Brazil has the world’s strictest laws against racist speech

No country has gone further than Brazil. In 2021 its powerful Supreme Court issued a ruling that equated racial insults, which are directed at an individual, with racism itself, understood as discrimination against an entire group, and which is banned under the country’s constitution. That effectively turned racist slurs into a crime with stiff penalties. Congress subsequently gave the decision statutory effect. The constitution offers no statute of limitations for racism, so offenders can be prosecuted years after hurling racist slurs. Penalties include jail time and hefty fines. The number of people prosecuted for racism has increased dramatically.

Yet it is far from clear that Brazil’s intense prosecution of racist speech is doing anything to curb racial inequality or prejudice. Instead, its main achievement may simply be to make Brazil’s judiciary feel virtuous while angering racists even more. As the rest of the world considers how to tackle hate speech, Brazil provides some useful lessons.

The country’s zealous laws are an attempt to right a historical wrong. Of the 12m people trafficked from Africa to the Americas by trans-Atlantic slave traders between 1501 and 1866, almost 5m disembarked in Brazil, more than anywhere else in the world. (Fewer than 400,000 arrived in the United States.) Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. In recent years a growing black-rights movement has led more Brazilians to identify themselves as preto (black) or pardo (mixed-race or brown) in the census. Today people who say they are not white make up slightly over half the population. The government has implemented racial quotas in universities and the federal civil service.

And the prosecution of racist speech has been turbocharged. The number of cases involving racism brought before the Brazilian courts each month has increased by a factor of 10 since 2021 (see chart). There are 1,072 Brazilians serving sentences for racism and racist speech. Some 309 are in jail full-time while another 322 are under house arrest or must sleep in low-security prisons at night. The remaining sentences involve community service or fines.

Ignorant tourists are being ensnared, too. Five foreigners have been detained for racist speech since the start of the year. One, Agostina Páez, a 29-year-old Argentine woman, called bartenders in Rio de Janeiro “black pieces of shit” and mimicked monkey gestures at them. Another Argentine, Eduardo Ignacio Murias, took photos of a black seven-year-old child on a train and sent them to a friend on WhatsApp, writing that “I’m thinking of bringing home a slave, there’s so many of them here.” He was arrested after a fellow passenger alerted the child’s mother. Mr Murias is in pre-trial detention in Brazil, while Ms Páez has been allowed to return to Argentina while she awaits trial by a Brazilian court.

Supporters of the hate-speech prosecutions point to the publicity around these incidents as one of the benefits of Brazil’s aggressive approach. It “shows people what racism looks like and that it is not allowed in our society”, says Alessandra Benedito of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in São Paulo. “These laws make a difference, not just because they punish but because they teach, they raise awareness among the rest of the population.”

Awareness-raising is one thing, but racial inequalities in Brazil remain stark. The World Bank reckons that Brazil is one of the world’s most unequal countries outside southern Africa. In 2021 the census found that the average per person earnings of white households were double those of black or mixed-race households—a difference that has not budged since Brazil’s statistics agency began collecting the data in 2012. The hourly wage for black Brazilian women is about 30% lower than that of white men in similar jobs, even after controlling for education, location and sector of employment.

Racist speech is not a primary cause. That would be Brazil’s shoddy public education system. The gap between the test scores of public and private secondary-school students is worse in Brazil than anywhere else in Latin America. Richer Brazilians, who tend to be white, do what they can to keep their children out of the public system. Poor grades for those who do attend often lead them to study at lower quality universities, and to enroll in courses that tend to lead to lower-paying jobs. Mauricio Reis of the Institute for Applied Economics in Rio de Janeiro has calculated that differences in the field of study explain a third of the difference in median earnings between whites and blacks in Brazil.

And even as Brazilian police forces are opening units specialised in racist speech, they are also killing thousands of black people every year, and at a growing rate. According to the Brazilian Forum for Public Safety, a non-profit that compiles crime statistics, black Brazilians were three and a half times as likely to be killed by the police as white ones in 2025. There is little evidence that the police are targeting non-whites deliberately, rather than tending to police poorer neighbourhoods, but the volume of deaths is staggering. Brazilian police kill nine times more people than do officers in the United States, when adjusted for population size. Their operations have a reputation for killing, rather than wounding.

Rather than addressing the causes of inequality, Brazil’s muscular hate-speech laws can undermine free speech. In May 2023 a court in São Paulo sentenced Leonardo Lins, a comedian known for his distasteful jokes and large social-media following, to eight years and three months in jail in a high-security prison. He was also ordered to pay fines of 1.7m reais (around $330,000). Only in February this year did a higher court overturn the conviction.

Racist speech is vile. That does not mean that making it illegal is a good idea.