Brazil-USA Black Lives Matter Exhibit Opens at Penn Pavilion

Black people in Brazil and the United States are dying and suffocating because of police violence and societal negligence in the fight against the dual pandemics of racism and COVID-19.  A new student installation outside Penn Pavilion focuses on the global fight to protect Black lives and create a politics that guarantees a good life for all. Growing out of a spring 2020 Duke course, the Black Lives Matter: Brazil-USA installation, along with a public-facing website by the same name, focuses on state-sanctioned police killings and the disparate impacts of COVID-19 on communities of color in both countries while also highlighting the rich history of Black-led multifaceted action seeking liberation for all.

Put on display for this weekend’s graduation, the installation encourages Duke’s graduates to deepen their antiracist commitments and carry them forward into their lives beyond Duke. At a launch event for the website attended by Duke’s President Vincent Price, Provost Sally Kornbluth, and Arts and Sciences Dean Valerie Ashby, Rahel Petros (T ‘23) explained that “We owe it to ourselves and the broader community to not only live these four years in the Duke bubble, but to go beyond the comforts of the classroom and campus life and even our country to make real change in the communities and spaces we occupy.”

Students, guests, staff, faculty and local residents can view the installation from graduation weekend into the summer. The team pushes its peers to think about the global nature of structural racism and white supremacy, while emphasizing the urgency of taking action. “Each of us must think more deeply, protest more loudly, and above all not lose the momentum towards change that has been building,” said graduate co-coordinator Courtney Crumpler (MFA ‘21). This project is co-sponsored by the Duke Department of History, Duke Brazil Initiative, Office of Global Affairs, the Office of the Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of the Dean of Social Sciences, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

The installation is a provocation for reflection and action that accentuates the international dimension of Black people’s struggles for rights and recognition by brokering a dialogue between two of the world’s largest democracies. “This is not just a display, a website, or an exhibit,” says Brazilian co-coordinator Marcelo Ramos, a doctoral candidate at the Universidade Federal Fluminense. “We are at a moment that demands international antiracist solidarity.” With an ebbing of the pandemic and Derick Chauvin’s conviction for George Floyd’s murder, the installation is a call for us to deepen our attention to the catastrophic crises in Brazil where over 25,000 people were murdered by the police since 2015 and the COVID-19 death toll reached a staggering 400,000 this week.