Hi,
I keep playing the scenes over in my head.
First scene: a black boy is inside a lift and a white woman stands outside, talking to the boy before seemingly pressing a button. The doors close, the boy presses more buttons and remains alone, with one of his hands behind his back, playing with a string. A few seconds pass before the doors open again, and the boy gets out of the lift. The woman is not there. We can see the boy open a door to his left, just outside the lift, before the image cuts out.
Next scene: domestic worker Mirtes Santana walks back to her employer’s condo after walking her employer’s dog for 10 minutes. She arrives at the bottom of the building and sees a body lying on the pavement. She screams when she realises the body belongs to Miguel Otávio Santana da Silva, her only child, who was five.
Miguel dies shortly after in hospital from the impact of falling 35 metres – all the way from the ninth floor of a 41-storey luxury condo in Recife, the largest city in northeastern Brazil.
It is any mother’s nightmare: when death takes over what is supposed to be the beginning of life. Tragic you may call it. Structural, I say.
The white woman who didn’t manage to talk Miguel out of the lift is Sari Gaspar, Santana’s employer, the wife of local politician Sérgio Hacker. She was getting a manicure when Miguel entered the lift.
Miguel had gone to work with his mother because she had no other childcare option in times of coronavirus. Reports say that when his mother left the building to walk the dog, she left Gaspar in charge of him. But Miguel went looking for his mother. He stepped out of the apartment and walked into the lift. Gaspar followed him but failed to see the danger of leaving a child unattended in a skyscraper lift. When Miguel got off on the ninth floor and walked through the door, he climbed onto an aircon unit outside a window, and fell down.
Santana needed her job as she was raising Miguel without the boy’s father. Plus she considered her employers nice: they had been OK with Santana bringing Miguel along to a villa outside of Recife, where they had stayed for some months weathering the coronavirus. Miguel had played with the masters’ children and swam in their swimming pool. When her employers contracted Covid-19, they went back to Recife, and Santana with them, as she was deemed indispensable.
Could she have said no to her employers and simply stayed at home instead of bringing her son to work, instead of exposing him and herself to the coronavirus? Journalists put a mic in front of the grieving mother. Commentators speak of it as a tragic accident. It is tragic, for sure, but it’s not a generic accident, a matter for even odds and bad luck. This is not the kind of accident that I, a white Italian mother with a blonde son, would worry about. This is structural racism.
It’s easy to jump on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon, pointing the finger at police brutality in the United States from wherever we are. But racism disrupts and destroys millions of lives, every day, everywhere – and it starts as early as the first 1,000 days.
There are a few basic things that could have prevented Miguel’s death: childcare options for single mothers; an emergency fund for parents who have to stay at home with their children during the pandemic.
But, above all, one thing could have made all the difference: Gaspar’s attitude towards Miguel. Why did the employer not step in the lift with Miguel? Is a young black life worth less than a manicure? If it had been one of Gaspar’s children in the lift, would the same thing have happened?
Gaspar was arrested for culpable homicide and released by paying a bail of 20,000 reais ($4,000). So yes, more than a manicure. But let’s be honest, not much more.
Brazil has a long history of institutionalised racism that results from the colonial era. It is no coincidence that Recife was the first slave port in the Americas. And that the condominium where Miguel died is named after John Maurice of Nassau, of the Dutch West India Company, who controlled the colonisation of this part of the world in the 17th century, using African slaves to turn a profit.
It is no coincidence that maids have been bearing the brunt of the coronavirus in Brazil and elsewhere in the world. It is no coincidence that they have to risk their lives and their children’s lives to please a master’s will and put food on their own table.
It is no coincidence that far-right President Jair Bolsonaro said that sterilising poor people was the only way to save Brazil from chaos.
“Black mothers are accused of neglect of their children on a daily basis because they are often forced to leave them alone at home to work, or in the care of older siblings. They are criminalised, they lose their guardianship. But the boss who murdered Miguel by negligence [a better word would be, contempt, dehumanisation] is already free,” wrote black historian Larissa Ibúmi. “Today again I can’t breathe thinking about Miguel’s mother and all the mothers of black children in this country.”
I will sign off with the words that Othering correspondent OluTimehin Adegbeye wrote in her most powerful newsletter to date: “We are tired, and under this bone-deep exhaustion there is a tight and bubbling rage. The world is on fire, don’t you see? The world is on fire and our bodies are the fuel. But we want to live. We want to live. We are already alive; why can’t we just live?”
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