The historical conditions in the Americas that built the objectification of blacks in general and black women in particular are well known. We also know that in this context of conquest and domination, the social appropriation of women from the defeated group is one of the emblematic moments of the winner's assertion of superiority.
In Brazil and Latin America, the colonial violation perpetrated by white masters against black and indigenous women and the resulting miscegenation is at the origin of all constructions of our national identity, structuring the decanted myth of Latin American racial democracy, which in the Brazil reached the last consequences. This colonial sexual violence is also the “cement” of all hierarchies of gender and race present in our societies, configuring what Angela Gilliam defines as “the great sperm theory in our national formation”, through which, according to Gilliam : “The role of black women is denied in the formation of national culture; inequality between men and women is eroticized; and sexual violence against black women was converted into a novel”.
What could be considered as history or reminiscences of the colonial period remains, however, alive in the social imagination and acquires new contours and functions in a supposedly democratic social order, which keeps intact the gender relations according to color or race instituted in the period of colonialism. slavery. Black women had a differentiated historical experience that the classic discourse on the oppression of women has not recognized, just as it has not taken into account the qualitative difference that the effect of the oppression suffered had and still has on the feminine identity of black women.
When we talk about the myth of female fragility, which has historically justified men's paternalistic protection of women, which women are we talking about? We black women are part of a contingent of women, probably the majority, who never recognized this myth in themselves, because we were never treated as fragile. We are part of a contingent of women who worked for centuries as slaves in the fields or on the streets, as salespeople, bakers, prostitutes… Women who did not understand anything when feminists said that women should take to the streets and work! We are part of a contingent of women with object identity. Yesterday, at the service of fragile little misses and crazy plantation owners.
The historical conditions in the Americas that built the objectification of blacks in general and black women in particular are well known. We also know that in this context of conquest and domination, the social appropriation of women from the defeated group is one of the emblematic moments of the winner's assertion of superiority.
Today, maids for liberated women and dondocas, or for export-type mulatto women.
When we talk about breaking with the myth of the queen of the home, the idolized muse of poets, which women are we talking about? Black women are part of a contingent of women who are not queens of anything, who are portrayed as antimuses of Brazilian society, because the aesthetic model of women is the white woman. When we talk about guaranteeing the same opportunities for men and women in the labor market, what kind of women are we guaranteeing employment? We are part of a contingent of women for whom the job advertisements highlight the phrase: “Good appearance required”.
When we say that woman is a by-product of man, since she was made from Adam's rib, which woman are we talking about? We are part of a contingent of women from a culture that does not have Adam. Originating from a violated, folklorized and marginalized culture, treated as a primitive thing, a devil's thing, which is also an alien to our culture. We are part of a contingent of women ignored by the health system in their specialty, because the myth of racial democracy present in all of us makes it unnecessary to record the color of patients on public health forms, information that would be indispensable for assessing health conditions of black women in Brazil, since we know, from data from other countries, that white and black women present significant differences in terms of health.
Therefore, for us, a feminist perspective is imposed in which gender is a theoretical variable, but as Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter state, which “cannot be separated from other axes of oppression” and which “is not possible in a single analysis. If feminism is to liberate women, it must confront virtually all forms of oppression.” From this point of view, it is possible to affirm that a black feminism, built in the context of multiracial, pluricultural and racist societies – such as Latin American societies are – has racism and its impact on gender relations as its main articulating axis, since it determines the gender hierarchy itself in our societies.
In general, unity in the struggle of women in our societies does not depend only on our ability to overcome the inequalities generated by historical male hegemony, but also requires overcoming complementary ideologies of this system of oppression, such as racism. Racism establishes the social inferiority of the black segments of the population in general and of black women in particular, operating also as a divisive factor in women's struggle for the privileges that are instituted for white women. From this perspective, the struggle of black women against gender and racial oppression has been drawing new contours for feminist and anti-racist political action, enriching both the discussion of the racial issue and the gender issue in Brazilian society.
This new feminist and anti-racist look, by integrating both the traditions of struggle of the black movement and the tradition of struggle of the women's movement, affirms this new political identity arising from the specific condition of being a black woman. The current black women's movement, by bringing to the political scene the contradictions resulting from the articulation of race, class and gender variables, promotes the synthesis of the fight flags historically raised by the black and women's movements in the country, blackening on the one hand, women's demands, thus making them more representative of all Brazilian women, and, on the other hand, promoting the feminization of proposals and demands of the black movement.
Blackening the Brazilian feminist movement has meant, concretely, demarcating and establishing in the agenda of the women's movement the weight that the racial issue has in the configuration, for example, of demographic policies, in the characterization of the issue of violence against women by introducing the concept of racial violence as a determining aspect of the forms of violence suffered by half of the non-white female population in the country; introduce the discussion on ethnic/racial diseases or diseases with a higher incidence in the black population as fundamental issues in the formulation of public policies in the health area; to institute criticism of selection mechanisms in the labor market, such as “good looks”, which maintain inequalities and privileges between white and black women.
There has also been a study and political action on the ethical and eugenic aspects posed by advances in research in the areas of biotechnology, in particular genetic engineering. A concrete example refers, for example, to health and population issues. If, historically, genocidal practices such as police violence, the extermination of children, the absence of social policies that ensure the exercise of basic citizenship rights have been priority objects of political action by black movements, the problems posed today by the themes of health and population put us in a situation that is perhaps even more alarming in relation to the processes of genocide of black people in Brazil.
Therefore, this new context of population reduction, the result of massive sterilization – combined with both the progression of AIDS and drug use among our population – and new biotechnologies, in particular genetic engineering, with the possibilities it offers for eugenic practices , constitutes a new and alarming challenge against which the whole black movement needs to act.
The importance of these issues for populations considered disposable, such as blacks, and the growing interest of international organizations in controlling the growth of these populations, led the black women's movement to develop an internationalist perspective of struggle. This internationalist vision is promoting the diversification of themes, with the development of new agreements and associations and the expansion of interethnic cooperation. There is a growing awareness among black women that the process of globalization, determined by the neoliberal order, which, among other things, accentuates the process of feminization of poverty, raises the need for articulation and intervention by civil society worldwide. This new awareness has led us to the development of regional actions within Latin America, the Caribbean, and with black women in first world countries, in addition to the growing participation in international forums, in which governments and civil society face and define the insertion of third-world peoples in the third millennium.
This international intervention, especially in the world conferences convened by the UN since the 1990s, has allowed us to broaden the debate on the racial issue at national and international levels and to raise awareness of movements, governments and the UN for the inclusion of an anti-racist perspective. and respect for diversity in all its themes. From this perspective, we acted together with the International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo, in 1994, in relation to which black women operated based on the idea that “in times of diffusion of the concept of superfluous populations, reproductive freedom is essential for discriminated ethnic groups to stop controlling and racist policies”.
Thus, we were in Vienna, at the Human Rights Conference, which gave rise to the commitment suggested by the Brazilian government, to hold a world conference on racism and another on immigration, before the year 2000. We acted in the process of preparing the Beijing Conference , during which a set of actions was carried out through which it is possible to measure the growth of the racial theme in the women's movement in Brazil and in the world. It is worth mentioning that the Vienna Conference assumed that women's rights are human rights, which is embodied in the Vienna Declaration and Program of Action, which give great emphasis to the issue of women and preach their full participation, under conditions of equality , in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of sexual discrimination, considering them priority objectives of the international community.
If the Vienna Declaration advances the understanding of the universality of women's human rights, for us non-white women an explicit reference to the violation of women's rights based on racial discrimination was essential. We understood that the Beijing Conference should make an explicit reference to the oppression suffered by a significant number of women due to their ethnic or racial origin. These world conferences became important spaces in the process of reorganization of the world after the fall of the Berlin wall and today constitute forums for public policy recommendations for the world.
The international feminist movement has operated in these forums as the most effective lobby among discriminated segments of the world. This explains the progress of the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in relation to women's issues, as well as the advances registered at the Cairo Conference and at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (ECO 92), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 In the efforts made by women at the Beijing Conference, one of the results was that Brazil, for the first time in international diplomacy, obstructed a meeting of the G-77, a group of developing countries of which it is a part, to disagree on the withdrawal of the ethnic-racial term in Article 32 of the Beijing declaration, a non-negotiable issue for black women in Brazil and in the countries of the North. The firmness of the Brazilian position ensured that the final wording of Article 32 affirmed the need to “intensify efforts to guarantee the enjoyment, under conditions of equality, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms to all women and girls who face multiple barriers to their development and its advancement due to factors such as race, age, ethnic origin, culture, religion…” The next step will be the monitoring of these agreements by our governments.
Conclusions
The white and western origin of feminism has established its hegemony in the equation of gender differences and has determined that non-white and poor women, from all over the world, struggle to integrate racial, ethnic, cultural, religious and of social class. How far have white women advanced on these issues? The left, right and center alternatives are constructed from these paradigms instituted by feminism which, according to Lélia Gonzalez, present two types of difficulties for black women: on the one hand, the Eurocentrist inclination of Brazilian feminism constitutes an articulating axis to more of racial democracy and the whitening ideal, by omitting the central character of the race issue in gender hierarchies and by universalizing the values of a particular culture (the Western one) for all women, without mediating them on the basis of interaction between whites and non-whites; on the other hand, reveals a distance from the reality lived by black women by denying “an entire history made of resistance and struggles, in which this woman has been a protagonist thanks to the dynamics of an ancestral cultural memory (which has nothing to do with Eurocentrism this kind of feminism). In this context, what would be the new content that black women could.
contribute to the political scene beyond the “touch of color” in gender proposals? The black American feminist Patricia Collins argues that black feminist thought would be “(…) a set of experiences and ideas shared by African American women, which offers a particular angle of vision of themselves, the community and society… that involves theoretical interpretations of the reality of black women by those who live it…” From this vision, Collins chooses some “fundamental themes that would characterize the black feminist point of view”. Among them are: the legacy of a history of struggle, the interconnected nature of race, gender and class, and the fight against stereotypes or “images of authority”.
Following the thought of Patricia Collins, Luiza Barros uses the image of the maid as a paradigm as an element of analysis of the condition of marginalization of black women and, based on this, seeks to find specificities capable of rearticulating the points raised by the North American feminist. He concludes, then, that “this peculiar marginality is what stimulates a special point of view of the black woman, (allowing) a different vision of the contradictions in the actions and ideology of the dominant group”. “The great task is to empower it affirmatively through reflection and political action”.
The black poet Aimé Cesaire said that “the two ways of getting lost are: by segregation, being framed in particularity, or by dilution in the universal”. The utopia we pursue today consists of seeking a shortcut between a blackness that reduces the human dimension and the hegemonic Western universality that annuls diversity. Being black without just being black, being a woman without just being a woman, being a black woman without just being a black woman. Achieving equal rights means becoming a full human being, full of possibilities and opportunities beyond race and gender. This is the final meaning of this fight.
I believe that in that decade, black Brazilian women found their path to political self-determination, released their voices, fought for space and representation and were present in all spaces of importance for the advancement of the issue of Brazilian women today. It was his theme that grew the most politically in the women's movement in Brazil, integrating, hopefully definitively, the racial question in the women's movement. What drives this struggle is the belief “in the possibility of building a human, fraternal and solidary model of civilization, based on the values expressed by the anti-racist, feminist and ecological struggle, assumed by black women from all continents, belonging to we are the same community of destinations”. For the construction of a multiracial and pluricultural society, where difference is experienced as equivalence and no longer as inferiority.
Sueli Carneiro is the founder and executive coordinator of Geledés – Instituto da Mulher Negra São Paulo.
