Racism and verbal violence: the text and socio-cognitive construction of the #somostodosmacacos

Abstract

This text aims to discuss verbal violence and racism by means of the analysis of racist frames deployed in #SomosTodosMacacos considering a corpus of texts constituted during the doctoral research by Parintins Lima (2019). The corpus was composed of opinion articles published in newspapers, magazines and news portals in Brazil, produced in reaction to the #SomosTodosMacacos published by Brazilian soccer player Neymar Junior, on April 27th, 2014 on social networks after his teammate Daniel Alves suffered a racist act in Spain. The methodology consisted of the description, identification and quantification of racism frames emerging in the corpus, identifying the most productive ones and observing their role in the meaning construction of #SomosTodosMacacos. The main result of the present study is that the interpretation of #SomosTodosMacacos as racist is anchored in stabilized and textually mobilized framed knowledge. The other result is that the hashtag’s interpretation is also anchored in social meanings mobilized or constructed in the opinion articles mainly by the association of the statement “We are all monkeys” to the representation of black people as monkeys which is rooted socio-historically in European evolutionism. The conclusion is that the interpretation of #SomosTodosMacacos as racist can be based on textual and socio-cognitive constructions of racist frames, pointing out the hashtag’s violent character.