Death by external causes; A study about race/color identification by skin in medical legal institute of Salvador/Bahia/Brazil, 2007

Over the past few years The Health of the Black Population has been consolidated as a specific health field in Brazil. Despite the controversy and complexity entailed in the act of identifying race/color by the skin, the relevance of identification is incontestable because it permits the association of the determined attribute with the cause of death, and traces the epidemiological profile of vulnerable populations. Thus, the act of identifying race/color by the skin allows us to recognize the limits and failures of services and the neglect and naturalization of discrimination and racism by institutions. In cases of death, given the impossibility of race/color self-declaration, the identification of race/color becomes a challenge. Therefore, I sought to analyze the process by which the Medical Legal Institute of Salvador, Bahia addressed the race/color question in identifying corpses in 2007. I used the following tools to conduct this research: semi-structured interviews, document analysis and observing the practice.  The relationship established between black skin and death, violence and marginality initially presented itself in a manner so explicit it was blinding. The evidence that the mortality rate in Brazil increases as skin color “darkens” not only becomes more perceptible as we observe the process of cadaver identification at IML, but reveals the shadows that hide a reality much worse than we could assume, untangling another myth: racial democracy. Black people die often, die more, die in an undignified manner, kill themselves and are killed in extraordinary proportions. Whites are rare in IML and when they appear, are immediately “dispatched”, because more frequently their deaths are “accidental” and therefore without judicial implications. Homicide, proven or presumed, brings with it the mark of delinquent violence related to drugs, crime, illegality and that which inscribes the dead body in a horizon of culpability that quasi justifies the violent death.