Para Inglês Ver : The Narrative Obscuration of Anti-Black Urban Policies in Rio 2016’s Opening Ceremony

Urban planning has been reluctant to grapple with the role of anti-Blackness in Rio 2016’s Olympic development policy beyond a few fleeting references to the disproportionate impacts experienced by Afro-Brazilians. Herein, we explore “ para inglês ver ” as a state obscuration policy deployed to cloak and deflect from a larger city-wide project of Black displacement and dispossession in Rio de Janeiro. By contextualizing anti-Black urban development policies and countering the narrative omissions, reductions, and silences of Rio 2016’s opening ceremony, we identify the ways in which Brazil’s development history shaped Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic-era urbanism and contributed to the worsening of the city’s social inequalities for Black Cariocas .