A questão racial na esfera pública (virtual): a experiência da Secretaria de Políticas de Promoção da Igualdade Racial no Governo Dilma Rousseff

Abstract

The present work aims to study how the organ of the Brazilian Federal Executive linked to the issue of racial equality stands in the virtual public sphere. The analysis focuses on the online communication experience from the Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR): the website www.seppir.gov.br. The organ was created in 2003 to formulate, promote and coordinate activities that promote racial equality in the country. SEPPIR began its activities in the first administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and it meant a historical response to the demands of the Brazilian black movement, a movement that managed to put the race issue in the public sphere in Brazil and went, especially since the 1970s, through an ethnic and cultural reconstruction, based, for example, on the defense of the use of the idea of race. This movement also began to influence the political parties and the sphere of political decision and to demand from the State, in its own way, shares of both recognition and redistribution. The SEPPIR website is the only vehicle used by the Secretariat to disclose, on an ongoing basis, its actions. The dissertation analyzes the object from the Depth Hermeneutics perspective, the methodological framework suggested by J. B. Thompson. It does that by performing together both socio-historical and discursive analysis (narrative analysis), and the interpretation of symbolic forms studied. In conjunction with this methodological framework, the paper seeks to analyze how SEPPIR behaves in the virtual public sphere, in relation to the types of publicity characteristics of the public sphere (visibility and discutibility) and if it can and how it meets the democratic demands of state digital experiences (responsiveness, porosity, and publicity). The hypothesis elaborated and confirmed by this study is that SEPPIR does not bother to give large contributions to the discursive public sphere in which debate is a main concern. It contributes in a greater extent for the formation of a sphere of public awareness around the race issue. It does that by the website being an issue pole of discourses about the racial reality in Brazil. Discourses whose narrative converges with that used in the recent history of the black movement, which, in turn, resembles the narrative chosen by the Workers’ Party in recent years.