Every year thousands of people are killed by the police in Brazil – mostly black people. Rio de Janeiro is the city with the highest number. Against this, some of these victims' mothers have been engaged in social movements as the Rede de Comunidades e Movimentos contra a Violência to fight for justice. Similarly, in the U.S., black people are often the target of police brutality. Movements as the Mothers Against Police Brutality and Black Lives Matter have been fighting structural racism and State violence. Social Movements in general demand changes and denounce problems on the public sphere making use of different repertoires of contention (Tarrow, 2009). I argue that movements such as these have more in common than the struggle for justice in a context of racialized police brutality – storytelling is one of the most important repertoires of them. In this sense, narrative can be understood as a powerful tool mobilized by social movements to claim for their demands (De Fina, 2020). The purpose of this qualitative interpretative paper is to identify the emergence of a specific type of narrative in contemporary social movements carrying out a comparative analysis of the performance of black Brazilian and Afro-American mothers in social movements to fight for justice. To do so, I observe how the narratives told by these mothers in different contexts of production speak to wider issues of structural and structuring racism in their respective countries, as well as the banalization of violence against black communities. There are several types of comparative research focused on the colonial history and race relations of Brazil and the U.S. However, this proposal is novel since there is a lack of comparative studies on this subject from a discursive theoretical approach. The study's corpus includes narratives told by both black Brazilian and Afro-American mothers at events and demonstrations available on websites (e.g.Youtube); ethnography of demonstrations in Brazil and the U.S. in 2018/2020. Understanding narrative as an organizing device of human experience (Linde, 1993; Bruner, 1997) and as a productive discursive lens by which to examine social life (Bastos; Biar, 2015), initial findings suggest the existence of a prototype narrative which organizes the suffering of losing a child. The parallelism that is seen, when all the narratives of both Afro-Brazilian and Afro-American mothers are taken together, emphasizes the repetition of the same tragedies and the collectivization of these women's pain. A comparative study such as this may enhance the understanding of how far the Brazilian and American organizations that fight for justice may be perceived as transnational networks fighting against the same problem, as well as how far they relate to more specific socio-historical demands.
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