De-kill / De-matando: Black Mothers’ Epistemology of Violence and Mourning in Rio de Janeiro

Based on fieldwork research undertaken with mothers of victims of violence in the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro, this chapter aims to discuss the concept of de-killing as a political strategy used by the mothers to seek justice for the police killings of young Black men and to challenge the structural racism of the media and justice system. De-killing involves activist mothers generating discourse in the media and acting bravely during police raids to denaturalize narratives that criminalize Black youth and justify police killings. The Black mothers’ management of suffering is a tool to refuse anti-Blackness. In Rio de Janeiro, the exposure of Black people to everyday situations of violence reveals a dynamic of overlapping structural aspects related to socioeconomic causes and ideological-cultural processes resulting in and generating negative representations of this segment of the population.