There are bad ideas, there are terrible ideas, and then there’s whatever just happened with Fabiana Bolsonaro, who somehow looked at 2026, took a deep breath, and said, “You know what this situation needs, blackface.”
Yes, real, actual blackface. Not metaphorical, not taken out of context, just straight-up painted face during what was supposed to be a political statement.
So here’s the deal. Bolsonaro, a Brazilian politician, decided to protest the appointment of Erika Hilton, a trans woman who was named to a prominent anti-racism role. Instead of, I don’t know, forming a coherent argument like a normal person, Bolsonaro went full chaos mode.
She filmed herself with dark makeup covering her face and basically said, “Look, I painted myself black, I identify as black, so why can’t I lead an anti-racism commission?” Her point being, changing your appearance doesn’t change your identity, drawing a comparison to transgender people.
And if you’re sitting there thinking, “There’s no way someone thought this would go over well,” congratulations, your instincts are working perfectly.
Because the internet reaction has been exactly what you’d expect, a mix of outrage, disbelief, and people asking how this made it past even a single internal thought check before going public. This wasn’t a slip of the tongue or a bad tweet fired off too fast, this was a fully thought-out, recorded, and posted video.
That’s the wild part. There were multiple off-ramps here. At any point, someone could have said, “Hey, maybe let’s not do the most historically offensive visual metaphor possible to make this argument.” Instead, they hit record and doubled down.
