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Lélia Gonzalez and Sueli
Carneiro, two black roses sowing Spring[1]
Lélia
Gonzalez e Sueli Carneiro, duas rosas negras semeando a primavera
Renata GONCALVES*
%20inglês_arquivos/image004.png){kind=small}
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2470-9095
Ana Paula Pires LOURENÇO**
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0887-0209
Abstract: The article addresses the contribution of two black Brazilian
intellectuals: Lélia Gonzalez and Sueli
Carneiro. Two fundamental black roses in the construction of the black movement
in the 1970s and in feminist discussions guided by black women. Many concepts
presented today as a novelty were developed by these scholars and activists, who
provide us with theoretical-political elements to understand and overcome the
intrinsic and current relationship between capitalism, patriarchy
and racism.
Keywords: Lélia Gonzalez. Sueli
Carneiro. Black Movement. Feminism. Black Women. Social Work.
Resumo: O artigo aborda a contribuição de duas intelectuais
negras brasileiras: Lélia Gonzalez e Sueli Carneiro. Duas rosas negras fundamentais
na construção do movimento negro nos anos 1970 e nas discussões feministas
pautadas pelas mulheres negras. Muitos conceitos hoje apresentados como
novidade foram elaborados por estas estudiosas e militantes, que nos fornecem
elementos teórico-políticos para compreender e superar a intrínseca e atual
relação entre capitalismo, patriarcado e racismo.
Palavras-chave: Lélia Gonzalez. Sueli Carneiro. Movimento
Negro. Feminismo. Mulheres Negras. Serviço Social.
Submitted on: 2/11/2022. Accepted on:
4/4/2023.
Introduction
|
T |
he debate about ethnic-racial
relations has been gaining ground in Brazilian Social Work, especially since
the 1990s: from the heated discussions about revising the minimum curriculum
for the profession to the massive entry of young black women into universities,
passing through growth of campaigns, manifestos, Conselho
Federal de Serviço Social/Conselho
Regional de Serviço Social (CFESS/CRESS) actions,
debate forums, seminars, etc. In recent years, the production of knowledge in
the area has also grown, with the publication of dossiers in academic journals
and collections, consolidating a theoretical and political body on the subject.
Alongside (and as a result of) these changes, there
was a change in the profile of social workers in Brazil. In the penultimate
national survey, with regard to ethnic-racial
belonging, 72.14% declared themselves white;
now, more recent data reveal that more than half of the professionals declare
themselves black, that is, as black and brown. There were “[…] 2.255 records, which represents 50.34% of the participants” (CONSELHO FEDE-RAL
DE SERVIÇO SOCIAL, 2022, p. 30).
These transformations were not able to eliminate the persistence of a
gap regarding the theoretical-political contribution of important black
intellectuals, inside and outside Social Work. We know very little about who
they are and we know even less about their studies
that could help us understand the impact of racism in our professional space
and in our daily lives. Although the theoretical production of this segment is abundant,
the literate environment of the Brazilian intelligensia insists on ignoring it. This erasure conceals fundamental characters, struggles
and resistances in the uprisings and insurrections throughout Brazil. In this
regard, “[…] black women are
absent as protagonists of historical processes and as intellectuals, whose
theoretical formulations are quite relevant for understanding the structure of
domination and exploitation in Brazilian society, from the colonial period to
the present day” (GONÇALVES, 2021, p. 75).
In this
regard, bell hooks emphasized that this is
the logic of “[…] capitalist patriarchy with white supremacy […]” (hooks, 1995,
p. 468), in which culture acts to make it impossible for women, especially black
women, to act as intellectuals who exercise their creative minds. The explosive
symbiosis between capitalism, racism and patriarchal violence instilled “[…] in
everyone's consciousness the idea that black women were just a body without a
mind” (hooks, 1995, p. 469). The unfolding of this symbiosis is also felt in
the classrooms. The author writes that, in exercises carried out with her
students encouraged to cite black writers, without specifying the gender,
invariably the names that came up were all men, with great difficulty in
quoting black intellectuals. It took a lot of encouragement for them to be able
to remember some writers, even famous ones like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Angela Davis (hooks, 1995).
This article
aims to break some of the invisibility barriers of black Brazilian intellectuals,
by presenting the theoretical and political creativity of two authors who are not well known in Social Work: Lélia
González and Sueli Carneiro. Two black roses that
sprouted from the fight against racial and patriarchal violence within the
dynamics of social classes.
2 In the
desert, two roses: individual experiences, common trajectories
Born within the working class, the condition of poverty profoundly
marked the childhoods of Lélia Gonzalez and Sueli Carneiro. On the first day of February 1935, in a large family
of eighteen children, Lélia de Almeida was born in
the capital of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, the seventeenth daughter of Mr. Accacio, a black railroad worker, and Mrs. Urcinda, a housemaid of indigenous descent.
While the girl Lélia had to migrate with her
family to the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1942, at the age of eight; the girl Aparecida Sueli
Carneiro, would be born eight years later, on June 24, 1950, in Vila Bonilha, Lapa region, in the capital of the state of São
Paulo, the firstborn among the seven children of Mr. Horário,
a semi-literate black railroad worker, and of Mrs. Eva, a black seamstress. Lélia's family had to move with
their relatives from the capital of Minas Gerais to Rio de Janeiro in order to escape extreme poverty and join the oldest
brother, who had become a soccer player for the Clube de Regatas
Flamengo. Sueli's remained in the suburbs of the city
of São Paulo.
The condition of black women was
felt very early on by both. Lélia grew up in an
environment that she would later write about, emphasizing that society
naturalizes black girls to be domestic servants from childhood: “As a child, I
was a nanny for a madam’s little son, you know that black children start working
way earlier” (GONZALEZ, 1986, p. 8). Sueli, in turn,
grew up seeing the exploitation and submission of black female bodies and had
the example of her own mother in her home, as her father did not allow his wife
to work outside the home and, therefore, Mrs. Eva had to quit sewing to serve
her husband and her home, taking on the household chores entirely on her own.
The sexist example she had with her father and the advice she received from her
mother awakened perceptions in Sueli that accompany
her to this day, in addition to the topic being a constant object of her
analyses. Perhaps it was the first childhood experiences (a mix of racism,
patriarchal violence linked to working-class conditions) that powered the
interest of our ebony roses to write about the condition of Brazilian black
women.
The shock that the patriarchal
domination aroused in Sueli made her realize the need
to study and have a profession and not depend on any husband. The same happened
with regard to the racism that led her to learn to
defend herself as a girl. As soon as she started attending school, as a black
child, she gained the stigma of being a quarrelsome one: “I was always a
mischievous, brave and quarrelsome girl. I had, by
conventional standards, a boyish demeanor.” (BORGES,
2009, p. 25). With this profile, she stood out at school to protect herself and
her siblings.
I had the
responsibility to defend my siblings, to take care of them. If a sibling came
home crying because someone had hit them, there was no doubt: I would go there,
take revenge and hit anyone. That was the profile of
the girl I was: not used to playing with dolls and performing functions
designated for 'girls' and behaving like them (BORGES, 2009, p. 25).
Sueli had the opportunity, still during
childhood, to be alphabetized by Eva, who was very fond of reading (SANTANA, 2021).
Lélia, on the other hand, belonged to a family in
which reading was not part of everyday life. Her brothers and sisters went to
school up to the second year of elementary school. Most
of the daughters of black workers could not attend school, having to sell their
workforce from an early age. Lélia, however, benefited
from her soccer-playing brother's social ascension and had the opportunity to
study at one of the best schools in Rio (RATTS; RIOS, 2010). Sueli went to study at a school in Largo da Lapa, in the
city of São Paulo. The two realized how much the school was a place for white
children. It was at school that Sueli had her first
explicit contact with racism. Despite being a good student, the school was not
the place that attracted her. In this regard, Bianca Santana wrote that: “[…] Sueli went to school, got good grades, but the
relationships that mattered to her were not there. Much on the contrary, she
felt permanently summoned to prove her ability” (SANTANA, 2021, p. 47).
Racism also marked Lélia Gonzalez's school
life. She realized how much the Brazilian pedagogical discourse was responsible
for her brainwashing, because as she deepened her knowledge, according to the
author, the more she rejected her condition as a black person. Later, already
in college, as she points out, “[…] she was already a thinking person, already
perfectly whitened” (GONZALEZ, 2018, p. 82). She became the “[…] nice black
girl, very smart, [that] the teachers liked” (GONZALEZ, 2018, p. 82). To be
accepted, “[…] she wore a wig, straightened her hair, liked to walk like a lady” (GONZALEZ, 2018, p. 82).
Sueli Carneiro, after
completing regular education, entered the Philosophy course at the University
of São Paulo in 1971, the year in which she also took part in a public tender
to become an office assistant at the Treasury Department. She graduated in 1980
and proceeded to a master's degree in the same area. The opportunity she had to
get in touch with African philosophers, unknown to black people and hidden in
the academic environment, led her to reflect on the racist structure of the
academia and the elitization of white intellectuals,
mostly men, which also does not privilege studies coming from black people[2].
Lélia Gonzalez has two degrees in her initial curriculum:
she graduated “[…] in History and Geography in
1958, and in Philosophy in 1962, at the former University of the State of
Guanabara (UEG), current University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ)”
(BARRETO, 2018, p. 15). In addition, she took a master's
degree in Social Communication and a doctorate in Political Anthropology (LOURENÇO; GONÇALVES, 2020). The author also turned to the studies of
Lacanian Psychoanalysis, which helped her understand the neurosis of Brazilian
racism. With this background and being
able to rely on her fluency in English, Spanish and French, Lélia
taught at the Faculty of Philosophy, Science and Letters at Universidade
Gama Filho, in Rio de
Janeiro; and was a professor of Brazilian Culture at the Pontifical
Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
Each of them had a love life marred
by racial tension. At a good friend's birthday party,
in 1971, Sueli met Maurice Jacoel.
He hesitated in accepting the invitation to a dance and was direct: “I don't
like white people”; to which the persistent boy replied that he didn't like it
either (SANTANA, 2021). After one, two, three dances, to Sueli's
surprise, the boy started talking about black culture and, in
particular, about candomblé. The started dating. However, “[…] all the lyricism and enchantment that affect couples
at the beginning of an idyll were shaken by the negative repercussions that the
relationship caused in the family” (BORGES, 2009, p. 41). That choice
represented a taboo in Sueli's family. Hell broke
loose. There was a raging collective disappointment: her mother panicked; the
father rebuked her loudly; the siblings followed the same discontent. Despite
feeling guilty, Sueli decided to react and defend her
freedom and autonomy. Her family had crossed all possible boundaries and she
could not allow them to decide for her who she would marry. With
regard to Maurice's Jewish family, the situation was no less difficult.
[The parents] invoked every racial and religious
arguments at their disposal to convince their son that the marriage would never
work. As they firmly believed that it was an institution for the rest of their
lives, they suggested that, instead of getting married on paper, the young
people lived together, so they could see if that was really what they wanted
(SANTANA, 2021, p. 72).
With Lélia Gonzalez, racism was even more
tragic. Before turning
black, like most black women in the 20th century in Brazil, Lélia
went through a profound whitening process[3]: she straightened her hair, wore a wig, etc.
Not understanding the racist structure of the Brazilian social formation, she
did everything to be accepted within the white middle class. However, this
procedure “[…] was not enough for Lélia Gonzalez to
be treated as part of the select white group. All the
effort she made to adopt the aesthetics of whiteness did not protect her from
the pain of racism” (GONÇALVES, 2020, p. 225). Lélia
herself describes her marriage as representing the polarization of racial
relations in Brazil:
But when it came time to get married, I went to marry
a white guy. There, then what was repressed, a whole process of internalizing a
'racial democracy' discourse came to the fore, and it was a direct contact with
a very harsh reality. My husband's family thought that our marriage regime was,
as I call it, 'concubinage', because a black woman does not legally marry a white
man; it is a mixture of concubinage and nastiness, ultimately. When they found
out that we were legally married, then a violent cane came over me; of course,
I became a 'whore', a 'dirty black woman' and things like that... (GONZALEZ,
2020, p. 286-287).
While
Maurice's family realized that their son's relationship with Sueli was irreversible, they began to treat their future
daughter-in-law well; Luiz Carlos' family never accepted the marriage, making
the relationship unbearable to the point where he committed suicide. A tragedy
that forever marked the life of Lélia Gonzalez, who
began to walk the way back to her origins seeking to darken, which “[…] meant a
profound personal, aesthetic, theoretical and political change” (GONÇALVES,
2020, p. 226). As Gonzalez herself noted:
From then on, I went to have sex with my people, that
is, I went to have sex with candomblé, macumba, those things that I thought
were primitive. Cultural manifestations that I, after all, with a background in
Philosophy, having sex with such a sophisticated Western cultural form, of
course, could not look at as important things. But anyway, I went back to my
origins, I searched for my roots (GONZALEZ, 2018, p. 83).
The author decided
to adopt her husband's name, thus becoming Lélia
Gonzalez, as a tribute to Luiz (RATTS; RIOS, 2010). From this painful episode, her
interest in Psychoanalysis arose. Initially, she sought analysis to deal with
the issues that had become clouded regarding the second man she had a
relationship with, a light-skinned black man who did not recognize himself as
such; on the contrary, he sought to deny the origins that connected him with
black culture and stereotypes. Lélia, submerged in
this situation, did not understand how her previous husband, who was white,
encouraged her so much in the study of racial issues and in her own recognition
as a black woman, and the current one did not support her and, moreover,
distanced herself from any manifestations of black culture (RATTS; RIOS, 2010). Gradually,
what was just a search for personal understanding, turned into an interest in
studies on psychoanalysis.
Lélia realized that this area of
knowledge was an opportunity not only to get to know herself more and recognize
herself in her blackness, having her attention drawn to the mechanisms of
racialization, but also to understand that she was facing the key to
understanding the very neurosis of a racist society. Her involvement with political organizations was consolidated from that
moment on, in the late 1960s. Something that was not ignored by the security
sectors of the military regime.
Lélia began to be observed by the Department of Order and Social Policy and
information about her appeared for the first time in the institution's files in
1972, when a request was made to investigate her possible involvement in the ‘recruitment
of supporters of the Marxist doctrine’, at Universidade
Gama Filho, where she taught Philosophy (GONÇALVES, 2021, p. 79).
Sueli Carneiro's
political involvement took place in other ways. Her marriage to Maurice was
marked by symbolism, it was practically an act of rebellion against racism. The
apartment they went to live in in the center of São
Paulo welcomed a lot of people, including those who needed to hide from the
military (SANTANA, 2021). They hosted a couple of friends who had been living
underground since 1969. As Sueli and Maurice were not
part of any political organization, “[…] sheltering the couple in a reckless
situation was a way of collaborating with the resistance” (SANTANA, 2021, p.
77). This also did not go unnoticed by the Department
of Order and Social Policy.
The
individual trajectories of Lélia Gonzalez and Sueli Carneiro seemed to follow the same course, but along
different paths. The crossroads of racism, patriarchal violence and capitalist
class exploitation placed them in the same universe of struggles in the late
1970s, when the emergence of the Unified Black Movement was announced on the
steps of the Municipal Theater of São Paulo.
3 Our two
roses and their black and feminist militancy
At the end of the 1960s, Lélia Gonzalez was already aware that she had to walk the way
out of the whitening she had gone through. The attempt to whiten it was not
enough to protect her. The pains she suffered as a black woman were deeply felt
and became the subject of political interventions and studies (GONÇALVES,
2020).
Those were times of the Military
Dictatorship and, therefore, of an enormous setback for democracy in the country,
when, already in the late 1970s, there was a great commotion in São Paulo, after the murder of a
black worker who, “[…] accused of stealing fruit in a fair, was arrested in the
Police District of Guaianazes and suffered so much
torture that he died” (SANTANA, 2021, p. 95). This and many other episodes of
violence led a group of people, who until then had been having isolated
discussions about the racial issue, to organize a demonstration against that
and countless other crimes arising from racism. On June 18, 1978, this group,
together with approximately 2,000 people, gathered on the steps of the
Municipal Theater of São Paulo, where Sueli and Lélia were present. The
act was a milestone in the emergence of the Unified Black Movement
(Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU)) and marked “[…] a paradigm shift in the Brazilian black movement, a
powerful inflection in the discussion of race and class” (SANTANA, 2021, p.
96). After the formation of the MNU, Lélia Gonzalez
[…] assumed the position of executive director in the
first election of the National Assembly of the Unified Black Movement, still in
1978. From then on, she worked in the articulation and, in
particular, in the political formation of activists, through lectures,
courses, meetings and productions of texts, which were disseminated in different
spaces and, above all, in the black press, in particular in the MNU newspaper
(RATTS; RIOS, 2010, p. 84).
The author was also close to the
Black Movement in Rio de Janeiro, Bahia and São Paulo.
Gonzalez was also one of those responsible for claiming the date of November 20
as a commemoration of freedom marked by the struggles of black people
(GONÇALVES, 2020).
Sueli Carneiro, unlike
Lélia Gonzalez, was never an organic militant of the Unified Black
Movement. However, this was an important point of convergence between the
two scholars. In addition to Sueli's trajectory being
strongly marked by being present in the first act, the Movement was very
important for the theoretical paths she followed, in addition to expanding the
author's political understanding.
For
Gonzalez, the MNU was of significant importance,
especially at a time when she understood herself more and more as a black woman
and began to theorize in her writings the issues in this regard in a racist,
patriarchal and classist society. Sueli Carneiro, as
for her, “[…] was already sufficiently feminist to perceive the sexism that
hovered there. Perceptions and annoyances that had not yet been formulated”
(SANTANA, 2021, p. 99). This intellectual's discomfort went against the
perceptions that Lélia had been formulating about the
issue of black women. Despite composing, compacting a common agenda and strengthening herself with the Black Movement, Lélia did not take long to realize and to be bothered by
the sexist aspects present in her structure.
From this perception stems the “[…] formation
of contemporary female groups with political purposes [that] occurred within
the Black Movement in the late 1970s” (RATTS; RIOS, 2010, p. 95). The
guidelines on women were urgent, as they began to realize that black women were
contradictorily excluded within the very movement that should welcome them. In
addition, they felt another discomfort: the wives of the militants were mostly
white women. Their focus on the real needs of black women was practically non-existent
and “[…] although black women were companions and collaborators in the struggle,
white women had a strong presence in the black male imagination” (RATTS; RIOS,
2010, p. 95).
Lélia Gonzalez, understanding the
implications of this patriarchal scenario, participated in the first meetings
of black women from Rio de Janeiro between 1973 and 1974. From then on, she
began to write texts and give lectures on the agendas that were dealt with in
the occasion (RATTS; RIOS, 2010). In the 1980s, other autonomous collectives emerged,
which thought about particular issues related to the
existence of black women, and increasingly felt the need for autonomy as a
collective of black women, as the black movement continued to reproduce sexist
practices and discourses. However, they also realized that they needed to
detach themselves from the feminist movement, which did not pay attention to
the racial issue, reproducing and/or naturalizing racist practices. The new aspects
of feminism in Brazil boosted new discussions that covered the experiences and
rights of women, but did not welcome black women nor
did they consider their more specific agendas (CARNEIRO, 2019).
Sueli Carneiro's militancy also
flourished in this field involving black women's issues. It is considered “[…] a
historical, cultural and political heritage that opened forests and paths for
the propagation of black feminist thought and the struggle for civilizing and humanitarian
milestones” (RIBEIRO, 2019, p. 5). Lélia Gonzalez, in turn, is presented “[…] as a daring intellectual, with a
free laugh, with a strong presence in the Feminist Movement, in the Black
Movement, in the Black Women’s Movement” (GONÇALVES, 2020, p. 225).
The strong presence of both in the Brazilian political scene gave them a
prominent role in the fight for the country's redemocratization,
in debates on racism, in discussions about black women and in subsequent
management spaces focused on public policies.
4 Two black roses sowing Spring
In the last years of the Military
Dictatorship, a political opening was gradually consolidated and, in this
process, progressive sectors and entities began to formulate government
proposals. Although a part of the feminists defended that the movement should
not get involved with the government to preserve its autonomy, another part
went against this principle and presented their demands to André Franco
Montoro, candidate for the government of the state of São Paulo. Elected
governor, Montoro appointed on September 12, 1983, the State Council for the
Condition of Women of São Paulo, the first in the country (SANTANA, 2021).
Created without the participation of
black women, the Council caused a public revolt by important exponents of this
segment, such as black radio host Marta Arruda. The latter, “[…] very popular
at the time, launched a campaign in the press. Not directly against the government, but calling black women to the insurgency”
(SANTANA, 2021, p. 127). The noise was so loud that it became impossible to
ignore. Black women who, until then, had not been following the discussion
around the creation of the Council, found themselves summoned by the radio
host. They requested an audience with the Council and received the explanation
that there was no discrimination in the state body: “[…] the absence of black
women was the result of their own lack of organization” (SANTANA, 2021, p.
128). After this meeting, Sueli Carneiro and other
militants founded the Coletivo de Mulheres
Negras (Black Women’s Collective), on October 6, 1983, emptying the argument
that they were not organized. They claimed immediate representation on the
Council. Racial tension was installed in the government agency.
In her biography, Thereza Santos (2008), the first to represent black women
on the Board, described how difficult it was to deal with the boycotts and
constraints imposed by white board members, who did not disguise discrimination
and racism.
In a meeting they
started to discuss the issue of birth control, I signed up to speak and a
councilor on the board spoke quietly to the councilor next to her: 'let's close
this issue because another one is coming with a problem of black women'. I
replied: 'My name is not another one, it's Thereza
Santos, and I'm going to raise the problem of black women in this matter.
Because when you talk about birth control it's always from the poor and we are
the majority of them; if you don't know, we have countless black women with
consequences of the controls developed by this society aimed at the poor, that
is, us'. I spoke about the reality of uteruses that
became dry, of women whose health was destroyed, and I made it clear that if it
wasn't their problem, it was ours. And that I would not accept any proposal
that had not been discussed by groups of black women (SANTOS, 2008, p. 91).
A great achievement for black women
in that period was the volume, fought for by Thereza
Santos and written by Sueli Carneiro, Mulher negra: política governamental e a mulher (Black women: governmental policy and women),
which made up the collection Década da Mulher (Decade
of the woman) (1975-1985), organized by Nobel publishing house and the
advice. It was “[…] the first study in the country to disaggregate social
indicators of gender, race and class, that is, to put on paper the numbers of
inequalities between white and black women in Brazil” (SANTANA, 2021, p. 131).
The book, published in 1985, demonstrated the “[…] need for a racial bias in
any proposed policy, in addition to structuring specific policies for black
women. Feminist politics began to be blackened” (SANTANA, 2021, p. 133).
Sueli Carneiro was elected councilor in 1986 and created the Commission for Black
Women's Affairs, increasingly improving the body and the guidelines discussed
by black professionals to work in various areas, such as: "[…] women's health,
family planning, education, work, violence, day care” (SANTANA, 2021, p. 133).
In the same year of the creation of
the Council in São Paulo, Lélia Gonzalez created in
Rio de Janeiro the Nzinga[4] Black Women Collective, of which
she was coordinator. The choice of name derived from “[…] the concern to rescue a historical past repressed by a 'history' that only
speaks of our oppressors. The famous queen Jinga (Nzinga) played a major role
in the struggle against the Portuguese oppressor in Angola” (GONZALEZ, 2020, p. 108). At the time, both the feminist movement and the black movement
realized the need to approach the most precarious layers of society. However,
the task was not that simple. Nzinga's experience, however,
[…] achieved something unique: on the one hand, a
political grouping of women from different social positions was formed
(residents of the hills and middle-class neighborhoods,
manual machinists with low education and women with university education); on
the other hand, diverse experiences of associative formation were gathered
(women from the feminist movement, the black movement and neighborhood
and favela movements, etc.) (RATTS; RIOS, 2010, p. 98).
Gonzalez
cultivated an intense relationship with the feminist movement, from which she gathered
reflections on inequalities between men and women and went on to introduce
analyses on the determinations of class, race and sex.
Lélia's political and intellectual strength
transformed her into something much greater than her two original movements:
black and feminist (RATTS; RIOS,
2010). In this regard, Luiza Bairros wrote:
When most of the MNU militants still
did not have a deeper understanding of black women, it was Lélia
who served as our spokesperson against the sexism that threatened to subordinate
the participation of women within the MNU and the racism that prevented our
full insertion in the women's movement. But through many long conversations and
her texts, we learned how to incorporate a certain way of being feminist into
our lives and our activism, we articulated our own interests and created
conditions to value the political action of black women (BAIRROS, 2018, p
426-427).
Although
daughter of Oxum[5]
et pour cause, Lélia Gonzalez moved like the wind of Iansã and in a “[…] circular movement, political activism and
theoretical formulations presented themselves as a constantly swirling spiral”
(GONÇALVES, 2020, p. 226). She arrived at
the feminist movement with readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Heleieth
Saffioti and many others. He got to know American
black feminism before any trend. These feminist matrices certainly contributed
to the development of her analyses on the place of black women in Brazilian
society.
Hence
her inclusion on the editorial board of the feminist newspaper Mulherio, a
feminist production based at the Carlos Chagas Foundation in São Paulo, which
conveyed reflections on inequality between men and women. Lélia's
contribution to the newspaper consisted, above all, in problematizing “[…] the
issue of black women as a specific category in the fight against social
inequalities between the sexes, a theme that she managed to extend to all other
feminist debates” (RATTS; RIOS, 2010, p. 103).
Gonzalez was one of the nominees by black women in Rio de Janeiro to
participate in the National Council for Women's Rights, created in 1985. It was
time to do something different in São Paulo, and Gonzalez's intellectual
production and political engagement guaranteed her a place in this space with
deliberative power. With a four-year mandate, from 1985 to 1989, it addressed
topics such as “[…] work, education, sexuality,
black women and violence” (RATTS; RIOS, 2010, p. 107).
Lélia Gonzalez and Sueli Carneiro had, therefore, active participation – as
the latter still has today – in several spaces and black and feminist political
organizations. However, despite all the effort to join feminists, black protagonism had no space: “The
feminist agenda disregarded the anti-racist struggle, more than that, race
relations were the abyss that separated white women from black women”
(GONÇALVES, 2018, p. 15). From now on, the idea was consolidated, with the
strong participation of our two black roses, of an autonomous organization of
women, materialized in the 1st National Meeting of Black Women[6], where, finally, these came out of invisibility.
5 By way of conclusion: Lélias
and Suelis announcing Spring
The militant trajectory of both
authors was built in different places (in the family, in the black movement, in
feminism, in academia, etc.). Each one saw black women's need for autonomy: Lélia founded Nzinga; Sueli
created the Black Women Collective; both participated in the construction of
the National Meeting of Black Women. In a circular movement, militancy gave way
to theoretical reflection at the same time that the
production of knowledge supported the political practice of our two black roses.
And there were so many theoretical contributions from the two black authors
that it is impossible to systematize them in the short space of this article.
It is only worth noting that
Gonzalez's wanderings led her: 1) to coin the political-cultural category of amefricanity, a
creativity of the oppressed people to fight against enslavement,
extermination, exploitation and oppression; 2) to re-signify the social place
of the black mother, responsible for introducing Pretuguese[7] into the country, a hallmark of African culture in Brazil; and 3) to
propose an Afro-Latin-American feminism,
that is, a feminism that considers the common
pain of millions of non-white women living in Latin America and that, given
their social position, articulated with racial and sexual discrimination, are
the ones that most brutally suffer the effects of capitalist exploitation
(GONZALEZ, 2018; 2020).
This
place of the black woman is marked by the intensification of labor activity. Before going to work as a maid, she has to finish her household chores, which include fetching
water from the waterspout, preparing food for her children and partner,
washing, ironing, etc. and going to the boss's house to take care of her
children, without being able to take care of her own (ADRIANO; LOURENÇO, 2021,
p. 296).
Carneiro, although she kept her feet
firmly planted in São Paulo, where he founded Geledés[8]– Institute of the Black Woman, never ceased to dialogue with the rest
of Brazil and the world (LOURENÇO;
GONÇALVES, 2020). The philosopher provided us with 1) fundamental criticisms of epistemicide, that
is, a set of practices that deny the forms of existence of
black people, which expropriate and reduce this population contingent to
subjects devoid of knowledge and knowledge (CARNEIRO, 2005); 2) the formulations about the matriarchy of misery, when racism,
patriarchal violence and capitalism produce
[…] on black women, a kind
of social asphyxia, with negative consequences on all dimensions of life, which
manifest themselves in emotional consequences with damage to mental health and
lowering of self-esteem; in a lower life expectancy, of five years, in relation
to that of white women; in a lower rate of marriages; and above all confinement
to less prestigious and less remunerative occupations (CARNEIRO, 2011, p. 127-128).
And we also owe to Sueli: 3) the proposals for to
blacken feminism so that the demands of that
hegemonic movement would also cover black women, with a daily life marked by
precarious livelihoods (CARNEIRO, 2003).
Both authors' studies on the past of enslaved women and on the
historical continuity of stereotypes about black women provide subsidies to our
area of training and professional intervention not only to understand the ties
that unite racism, patriarchal violence and capitalist
class exploitation, but above all they set us, the new Lélias
and Suelis, the task of overcoming them and,
therefore, of sowing Spring.
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________________________________________________________________________________________________
Renata GONÇALVES Worked
on the conception, design, data analysis, writing, suitability for approval of
the version to be published.
Degree in Social Work from Institut Cardjin – Belgium (1992). Master in Social
Sciences from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (1999).
Doctoral internship at the École de Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales – Paris (2003). PhD in
Social Sciences from the State University of Campinas (2005). Vice-coordinator
of the Graduate Program in Social Work and Social Policies at the Federal
University of São Paulo. Coordinator of the Center
for the Study of Afro-Brazilian Studies (NEAB) and of the Intellectual Black
Brazilian Women Project at Unifesp.
Ana Paula Pires LOURENÇO Worked
on the critical review of the article, writing, suitability for approval of the
version to be published.
Degree in Social Work from the Federal University of São Paulo (2020).
Master's student, since 2021, of the Graduate Program
in Social Work and Social Policies at the Federal University of São Paulo,
Baixada Santista campus.
She is a member of the Reflex Studies Center
in Palmares (under the coordination of professors
Renata Gonçalves and Deivison Faustino) and is a
researcher at Unifesp's Black Brazilian Intellectuals
Project.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
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