GENOCIDE OF THE BLACK PEOPLE AND BIOETHIC:

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ISSUE

Abstract

This scientific article addresses the affliction provoked by the necropolitics that currently decimates black people of Brazil, with a murder rate of 75% of the country’s total count. This reflection reverberates the shooting of Evaldo Rosa, in abril 7^th, 2019, whose car was hit by 62 of 257 shots fired by army’s military, in the city of Rio de Janeiro and unleashed a wave of complaints against the genocide of black people perpetrated by the Brazilian state. A disarmed black man that was driving his own family, the fatal victim was also target of derision by his murderers. The article’s reasoning brings up literature’s excerpts produced by the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), whose work is engaged on the anticolonial fight in support of a free Africa. Likewise, the text also discusses the United-Statian Van Rensselaer Potter (1911-2001), a biochemist, oncological researcher, considered one of the founders of Bioethics. The article compares the anthropological assumptions of each author.  In Fanon, the confrontation of colonialism of the 1950 and 1960 and its repercussions on societies and on people’s psyche consists of the raw material of his activities as a psychiatrist, writer and political activist. Potter, sensitized by his teaching and his experience with cancer patients, evaluated the conditions of human survival on the planet and envisioned the need for cultural changes under penalty of life extinction. Fanon’s uneasiness about freedom, in his analysis of colonialism and the liberation struggle, considered the need for violence and death; Potter, motivated by survival, postulated a quantitative control of the population. Given this scenario, the present reflection wants to know: in what sense the relationship between the genocide of black people, in Brazil, and bioethics establish an anthropological question? Regarding this questioning, the article recovers the subject of philosophical anthropology, weaving a general profile of the discipline as well as its importance for human action. Moreover, the article collects from Fanon's writings approaches that may identify his anthropological perspective. Furthermore, it does the same process regarding Potter’s writings. In conclusion, Fanon’s anthropological reflections lay in consciousness and the growing of awareness, liberty’s preconditions and responsibility. In contrast, Potter articulates a discriminatory humanism, a premise with serious repercussions.