Up Against the Wall: Disorganising and Silencing Political Blackness in Portugal.

This article examines antiblackness in Portugal as a manifestation of its global dimensions, focusing on the interplay between race, space, law, and the political. Resulting from empirical and archival research as well as socio‐legal accompaniment of individuals and families in cases involving police brutality over the last decade in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (Portugal), the article investigates the role played by the criminal justice system in endorsing institutional racism and silencing/sanctioning (extra)legal state violence. First, it focuses on public housing and security policies as political devices in criminalising and managing political blackness, through displacement, place annihilation, and law enforcement. Further, the article analyses three paradigmatic court cases involving police brutality to explore how the criminal justice system has been the ultimate institution sanctioning white innocence by managing accountability for black victimisation, leaving Black people "little space to breathe" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiltKebm2Jg). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]