“The black woman is not seen as a subject to be loved”

On the 20th of November, the Black conscience day🇧🇷 To reinforce the importance of this date, this month, CLAUDIA sought out black women opinion makers and activists of the cause to discuss topics such as cultural appropriation, racism and representativeness. As a result, we launched a series of interviews on the importance of increasingly debating racial issues in Brazil.

🇧🇷Clear, straight and completely black, rare, without you / Loose almost dead / Body, my body / Walks, in my shadow“, the verses are part of the song “Solto” sung by Elza Soares, a woman, black and peripheral. The 10th track on the disc The Woman at the End of the World, laureate with the Latin Grammy, as best MPB album, is the perfect plan for the discussion of a crucial topic. The loneliness of black women was academically addressed, for the first time, with the thesis by researcher Claudete Alves, which later became the book Did it become a rule?🇧🇷

Conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the last Census dated 2010 disclosed that 52.52% of the black women who participated in the survey did not live in a stable meeting. That is, according to the words of Architecture & Urbanism student and Black Feminism activist, Stephanie Ribeiro, more than half of the female population with black skin lives, today in Brazil, in “definite celibacy”, and not by choice: “The black woman is not seen as a guy to be loved.”

See also: “To be black in Brazil is to be born knowing that you will have to resist”.

CLAUDIA: In what way do you believe that the loneliness of black women has racism as one of its main pillars?
Stephanie Ribeiro: I started talking about this subject after I had contact with the last Census carried out by the IBGE, in 2010, which proved: 70% of Brazilians marry partners of the same color, that is, white people marry white people. But 52.52% of black women, especially those with darker skin, were alone, as if it were a kind of definitive celibacy. And for me, this does not reflect a choice of its own, but rather a consequence of several other issues. It was then that, at this moment, I started to read about the affectivity of the black woman. My first deeper contact took place through the book Did it become a rule? by Claudete Alves, who points out that this is not a discussion about whether or not you are in a relationship, but about you being and not feeling loved, not feeling respected, not being able to count on your partner’s companionship. I believe that the main justification for the loneliness of a couple revolves around the fact that the black woman is not seen as a guy to be loved. Then I started reading the work of the American writer Bell Hooks, Living on Love, which also deals with the affective role and construction of the identity of black women.

Read more: “How is there no racism in Brazil?”

Is taste a social construction? How does it apply in this case?
Since you are born, you are inserted into this society, there are several social constructions that will invariably fall on you, even if you don’t want to. The idea of ​​the social place you occupy depends on all the social construction that they imagine to be “ideal” for a beautiful woman or a handsome man, the aesthetic standard. A lot of people refer to this concept as something that came out of nowhere, but no, it was based on the idea of ​​white supremacy – that white people have always been and always will be the most beautiful. And what many people do not see is that this thought served as a justification for various cruelties practiced in our society.

Always in all magazines and advertisements, white is placed as the most beautiful. And it is very painful to see that even if people do not fit this standard, they will look at the ideal of beauty and try to fit in, whatever the cost. Any individual who is not white will try to fit in, even non-pattern white people will struggle to do so. Because it is not any aesthetic type that can be considered beautiful, there is no plurality🇧🇷 And it is within this standardization that you build, century by century, what is beautiful, good, acceptable, legal. Then you reinforce that the white person is the ideal in all situations – why would it be different in the affective construction?

The black woman has always been the subordinate, hypersexualized, that is, it is not for you to build a relationship. The black man also has a negatively stigmatized place: the bandit, malandro, or the ‘hot black man’, also hypersexualized. Therefore, I cannot think that any individual is socially educated to see black people as subjects, as worthy, multiple in their qualities and feelings. And we have also very much internalized this idea of ​​a love-at-first-sight relationship: I meet a stranger and immediately fall in love with him, like in a fairy tale. So, if you don’t see black people as people, you can’t give them the possibility to build any kind of relationship with them. It’s not simply finding someone attractive, it’s not giving them the opportunity to see that person as someone like you, who also has stories, desires, tastes, skills, that is, similar to you in all your human complexity.

See also: “We want representation beyond the shampoo commercial”.

How does patriarchy structure black women’s loneliness?
The loneliness of the black woman is not only a consequence of the social structure that places whites as superior, but also men as such. It is extremely common for people to think that all initiatives to engage in a relationship must come from men – they are the ones who choose. That’s why many women believe that affection is only about male decisions, that is, even with all exceptions, they need to see themselves as the protagonists of the relationship. If you are dating a man, you are not seen as a subject, but always as subordinate to your partner’s decision-making power.

This type of oppression does not happen in homosexual relationships, only in heterosexual ones. But even so, for example, a couple of two gay men – one black and one white – certainly, the one with greater symbolic power, will be able to make decisions and make choices.

But the oppressions are structured in such a way that black women are the base of a class pyramid that loses all possibilities to make choices, even the most individual ones, such as those concerning their own affectivity. Therefore, the loneliness of black women is a complex problem that involves issues of gender and race. And this, many times, leads to clashes within the black movement itself – there is (and a lot of) machismo within the groups that are fighting against racism.

As vulnerable as the situation of black people in Brazil is, we have to understand that black women are also black and need to fight for their rights, they need to have a voice. And what we see on the part of many black militants are stories that range from complete abandonment, to an extremely abusive relationship, with explicit episodes of violence. I see that some women charge their partners differently when they are black. For example, if she was beaten by him, she will certainly think twice before denouncing him because black people are already incarcerated en masse.

The State, by itself, is already racist, it already promotes the genocide of the black people, and you, knowing all this, all these difficulties, are you going to file a police report against a black man? And unfortunately, many black women live in this sad dilemma. I, for example, have heard several times we [mulheres negras] we should remain silent because ‘this agenda was not very important’ or ‘because it does not reach the entirety of the movement’. So, black men forget that we also have the right to live fully in this society, and for that to happen, we need to guide machismo within these collective spaces, that is, in society as a whole, including the black movement itself.

Read more: Black Women’s March faces racism and violence.

Is the loneliness of black women linked only to their affective relationships?
A lot of people think so, but I disagree. Black women have very serious affective problems, because since they were little they can no longer find dolls, makeup in their color – it is inevitable that this idea that we will never be ideal, we will never be part of what is socially accepted as beautiful, causes a sudden drop in our self -esteem, and of course our psychology as well.

When we talk about the genocide of the black population, we are saying that a mother who, many times was abandoned by the child’s father, raises that child with the greatest care in the world and, every 23 minutes, he can simply turn up dead. How do you think the emotional and psychological conditions of this woman who has already been left aside countless times in her life will be? It is virtually inevitable that she will become very depressed and lonely.

Many academics argue that race and gender are not issues that are interconnected and can be debated together in the same frame. An example of this is that the homicide of black women grew 54% in a decade, according to the Map of Violence 2015; while that of white has decreased considerably. Being a woman and black weighs a lot, and that kills🇧🇷

See too: “Black symbols are on the rise, but in the hands of white people”

Does the loneliness of the black woman go back to our slave heritage?
Certainly. The impact of slavery does not only fall on the places we can occupy or not, on the opportunities we have or not, but also on our families and on our affectivity – whether or not we have a boyfriend, whether or not we have a stable relationship. I know 17-year-old girls who already live in affective loneliness, who are already certain that they will only be able to rely on themselves for the rest of their lives.

There is a huge percentage of women incarcerated, for reasons that, many times, are not even connected to them. This loneliness also exists: women are practically abandoned behind bars, by their family, by their husband, by their children. Even in prison, they are definitely erased, as if they weren’t the least bit important to anyone.

And the more you live socially, the more this loneliness becomes more present and the certainty that you are not seen as a subject, as an ideal. And even black women who fit certain aesthetic standards, with lighter skin and finer features, for example, still face huge barriers because they are always framed in the role of sexual objects, the ‘mulata’, the exotic.

Black women were seen during slavery as a reproductive object, who existed exclusively to generate more objects to work with – without any family or affective ties, because they were the result of violence. And today, the black woman is seen as someone who always needs to be strong, the keeper of the house, or a sexual object, and this image, reaffirmed in the media, has a great…