Brazil's Black Power Outage
On a windy October evening in Rio de Janeiro, newly elected city council member Marielle Franco stood in the middle of a packed rally with tears running down her face. As the election results came in, dozens of supporters danced around her, many of them wearing campaign stickers featuring a silhouette of Franco’s Afro. With her victory, the 37-year-old single mother had become one of the few black women in Rio’s history to hold a city council seat.
Franco and the 31 other black women who won city council seats in other Brazilian state capitals in October are part of a generation of young black Brazilians who have become increasingly vocal inside and outside statehouses. But these gains are now under threat, as a new government seems poised to undermine the social policies that have elevated so many black Brazilians, creating a new sense of
