Brazil’s electoral court TSE lists words to be banned from the vocabulary for alleged racism

On Nov. 30, during the meeting Democracy and Anti-racist Awareness in Electoral Justice, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) launched the booklet “Racist Expressions: why avoid them”.

According to the organ, the purpose of the manual is to list words and expressions to be banned from the Brazilian vocabulary under the justification that the terms would be offensive to black people.

Words such as “enlighten”, “slave”, “half-ass” and “nega maluca”, as well as expressions such as “done on the thighs”, were pointed out as liable to exclusion.

In several cases, the booklet suggests different hypotheses that could support the supposed racism present in the words and expressions and, even without a faithful conclusion about the historical and cultural context of the terms, points to their banishment.

When pointing out reasons to stop using the word “half-ass”, for example, the TSE cites three possible explanations for the origin of the word, which contradict each other, and at the end, it states: “although there is no consensus about the origins, the possibility of being understood as a memory of slavery is sufficient justification for the expressions to be replaced”.

In defending the exclusion of the word “mulata” – which means a woman of mixed black and white races – the TSE mentions that “even if the expression does not have a notably racist origin as some defend, the uses and meanings that have been employed end up impregnating it with this sense. Thus, it deserves to be abandoned.

The production of the material was headed by the Commission of Racial Equality, created by TSE in April of this year to increase the participation of black people in the elections. However, the primer launched by the Electoral Justice has no connection with the electoral theme.
Historical inaccuracy and buzzwords are the justifications for part of the terms listed as prejudiced

There are 40 words and expressions labeled as racist, but the material remains open for updating with new terms.

Although the primer mentions terms that carry racist connotations, such as the pejorative use of “nigger service”, or “black man with a white soul”, there are several terms that the TSE itself recognizes that there is no guarantee of racial bias.

In justifying the inclusion of the word “nega maluca” – the popular name given to chocolate cake – to the list of “prohibited terms,” the TSE says that the word “depreciates the black woman because it associates her with a dessert.” “This mechanism hides the habit of undue sexualization of the black woman,” it says.

As for the word “boçal”, the manual mentions that, during the slavery period, the term was used to refer to enslaved people who could not speak Portuguese. In practice, there is no racist content in the word, but according to the TSE, “its use reminds us of a prejudiced origin that must be overcome.

To justify the exclusion of the expression “chuta que é macumba”, the primer says that its use disseminates the idea of “persecution and destruction of anything that can be associated with religions of African origin”.

The word “clarify” carries in itself the sense of opposition to the absence of light, which generates difficulty in seeing. But, according to the TSE, the word should also no longer be used, because it “embeds racism in it from the moment it conveys the idea that the understanding of something can only occur under the blessings of clarity, of whiteness, keeping black things in the field of doubt and ignorance.

Finally, in explaining why the expression “made on the thighs” should no longer be used, the booklet cites three hypothetical narratives for the term’s origin.

Only one of them points to a supposedly prejudiced connotation, which is that the term would be related to the colonial habit of producing tiles molded on the thighs of enslaved people.

However, as shown by Gazeta do Povo, in 2006, the architect José La Pastina Filho, who initially believed in this hypothesis, dismantled such myth by resorting to mathematics after spending four months traveling through the state of Santa Catarina in search of traditional tiles from old sheds.

“[…]We took the measurements of the thighs of a 1.80 m tall man and verified that, using it as a mold, it would only be possible to manufacture a tiny 36 cm long tile.”

“Without further concerns about aspects of human anatomy, if we establish a simple rule of three, we can verify that to manufacture a 77 cm tile [as the traditional one’s measure], we would need to count on a 3.85 m tall slave”, he wrote in the article that became famous, originally published in the UFPR Archaeology journal in 2006.

Even so, the TSE primer preferred to understand that “the everyday language usually associates it with the work of a black person, something of low quality, badly done.

Thus, the expression reproduces a racist idea and should be abandoned.”

Words to be banned, according to the Electoral Justice

See the list of all the words and expressions that have been targeted by the TSE:

A coisa tá preta
Dirty belly
Boçal
Bad hair
Chuta que é macumba!
Skin color
Bedside table
Creole
The color of sin
Denigrate
Day of white
Disputar a negra
Clarify
Slave
Ethnic print
Made on the thighs
Macumba’s chicken
Black humor
Inhaca
White envy
Lista negra
Macumbeiro
Black magic
Half-assed/half-assed
Black market
Mulata
Mulata tipo export
I’m not your negas!
Born with one foot in the kitchen
Crazy Nega
Black with fine features
Black with exotic beauty
Black with white soul
Black sheep
White soul nigga
When he ain’t in jail, he’s armed
Samba of the crazy nigga
Servicio de nigga
Teta de nega
Come back to the sea, offering!

With information from Gazeta do Povo