Translator: Themis Scalco Reviewer: Claudia Sander When I say "identity," what do you think about? What comes to your mind? Besides that document we carry with us wherever we go, the identity I'll speak about is our individual and collective perception of ourselves and of others.
It's a sum of characteristics that makes us to be seen as individuals and as part of a group, but, mainly, as individuals. And each individual carries a sum of attributes, that are cultural, intellectual, moral and psychological. These attributes reverberate through our body.
It's our body that tells us who we are and which individual we are. I'd like to ask you to do a few exercises to reflect, for example, when I tell you . .
. When I tell you about dreaming, perspective, trajectory, what do you remember about the people who were like you? Where were these people?
Who were these people? More importantly, how were these people shown to you? Who did you want to be like?
By that I mean, as an example, who did you use to look at and say, "No, I don't want to be like that person"? What were your references in building your identity, your attributes, what you carry? Speaking of identity, I'm reminded that a year and a half ago I was somewhere very much like this one.
I was doing my college orals and one of the justifications of my paper was the decolonization of thought, a concept by Grada Kilomba, a Portuguese writer from São Tomé and Príncipe and PhD in Psychology. Decolonization of knowledge and thought proposes more than just knowing, it proposes we get to know other knowledge and wisdom producers, not just what is currently presented to us. And, furthermore, since we are in an academic environment, what is presented to us in these environments where knowledge and wisdom are produced, from a white European perspective.
Grada Kilomba proposes we reconfigure our thought, we realize and get to know and disseminate thought and knowledge of other people, not just those that come from Europe, or white producers, as she says. Thought and knowledge decolonization also proposes that we manage to listen to those who have been silenced for a long time, to those who have been speaking for very long but haven't got our attention, because we've kept our eyes and ears shut to those people. One way of realizing how much we ignore about the concept Grada has of decolonization is through "how many.
" If I ask you how many books by black authors you know, how many will you say? If I ask you, how many books by black authors have you read? How many will you say?
And these people have been writing, have been producing for a long time. Grada Kilomba's decolonization concept links straight away with a speech by Chimamanda Adichie in a TED event, which I heard in 2009. Just a minute, going back a little.
When I talk about getting to know other thought and knowledge producers, I mean, for example, black men and women and indigenous people, who are also knowledge producers, and, most importantly, producers of oral knowledge. And when I speak of minorities, where black men and women belong, I mean only and exclusively social and economic power minorities, and not populational minorities since, according to IBGE data, blacks make up 54% of the national population. Grada's concept of thought decolonization also proposes that we equate things, not bringing equality but equity, which is to adapt the opportunities already there, making them fairer for all, because we know that according to the constitution, we are all equals, but we know that socially, politically, and economically, we are not treated in equal ways.
And Grada's decolonization bridges with Chimamanda's speech because in that TED 2009 talk she says that, to know the history of a people through one exclusive perspective makes these people just one thing and this is directly linked to power. And power doesn't mean only to tell the history of a person, of a people, but to make it their definitive history. And how do we build these narratives?
How do we make these histories the definitive ones? Through stereotypes that do no more than project prejudice we load unto others; which is simply to stigmatize others without even knowing them. Which do no more than annihilate others' individualities putting everyone in a package where they or others like them will act the same way.
The stigmas, the stereotypes are built from repetitive images, coming from our collective and individual imaginary from repeated images seen over and over, and we consume these images. We hold these images, we retain these images in a very natural and cordial way. We never ask ourselves how these images came to be.
So I'll bring some examples of what stereotypes are, or the ways in which black women and men are portrayed in our society currently. I remember that in 2015, in my monograph - I have a degree in Publicity - I researched the five largest advertising companies according to their media power, and their campaigns. I did analyze the five largest companies in Brazil.
From among them, I analyzed 24 ad campaigns, and black women appeared in only five of them. They also appeared in very specific contexts. For instance, of two women, one appeared in an HIV awareness campaign, another in a cancer awareness campaign.
Another black woman appeared in a violent context. She was portrayed as the mother of an adolescent amid violent rooters and the other two women appeared in cosmetic ads as if they were the only ones, there was a party with several other women and there they were, just two black women. And how can we break .
. . By the way, before breaking stereotypes, we need to talk about them.
One way for black women to be portrayed, and we've been talking about other ways of being portrayed, begins with stereotypes. As an example, it is the black women who always know how to samba. It's very common to hear, "How come you don't know how to samba?
" As if it were something, as somebody said here earlier, that comes in the blood, and it's not like that. Another way we see stereotypes emerge, I saw this through online research in a search portal: black women in fancy expensive shops are never considered as a client. People always ask if these women work in the shop.
It's just another way of being racist. A third way, also through research in a search portal, is that black men get commonly confused with - let's use big quotes when we say "confused" - with street thieves. No matter if the man is in a suit, or jogging, whether he's coming home from work.
If any kind of violence occurs on the street following a hold-up, the black man is always a suspect. Finally, one of the cruelest ways I mention here today happened a while ago, you can check the date, it was on March 31st of 2015 and very recently again: a black unaccompanied child inside a shop was taken for a beggar. We're talking about a kid that is taken for a homeless person inside a shop and required to get out of there.
We need to understand this kind of behavior is perpetuated by us. We need to understand how we're allowing these things to happen and aren't doing anything to stop them. One of the ways to undo all of these stereotypes, all these racist ways to face others that should just be others, as it was said here many times today, is to understand that there are other histories, other ways of looking, other places, and it's possible to get to know and accept these other looks.
For example, when I talk about companies, business people or businesses, I'm confident that a very solid image comes to your head. When I think about a business person, just one image popped up and it was a white man dressed in a suit, who was the business owner. And I bring here today three women.
Three business women, producers and owners of their narratives who are building a different history, another way of seeing black women, there in Rio de Janeiro. The first one is Fabiola Oliveira. She has a degree in Education, and is the mentor and executive producer of Odarah Produção Cultural Afirmativa.
Except that Odarah is much more than that. Odarah is a meeting place to celebrate. It's a place of affection.
Besides Fabiola, I bring . . .
Jaciana Melquíades, who has a degree in History and is the manager of Era Uma Vez o Mundo, a company that has just had support from a crowdfunding initiative, and she talks about the importance of children's representativeness in their most incredible moment, which is when they are very young and are building their mental images of themselves. Finally, I bring you Élida Aquino, who is a Nursing student and executive founder of Afrobox a service of subscription boxes that encourage conscious consumption of products exclusively made for black women. It doesn't mean other women cannot buy them, but these products are thought and made for black women, having in mind, for instance, the several color ranges of their skin that, up till recently, were not widely available in the market, such as foundation for those whose skin shade is darker.
This is what Fabiola, Jaciana and Elida can present to us: black women who can break stereotypes; who have a personal history and can be portrayed in other ways that break the pattern, and decolonize. Bringing Grada back, the thought is exactly this, to open space for other voices, for other people to speak up, for other people to tell their histories. To talk about their histories is more than necessary.
It's necessary because we, as blacks, in order to break these stereotypes, these stigmas, we need positive mirrors. And having a positive mirror is no more than . .
. having somebody to mirror ourselves in. Understanding that we need somebody to mirror ourselves in is this: racism, when it doesn't kill us, it ruins our confidence.
It makes us disbelieve that we have potentialities. I, for instance, come from a family where I'm the first person to ever go to college. Between high school and college, there went eight years trying.
Eight years trying to get access until I made it. This doesn't mean I didn't try hard enough. It just means I was insecure to the point of not making it.
It means I didn't use to see other women, before me, as I was the first in my family to get to this place. And what can we learn from this experience? When I talked to other girls, for example, about examples of black women, we always used to refer to our mothers, our aunts, our grandmothers; never to black women in power positions elsewhere, except in these family circles.
Besides these women I brought here today, I'd like to talk about others, very quickly, for instance, besides Fabiola Oliveira, Elida Aquino, Jaciana Melquiades, I bring Jessyca Liris, Suzane Santos, Kelly Melquiades, Silvana Bahia, Leticia Santanna, Julia Flauzino, who are women who fight in Rio de Janeiro, and some here in Porto Alegre, too. They are large-scale protagonists in the anti-racial struggle in the macro, but they also make a difference to other women in the micro relationships. Individually, we have no money or wealth, but, collectively, nobody stops us.
And, to close, I'd like to bring the voice of Mother Beata of Iemanjá, who passed away in the last weekend of May, who says, "Water drops together turn themselves into rain. " And, just adding, I think that more than rain, we can be a storm. Thank you.
