyone would be in the same boat. But that was not what we saw with the first deaths due to Covid-19 in the country. It was not what we saw with the story of 63-year-old Cleonice Gonçalves, who on the morning of March 17, 2020 was having difficulty breathing. She had checked in to the hospital near her home in the mountainous outskirts of Rio de Janeiro after suddenly becoming sick the day before while at work as a housekeeper in an upscale Rio apartment. Doctors intubated her, but her condition worsened quickly. By that afternoon, Gonçalves was dead. She was the first fatal victim of Covid-19 in Rio and one of the first in the country.

Gonçalves’s boss had recently traveled to Italy and suspected she had caught the coronavirus, but did not tell her employee, according to local health authorities. Like many individuals with similar jobs, Gonçalves never had the opportunity to stay home and protect herself. Her story became emblematic of the plight of many vulnerable Brazilian workers, mostly Black women, who did not receive support to remain in isolation and had to risk contagion to continue to work. Domestic work is not an essential service, except in a patriarchal and racist society.

With its devastating reach, the Covid-19 pandemic found fertile ground in societies with existing inequalities of race, gender, class, and geography. Women, racially oppressed groups, and populations living in deprivation are most affected—directly or indirectly—by humanitarian crises, whether economic, environmental, or public health-related. Their precarious living conditions compound a daily life of rights violations. Black women, who are at the base of Brazilian social hierarchy, have least access to the formal labor market and essential goods and services such as education, housing, and health care. Racism, in its many manifestations rooted in social and class cleavages in Brazil, affects Black people in perverse ways. And Black women suffer at the intersections of racism and sexism, which means suffering all the consequences of a patriarchal, sexist state.

Considering this convergence of racism and sexism, Afro-Brazilian philosopher Sueli Carneiro argues that Black women suffer double social discrimination, which results in a kind of social asphyxiation with negative consequences in all aspects of life. The system of oppression on the basis of race, gender, and class traps Black women, pushing them into a historical cycle of disadvantages and violences that only gets worse in the context of pandemics or other global crises.

Existing Inequalities and the Pandemic: An Intersectional Issue

The novel coronavirus pandemic presented a challenge to humanity due to its severity and ease of transmission, as well as its interaction with pre-existing conditions, especially chronic diseases such as cancer, hypertension, and diabetes, among others. At the same time, implementing Covid-19 prevention measures has been difficult, particularly in societies like Brazil with deep internal inequalities. In the pandemic context, these inequalities manifest in the ability or inability to adhere to prevention measures, access Covid-19 tests and diagnostics, and access treatment and/or hospitalization, as well as in exposure to social and economic impacts and the risk of death. Even while distancing, isolation, mask use, and other precautions became widespread, they did not reach Black women equally, because that would require social equity.

According to the 2018 National Household Sample Survey carried out by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), some 47.8 percent of Black women are part of the informal labor market, compared to 34.7 percent of white women, 46.9 percent of Black men, and 34.7 percent of white men. In these statistics, institutional racism is on display. When it comes to informality, the levels are similar for Black women and Black men, and both groups encounter greater barriers compared to their white counterparts in accessing the formal labor market. Unemployment rates are always higher for them, and this trend accentuated during the pandemic. From the fourth trimester of 2019 to the second trimester of 2020, the unemployment rate rose from 15.6 percent to 18.2 percent for Black women, 10.6 percent to 14 percent for Black men, 10.1 percent to 11.3 percent for white women, and 7.4 percent to 9.5 percent for white men, according to data from the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socio-Economic Studies. In such uncertain circumstances, it is impossible for many to adhere to calls for isolation, because they are forced to keep searching for work to survive. This often involves long commutes and using public transportation, or turning to precarious services such as Uber, which all entail a risk of exposure to contagion.

At the same time, women are the predominant providers of care in the formal labor market, and this work, to a large extent, is essential. This is a field marked by hierarchies of gender, so Black women are once again subjected to the intersection of gendered and racialized oppressions in these spaces. Black women represent the majority of women working on the frontlines of the pandemic as healthcare providers, occupying positions of great exposure to contagion in jobs that are often precarious and potentially unsanitary. Black women in Brazil account for almost half of nurses and represent a majority in healthcare service positions, such as nursing assistants and technicians.

It is worth noting that the most recent epidemic prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, that of the Zika virus, brought major consequences for young Black women in the country’s Northeast, the region hardest hit by the outbreak. The population in the Northeast is nearly 70 percent Black, and the region is also home to precarious health and basic sanitation conditions. According to IBGE’s latest census data, 14.45 percent of northeastern households do not have access to tap water, compared to 1.29 percent of southeastern households in the same situation. Northeastern women, who are often largely responsible for their households, live with irregular access to basic sanitation and face obstacles when it comes to accessing reproductive health services. Fast forward to 2020, and Brazil’s first recorded case of maternal death due to Covid-19 was that of a young Black woman in the countryside of Bahia, located in the Northeast. She was helping her partner at work when she contracted the coronavirus.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit Brazil, reproductive rights and social policies for women first stagnated, then suffered setbacks. According to Maíra L.S. Takemoto and coauthors, Covid-19 provoked an estimated 20 percent increase in maternal mortality in Brazil in 2020, and the fatality rate for maternal Covid-19 cases increased to 15.6 percent in 2021 compared to 7.4 percent in 2020, suggesting that the second wave was more deadly for pregnant people than the first. As of mid-2021, Brazil had recorded 1,114 deaths of pregnant or postpartum women due to Covid-19, and the majority, some 77 percent, were Black women, according to the Feminist Center for Studies and Advisory Services (CFEMEA).

In recent years, obstetric case has improved in Brazil, especially in terms of access to prenatal care through the expansion of basic healthcare coverage and strategic programs. For instance, the program Saúde da Família (Family Health), launched in the 1990s and expanded in the 2000s, to some extent reduced racial, regional, and socioeconomic inequalities in access to services. However, despite the implementation of government programs aimed at improving obstetric care, such as the Ministry of Health’s reproductive planning and humanized care strategy Rede Cegonha and the Mother and Child Care Program (PROAMIS), disparities remain. Black women who are poor, have little formal education, reside in urban peripheries or in the North and Northeast regions are still the most affected by a lack of access to health services and the most at risk of unfavorable and even deadly outcomes, such as maternal mortality.

These experiences underline how women in Brazil, especially Black women, lack access to quality, accessible care. This reveals a systemic violation of the human right to life and equal access to health care. There is a direct relationship between access to care, the quality of care, and the causes of maternal death, as these are most often preventable causes.

Breaking the Cycle

The pandemic interacts with all pre-existing forms of violence, and looking to the future—and to humanity—has been a great challenge. Covid-19 prevention measures follow protocols that do not recognize deep inequalities or intersectionality. Intersectionality, according to Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, captures how actions and policies generate oppression and dynamics of disempowerment along axes of race, gender, class, and other experiences of marginalization.

Amid disease outbreaks, the tyranny of the urgent results in silences around issues of gender, researcher Julia Smith writes, and this is also true of race and other related oppressions in the face of political, economic, and public health crises. In short, what should be at the center of policies and initiatives is left out. Reductions in services, such as legal abortion, lay bare inequalities and amount to human rights violations. In Brazil, the number of abortions performed declined by about 55 percent at the beginning of the pandemic due to the procedure being deemed a non-essential service. This coincided with an increase in cases of sexual violence as calls to isolate often left victims at home with their abusers. Abortion is legal in Brazil only in specific instances, one of which is when a pregnancy is the result of rape.

How do we stop it the cycle of inequality? Information from Cadastro Único—a registry used in identifying low-income families for the administration of several social programs, such as the Bolsa Família cash transfer program—reveal that Black people represent 68 percent of the list, and 39 percent of them are women. Such data reveal how race, gender, and geography intersect with experiences of extreme deprivation and poverty.

The cycle of poverty is a cycle of racism that has claimed Black lives systematically, perpetuating gendered racism, racialized transphobia, and a racism that determines who lives and who dies—in a word, genocide. To let live or let die—this is how societies structured by racism organize the lives of Black and white people. Colonization imposed a ranking, as feminist philosopher María Lugones wrote, of European whites as “fully human,” while “Indigenous peoples of the Americas and enslaved Africans were classified as not human in species.” Anti-Blackness is the foundation of humanity, João H. Costa Vargas reminds us, because “the modern being is defined in opposition to Black non-being.”

I see ways to interrupt this cycle. It is crucial to have the participation of Black women, as well as women in general, Black people in general, and trans people, in spaces where decisions are made and public policies and forms of social control are implemented. This is essential to achieving societal shifts and building egalitarian and equitable political representation. Black bodies—Black women’s bodies—have the right to move, to live, and to find a place in the statistics that mark well-being. To this end, the Black women’s movement has made great gains over its history. But we need a state that answers to more than half of the population, a state that answers to the majority, so that one day Black women’s bodies will carry only stories.

* Emanuelle F. Góes is a postdoctoral fellow at the Data and Knowledge Integration Center for Health at Fiocruz Bahia and a research fellow at the Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements, and Population Health Equity at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health. She is also a researcher at Iyaleta–Pesquisa, Ciência e Humanidades.