One of the captivities of freedom: the restriction of land access to black people

Abstract

The present work seeks to deal with the Brazilian land structure, ruled by the maxim of “captivity of the land”, as one of the founding elements of structural racism in Brazil. The distribution of land has as core the concentration, from the Portuguese colonization to the present day. From the exploitation of the work of the enslaved black population for more than three and a half centuries, a model of agricultural production through huge estates was founded, turned to the exportation. After slavery ended, black people, in addition to not being assisted or repaired by any of the material and moral damage caused by this phenomenon, had their lives depreciated in many ways, one of these was the deprivation of access to land. When considering the importance of territoriality for the reproduction of the lives of these populations, the study aims to point how racism and the historical evidence of land concentration, which remains until today, constitute the same social structure; counting on the direct interference of Brazilian political institutions. This discussion is important at a time when the agroindustry expands itself territorially at an increasing speed and the debates about structural racism gain popular and media attention - except, however, when it comes to the advance of expropriations (agricultural frontier) in the lands by quilombola and/or indigenous peoples, as these issues are not usually treated in a relational way.