Rise Up or Die!: The Struggle Against the Genocide of Black People in Brazil

by Andreia Beatriz Silva dos Santos, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Joy James (Preface by), Dylan Rodríguez (Afterword)

Overview

Inside one of the most daring and provocative Black organizations in Brazil of the last two decades, from the perspective of its founders and militants.

Rise Up or Die! describes the origins, main concepts, distinct phases, and visions of the future of one of the most innovative, daring, and militant Black organizations in Brazil. Firmly rooted in that country’s long tradition of resistance and rebellion against a nation that depends on the continued hyper-exploitation, dehumanization, abandonment, and social and physical death of Black people, the organization invented what it refers to as “bad manners in Black politics.” If bad manners mean a refusal to abide by expectations of decorum, analysis, collective organization—and indeed the Brazilian genocidal model of racial democracy—then Rise Up certainly fits the description. The organization invented a new political vocabulary, led to the formation of an autonomous Black School in Salvador (the Winnie Mandela School), and constantly attracts people from the most marginalized Black spaces of the largest Black nation in the world, second only to Nigeria.

Drawing on a constantly replenished matrix of Black radical traditions, the activists of Rise Up or Die relentlessly pursue invention as the necessary alternative to a social formation that simply hates Black people.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945335280
Publisher:	Common Notions
Publication date:	08/05/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Andréia Beatriz Silva dos Santos is a cofounder and main organizers of Reja ou Será Morto/Reaja ou Será Morta (Rise Up or Die!). She is trained as a medical doctor.

Hamilton Borges dos Santos is a cofounder and main organizers of Reja ou Será Morto/Reaja ou Será Morta (Rise Up or Die!); Hamilton is a poet, writer, amateur gardener.

João H. Costa Vargas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside and the author of The Denial of Antiblackness: Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering.

Read an Excerpt

Hamilton: I was born in a family dominated by women. As I grew up, they surrounded me with a vast inventory of ancestral and spiritual explanations. I have an ancestral mark, from my initiation in Candomblé, which is that I was born with the dead. It's a choice that I made before I was born. This I discovered along my life trajectory.

So this is the first thing I have to mention in terms of being prepared for the struggle: the close relationship with death. I've always had that, but I only noticed it in Rise Up or Die! That's why, when we are at a protest march, we say "look behind us, you'll see the dead." About five years after Rise Up started, the police killed a young mother while she was carrying her baby; she was shot in the back of the head. Immediately upon hearing about it, we went to the scene. We arranged buses. We had about two hundred people. The police claimed we had fifty, we said we had five thousand. We said "you're not counting the dead."

Andréia: A lot of what I am and how I see the world has to do with being a dark-skinned Black person in Rio Grande do Sul [the Brazilian state with the greatest proportion of white people.] I'm not someone who discovered myself Black in college. I was born in a family whose father was Black, my mother is Black, and I have three Black siblings. The conversation about race was always present among us; my parents clearly understood that we had a mark. I always heard from them "because of your Black skin, you will have several negative experiences." I grew up hearing this all the time; the same when I saw my aunts and uncles and other family members. So there were no surprises when I left that core family protection. It also made it evident that being Black in a Black space means protection. When you begin to expand your horizons, when you go to school, when you go to the corner store, when you leave your neighborhood where everyone knows you and your family, the mark becomes more accentuated.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION by João Costa Vargas  3

1. BEGINNINGS 12
(How Andréia and Hamilton’s personal and community experiences prepared them for the formation of Rise Up in 2005, from their childhood to the consolidation of their political perspective.)

• Intimacy with Death  12
• Theater and “Os Maloqueiros”  14
• Belo Horizonte  19
• Growing Up Black in Porto Alegre, and Going to Medical School  24
• The Mark of Blackness  32
• Provocation Wednesdays  35
• Prisons, Carcerality, and Communitarian Cultural Action  40
• Grounding in Black Communities  46

2. PHASES  58
(The distinct phases of Rise Up, including its expansions, retractions. A description of the ways in which Rise Up went from a campaign against the genocide of Black people to a political organization.)

• The Cabula Massacre: Evaluating the Collective Trajectory and Moving Forward  58

3. FUNDAMENTALS  66
(The key concepts informing the development of Rise Up, as well as the analytical perspectives that emerged out of Rise Up’s trajectory of struggle.)

• Creative Hatred  66
• A Deep Black Sadness  72
• A Collective Armor  75
• Black Transnational Love  80
• Vital Command  84
• Sequela  85

4. FUTURITY  90
(Rooted in yet modifying Abdias do Nascimento and Beatriz Nascimento’s concepts of Quilombismo, this final chapter focuses on Rise Up’s perspective on a desired future that is autonomous and Black affirming.)

• Quilombismo  90
• Land  95
• Futuristic Ancestrality  98