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Racism and Sexism in Brazilian Culture

2021; The Feminist Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wsq.2021.0027

1934-1520

Lélia Gonzalez, Bruna Barros, Feva, Jess Oliveira, Luciana Araújo dos Reis,

Gender, Sexuality, and Education

Racism and Sexism in Brazilian Culture1 Lélia Gonzalez (bio) Translated by Bruna Barros2, Feva3, Jess Oliveira4, and Luciana Reis5 I. What We Supposed to Do Now? … Then some very nice white people invited us to their party, saying it was for us too. Some book about us … We were very well-received and treated with all due consideration. They even insisted that we sit at the table where they were sitting, giving beautiful speeches, saying that we were oppressed, discriminated against, exploited. They were all fine, educated people, who traveled around this world of God. They knew things. And we went to sit there at the table. But it was full of people with whom we couldn't sit. However, we handled the situation pretty well, looking for chairs and sitting right behind them. They were so busy, teaching a bunch of things to the creoles in the audience, that they didn't even notice that, if one came a little closer to another, they could make a little space and everyone would sit at the table. But they were the ones organizing the party, and we were not supposed to fuck it up with excuse me, excuse me, dragging chairs here and there. We had to behave. There was speech after speech, everything followed by a lot of clapping. Until the moment the neguinha6 sitting with us got all sassy. She was called to answer a question. She got up, walked toward the table to speak into the microphone, then she started complaining about certain things going on at the party. The quizumba was put together. All them negroes seemed to be waiting for it so they could fuck everything up. Suddenly there was such loud talking, screaming, booing, that no one could even hear any speech. Obviously, the white folks turned white with anger and with good reason. They had invited us to this party to celebrate a book about us, and we behaved like that, dismantling their speech. Where in the world? Even though they knew more about us than ourselves? Since they were there, willingly teaching us a lot of things about us? There was a moment when they could not bear that whole frenzy of those ignorant and rude negroes anymore. It was too much. At that point, a troubled white man started a fight with a creole who was holding the microphone and speaking [End Page 371] against white folks. And the party ended up in a big fight … Now, only between us here, who was to blame? That sassy neguinha, of course. If she had not spilled the beans … Now white folks don't fuck with her no more. They badmouth her to this day. Also, who allowed her such bad behavior? No wonder they keep saying that "when Blacks don't fuck up when they come, they do as they go" … This long epigraph means far beyond what it tells. Ultimately, what we can perceive from it is the identification of the dominated with the dominant. And that was already very well analyzed by authors like Fanon, for example. Our attempt here, though, is to inquire about the cause of this identification. That is, what happened in order for the myth of racial democracy to be so widely accepted and disseminated? What were the processes that would have determined its construction? What does it hide beyond what it shows? How are Black women situated in its speech? The position in which we are will determine our interpretation of the double phenomena of racism and sexism. For us, racism establishes itself as the symptom that characterizes the Brazilian cultural neurosis. In this sense, we will see that its articulation with sexism produces violent effects on Black women in particular. Consequently, the position from/about where we'll talk implies another one, the one we have been talking about in previous texts. The change came to be due to certain notions that, forcing its emergence in our speech, led us to return to the issue of Black women from another perspective. These are the notions of the mulata,7 the doméstica (domestic worker),8 and the...