RACIAL POISONS AND BRAZILIAN EUGENICS: SOCIAL RESIGNIFICATION IN LIGHT OF NECROPOLITICS

Abstract

This article analyzes the persistence of eugenic rationalities in Brazil’s social formation, examining their contemporary reconfiguration in institutional practices of classification, control, abandonment, and selective exposure to death. It starts from the problem that eugenics, although historically associated with scientific racism, whitening, and hygienism, did not disappear as a matrix for hierarchizing life, but was displaced into new forms of managing inequality. The study adopts a qualitative, bibliographic, documentary, and analytical-interpretive approach, using classical works, recent scientific literature, and official sources on homicides, incarceration, disappearances, Black population health, and territorial vulnerabilities. The discussion shows that penal selectivity, preventable death, precarious care, statistical invisibility, and educational sub-citizenship express historical continuities of racial dehumanization. It concludes that overcoming these permanences requires anti-racist public policies, improved official race/color records, territorial strengthening of care, and critical revision of institutional practices that naturalize the disposability of Black, Indigenous, quilombola, and peripheral populations.