Making black lives don't matter via organizational strategies to avoid the racial debate: The military police in Brazil

The #BlackLivesMatter movement has raised awareness of the killing of black people by law enforcement agents in the United States specifically and racism in general in different parts of the world. Academics in Management and Organizations have discussed various dimensions of racial inequalities and differences in organizations. However, little discussion has taken place regarding the actual practices deployed by organizations to avoid the racial debate. Based on our experience of doing research into the police in Latin America and engaging in the public debate to stop police killing and the killing of police officers, we discuss here the strategies deployed by the military police forces in Brazil to make black lives don't matter by avoiding discussing the police's role in Brazilian racism. We argue that these strategies make the police to fail to recognize their role in the killing of black people in the country. Despite the Brazilian military police being an extreme case, we suggest organizations maintain more open or more overt strategies that make black lives don't matter and call academics to research and denounce these strategies.