A New Comic Exposes Racism and Economic Inequality Amid Brazil’s Coronavirus Pandemic

 “There is nothing more symbolic of Brazil than this—for the first person to die of COVID-19 to be a Black domestic worker,” said Oliveira, a Black feminist writer and cyberactivist. “Sadly, we needed a pandemic to show just how sick our society is.”

The series—called Confinada, meaning “Confined”—aims to reflect the starkly divergent realities that Brazil’s rich and poor have faced during the pandemic. It tells the story of Ju, a fictionalized Black domestic worker from a favela who is forced to quarantine with her wealthy employer, a digital influencer living in a luxurious penthouse in Rio’s beachfront São Conrado neighborhood. The series, which launched in April, is published on social media networks such as Instagram, where it generates hundreds of thousands of likes.

“We knew we had to talk about this subject,” Assis said in July. He is a screenwriter-turned-illustrator who first joined forces with Oliveira earlier this year. Together, they produced another series that tackles broader economic and racial inequality in Brazil. The reason for the new project? “We were seeing that, really, the pandemic was making even more clear the social inequality that we have in Brazil,” Assis said.

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A New Comic Exposes Racism and Economic Inequality Amid Brazil’s Coronavirus Pandemic