Desigualdad de trato y ciudadanía en Brasil: puntos y contrapuntos

Abstract

This is a lecture given at the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Latin American Forum of Anthropology of Law, held in Mexico City on October 22, 2024, at UNAM. The text discusses the particular way in which citizenship and unequal treatment are articulated in Brazil, based on the tension between two conceptions of equality: (1) the conception that emphasizes equality of rights among all citizens, dominant in our constitution, and (2) the one that subordinates the allocation of rights to the analysis of merit, causing differences in treatment to be experienced as inequality in access to rights. Inspired by Aristotle's formulations, but disseminated in Brazil through Rui Barbosa's definition, according to which “The rule of equality consists only in giving unequal shares to the unequal, to the extent that they are unequal”, the second conception privileges the merit of individuals, as opposed to the merit of the situation or circumstance of reference, as occurs in the United States, taken as a counterpoint in the text. The debate on Aristotle's formulations in the United States is contrasted with conflict management practices in our judiciary, where the recurrence of decisions based on the citizen's social status or condition makes clear the prevailing pattern of unequal treatment.

Keywords: citizenship, unequal treatment, conceptions of equality, judiciary, Brazil, United States.