Mirrors of Racism

The Brazilian campaign Mirrors of Racism is a very literal example of the counterspeech technique of amplification - making offensive or hateful content more visible to more people - since it plastered messages from social media on billboards, in huge letters. In 2015, when the journalist Maria Julia Coutinho (widely known by her nickname Maju) became the first Black weather broadcaster for a prime-time news show, Jornal Nacional, some Brazilians reacted with a torrent of racism online, against her and other Black Brazilians. 

In response, Criola, a Black women’s civil rights organization in Brazil, partnered with the advertising firm W3haus to create an anti-racism campaign. They collected some vivid, crude racist comments and posted them in huge letters on billboards in five Brazilian cities, in the neighborhoods where the people who had posted the comments online lived. Each billboard also bore the tagline “Racismo virtual, consecuencias reales” (“Virtual racism, real consequences”).

 “The strategy of the campaign was to take internet racism out of the internet and expose it in the streets so that the population (of the region) could become aware of the damage caused by these virtual acts,” said Criola’s General Coordinator, Lúcia Xavier.

To further amplify the content and the campaign itself, W3haus interviewed Brazilians about it, and posted the resulting videos online. In one, passersby on the street react to a billboard. One middle aged white man says, for example, that some Brazilians like to pretend that their country is free of racism, but the billboard obliges them to recognize that this is false. In another video, the author of one of the racist posts stands in front of a billboard emblazoned with it – and his own blurred profile photo – and apologizes to a Black woman.  Posted online, these videos further amplified the racist content and the campaign beyond the communities where the billboards were located.