Racist Slurs and Precarious Freedoms: Seeking Legal Redress in Brazil’s Coffee Belt

Abstract: This essay examines how very likely Black and Indigenous residents of nineteenth-century Campinas, Brazil, used the courts to challenge racial insults that threatened their freedom, honor, and citizenship in a slaveholding society. Drawing on fifty-four cases of verbal slander, it argues that racist slurs—particularly those evoking slavery, animalization, and color—could endanger the tenuous legal status of free people of color by associating them with enslavement. Placing Campinas’s cases within Brazil’s evolving constitutional order, the essay shows how litigants mobilized the law to assert dignity and claim citizenship rights in everyday conflicts. A comparative discussion engages Cheryl Harris’s insights on whiteness as property, revealing how racial hierarchy operated as a material structure of privilege across post-slavery societies. The article concludes by tracing the long arc from nineteenth-century disputes to twentieth-century efforts to criminalize racist slurs in Brazil, highlighting a deep genealogy of antiracist struggle.