Text: Tadeu Kaçula*
Just over 15 days ago, a nine-year-old black Brazilian boy had two fingers cut off at the gate of a school in Cinfães. The family describes recurring attacks, xenophobic insults and attempts to escape. It wasn’t an accident. It was the outcome of an environment in which some children learn too early that certain bodies are worth less. With xenophobia on the rise as a result of the immigration influx, it is necessary to think about public policies to combat it.
Since November 2024, deputies from Livre, PAN, Bloco de Esquerda, PS and PCP have been warning of the escalation of hatred and racial discrimination against immigrants. These warnings are important and reveal awareness, but there is still no political consensus. When only part of the system recognizes the problem, fighting it becomes a party flag and not a democratic commitment.
There is also difficulty in understanding how xenophobia operates in practice. It does not begin with physical aggression. Before the gate, there were jokes. Before the jokes, distrust. Before distrust, the idea that some belong and others just are. Little by little, a child stops being seen as a child and starts to be seen as a foreigner. Then, intruder. When language dehumanizes, practice follows. The word becomes a bumped shoulder. The collision turns into a chase. The chase turns to blood.
Identifying the phenomenon is necessary, but not enough. If we know that xenophobia works as a process, we also need to think about public policies that promote coexistence, encounter and shared responsibility. In 2026, at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, I will study a possible path: Afro-diasporic cultural practices, especially samba.
Samba is not just music. It’s a way of being with each other. It creates belonging without requiring assimilation, transforms difference into coordination, and produces community where boundaries might otherwise exist. For samba to exist, it is necessary to listen, respond, adjust, sustain the rhythm together. Samba does something that institutional policy still doesn’t do well enough: it creates a space in which no one needs to disappear for coexistence to work.
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If Portugal wants to confront xenophobia, it is not enough to recognize its existence. It is necessary to build concrete opportunities for coexistence: cultural policies, public funding, educational projects and meeting spaces where Brazilians, Portuguese and other communities can exist without fear.
The country is faced with a choice: treat Cinfães’ case as an isolated tragedy or as a collective warning. If you choose the second path, you will need to ensure that no child has to flee to survive and that no community has to prove every day that it deserves to be there.
Because, in the end, the question is not just what they did to that boy. The question is how it got to this point and what the country is willing to build, collectively, so that cases like this never happen again.
*Tadeu Kaçula is a sociologist, PhD in Social Change and Political Participation from the University of São Paulo (USP) and post-doctoral fellow at the Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho (UNESP). In 2026, he will be a visiting researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon, with a scholarship from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).