Atropelando o conceito de linchamento: quando o chicote me alcança eu não consigo respirar

Abstract

This Master’s thesis contests the social and legal meaning of “lynching” in Brazil and rejects its trivialized uses-especially “virtual lynching”-for turning Black pain into metaphor and dissolving its racial and material historicity. I adopt “escrevivência” as method and episteme, articulating experience, archives, and legal analysis to re-center memory, the body, and racial situatedness in knowledge production. The empirical path combines: (i) a cartography of the entry and circulation of the “Lynch Law/Code” lexicon in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazilian print culture (National Library/Hemeroteca), up to the stabilization of “lynching” as a public-punitive signifier; (ii) a review of 67 criminal appellate decisions from the Rio de Janeiro Court of Justice (2000–2024), in which the term appears as contextual description rather than a legal nucleus; and (iii) a case study of the killing of Moïse Kabagambe, cross-reading case files with attention/affect dynamics on social media (X/Twitter). As an analytic contribution, I propose social permissibility to explain the diffuse acceptability of the method when the targeted body is Black, coupling three axes-spectatorial omission, racial selectivity of indignation, and tacit authorization-that normalize ongoing harm through language, affects, and institutions. I argue that “lynching” names a technology of public, bodily, pedagogical, racially directed punishment, carried out by private and/or state hands, and that its semantic deracialization produces silences both in public life and in legal records. By reclaiming precise naming and memory, the study sets criteria for usage, refines legal debate, and informs normative discussions on accountability and hate crimes in Brazil.