Avoiding Identities: Health Between Submission and Resistance

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• Avoiding Identities Health Between Submission
  and Resistance

• Thereza Christina B. Coelho, MD, Msc, PhD, Vi
• (Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana,Bahia,
  Brazil)
• Ewen Speed, BA, MSc, PhD (University of Essex,
  UK)
• Andréia Beatriz Silva dos Santos, MD, Family
  Health, MSC
• Samanta Cardoso Góes, Medicine, Studen,
• Larissa Castro Rodrigues, Medicine, Studen
• Hèlvia Fagundes, Medine, Student,

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Introduction

• Two Brazils one black and poor, other white and
  rich.
• Myth of Racial Democracy in Brazil cordial
  racism and the tendency for a false "whitening"
  of the population.
• There is a tension between the desire to abolish
  the term "race", which is valid as a social
  category, and the strategies to combat

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Objective

• Analyze the discourse of professionals who are
  responsible for determining race-skin colour of
  individuals who died by violent causes about
• work process
• relationship between their perceptions of the
  classification and their behaviours in the
  ideological level (social legitimacy of racial
  supremacy) and, in the political level
  (maintenance of traditional designs of power
  distribution).

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Adaptation of Castells Tipology
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Methodology

• It is the doctors responsibility to fill out a
  form stating, in details, the causa mortis and
  including other data (in Brazil it is called
  Declaração de Óbito - DO). So, the DO is a
  sub-product of a more ample process of necropsy.
• The Forensic Medicine use only the skin colour
  Leucoderma (White, of European origin)
  Melanoderma (Black of European origin)
  Xantoderma (Yellow of Asian or American-Indian
  origin) Faioderma (a mixture of Black and White)
  (França (1998).

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Methodology

• Santoss studies (2008) showed serious problems
  in the translation from the Technical Report of
  the necropsy to the DO Classification presented
  in the System of Mortality Information White,
  Black, PARDO (Brown in our translation),
  Yellow, and Indigenous.
• We analyzed the discourses about colour, race and
  racism present in the interviews carried out
  between 2007 and 2008, with 9 professionals (6
  coroners and 3 assistants of necropsy) in a
  Forensic institution for a municipality of 500
  inhabitants in the north eastern area of Brazil,
  with a high proportion of the population formed
  by "Blacks" and "Brown".

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The game of truth and the process of racial
identification in people who underwent a necropsy

• The predominant identity in the Forensic Medical
  space is between the explicit legitimacy (EL) and
  the camouflaged legitimacy (CL).
• The definition of race-colour is, for the
  coroner, something very peripheral, unimportant.
• The identity of legitimacy in Brazil is actively
  denying. While an identity of camouflage can join
  the discourse related to the myth of racial
  democracy by simple ignorance or naivety, the
  identity of legitimacy is active in order to
  publicly cover up what is privately revealed in
  various ways.

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The identity of legitimacy

• Extract 1 Interviewer Do you think it is
  important to fill in the item race / colour on
  the DO? Interviewee E I think the racial issue,
  it has to be clarified in the cultural field
  (...) Because, I think we discuss it very little,
  okay? Disqualifying the Black slave, you know?
  And also the White as the master on the farm, the
  owner, the lord of slaves. I think that only when
  the White man puts himself in the black mans
  shoes, understand? And vice versa is true.

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Avoiding Identities between the mimesis, the
submission and resistance.

• The second identity the camouflage - classified
  himself as a "Faioderma" his is successful
  personal experience against the social barriers
  seem to confirm the values of meritocracy.
• The Blacks are the others "my employees son".
  Even their adopted children, can change their
  colour they are White in the morning and Black
  at night (Metaphor).

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• Coroner 2
• Certainly, in my case, there was a
  redistribution of income, because I got to a
  place where few people get, right? (...) My
  corpses that I see I classify them as Faioderma.
• Coroner 3
• Dominant thought adverse social conditions
  faced by Blacks is a legacy of slavery, a partial
  truth that tries to pass by a full truth, that is
  a truth which is able to explain everything when
  excluding racism as an explanation to problem
  (fallacy of relevance).

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The veiled Subject the aides

• Determining the Causa Mortis is what counts the
  race-colour information is seen as bureaucratic
  and could be left to aides
• Interviewer And who is to fill out the Death
  Certificate?
• Auxiliary of Necropsy The doctor, but in some
  cases... most times I am the one who fills it
  out. I do it based on the documentation as well
  as the form that comes from the Police Station.

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The truth as a political question what is the
real power of the colour?

• The identity of resistance is excluded from the
  forensic medical space.
• The Identity of "Project", proposed by Castells,
  or still the Radical Identity, conceived by
  Giroux and Peterson, were not expressed in any
  speech.
• Why those doctors give up on their powers of
  producing truths, and show no commitment to their
  work object?

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Conclusion

• The real coroners object is not the corpse, but
  the living being that he was one day, and whose
  material proof is his body in the decomposition
  process, while the real loss is that one
  generated by a useless human sacrifice. Making
  the most possible truth of this death emerge is a
  way to repair a bit of the injustice violently
  experienced. The colour can talk about the
  inequality a difference that is unjust as
  long as the camouflaged ideology is unmasked,
  tearing down the discourse of Racial Supremacy.

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References

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• SILVEIRA, Thereza C. C. A Prática do Psiquiatra
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•  

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Thank you!
Program of Post-Graduation in Collective
Health Department of Health State University of
Feira de Santana, Bahia, Brasil UEFS
Núcleo de Saúde Coletiva E-mail
nusc_at_libra.uefs.br thereza.coelho_at_cnpq.
Health and Human Sciences Colchester, United
Kingdom