Racism denies the position of scientist to black women – 03/09/2023 – Science

I was proposed by my fiancé, Thiago Thomé, on top of the Timbalada electric trio during the last Carnival in Salvador. When announcing the event, a report in the local media reported that a Bahian scientist had been asked to marry a global actor.

Among the various comments in the report, the one that most caught my attention was: “She is not a scientist. She is a university professor, writer and speaker.”

I was reflecting on the multiple layers of this statement and decided to publish a video about the positivist character of understanding science in European modernity, in the process of primitive accumulation of capital, which established linear and hierarchical bases based on the tripod of experimentation, mathematical treatment and development of a general theory.

These criteria put physics ahead of the sciences, and the so-called exact sciences ahead of the human sciences.

However, as much as, during my training, the dichotomy between bench laboratory sciences and human sciences was criticized, I did not find myself within this tension, since my classes, research and books transit intellectually at the interface and reflect my scientific path. : graduation in chemistry, master’s and doctorate in science teaching, graduation in philosophy and postdoctoral in education.

So, what would you say more strongly about the statement that I am not a scientist? Certainly the racist and sexist nature of denying a black woman her recognition as a scientist.

Historically, humanity emerged in Africa along with the first forms of societal constitution: kingdoms and empires, philosophy, sciences, technologies, political development, etc.

However, we have accessed for a long time in Brazil, mainly in schools, a narrative according to which black people emerged in the world from slavery in the Americas and to be “slaves”.

The latter was ontologically based, depriving black people of humanity, removing from us all human attributes, among them, the social performative dimension in the gender construct, which made Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist born in the United States, ask: “And I am not a woman?”.

Since science is an intellectual construction, therefore, eminently human and considering that black people are dehumanized in this social and historical process, the conclusion was reached —by a simple syllogism— that black people do not develop science, much less black women, because are the other of the other.

The other of the other since we are doubly negatively altered: the other because we are black, the other because we are women, moving us even further away from the notion of the universal human subject, historically constituted from a racist, androcentric, ciscentric, heteronormative understanding, ageist, ableist, fatphobic in the collective imagination.

Just remember the images of the “human body” presented in science books.

Yes, I am a scientist. The physicists Katemari Rosa, Sônia Guimarães and Zélia Ludwig are also, as well as the chemists Nicea Amauro, Denise Fungaro and Anna Benite, the biologist Rosy Mary Isaías, the biomedical Jaqueline Goes and many other black women in Brazil.

Among the Africans, there is the South African epidemiologist Quarraisha Karim, the Congolese parasitologist Francine Ntoumi, the Ethiopian biologist Segenet Kelemu, the Kenyan biologist Dorothy Nyingi and many others. Women who develop science on a daily basis around the world and, therefore, are references for youth towards the construction of another world in which history is more plural, diverse and representative of its people.

In this month for women’s rights, we want to continue fighting for the right to exist and to develop our lives free of structural oppressions, which insist on limiting and subordinating us in all areas of social development, as is the case in the sciences.