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

It was offered to me by my fiancé, Thiago Tomei At the head of the Timbalada electric trio during the recent carnival in Salvador. As the event was announced, a report in the local media said that a scholar from Bahia had been asked to marry an international actor.

Of the various comments in the report, the one that struck me the most was: “She’s not a scientist, she’s a college professor, writer, and speaker.”

I was pondering the many layers of this statement and decided to publish a video on the positivistic nature of understanding science in European modernity, in the process of primitive accumulation of capital, which established linear and hierarchical rules based on the tripod rule of empiricism and mathematics. Addressing and developing a general theory.

These criteria put physics at the forefront of the sciences, and the so-called exact sciences at the forefront of the humanities.

However, as much as the separation between laboratory sciences and human sciences was criticized during my training, I did not find myself in this tension, because my chapters, research and books move intellectually to the fore and reflect my scientific path. Graduated in Chemistry, MA and PhD in Science Teaching, Graduated in Philosophy and Postdoctoral in Education.

So, what could you say more forcefully than to say that I am not a scientist? Certainly the racist and sexist nature of denying a black woman recognition as a scientist.

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

However, for a long time in Brazil, especially in the schools, we had access to a story in which blacks emerge in the world from slavery in the Americas and to be “slaves.”

The latter was based on ontology, denied blacks humanity, and removed from us all human traits, among them, the social dimension in gender construction, which made Sojourner Truth, a US-born abolitionist, ask: “And am I not a woman? “.

Since science is an intellectual construct and, therefore, eminently human, and given that black people are dehumanized in this social and historical process, it has been concluded – by simple syllogism – that black people do not develop science, let alone women Blacks, because they are part of the other.

The other because we are doubly negatively altered: the other because we are black, the other because we are women, which causes us to distance ourselves further from the idea of ​​the universal human self, historically shaped by the racial, golden, central, heterogeneous understanding, aging, ability, and fear of fat in the collective imagination. .

Just remember the pictures of the “human body” shown in science books.

Yes, I am a scientist. Physicists Catemari Rosa, Sonia Guimaraes, and Zelia Ludwig are also in, as well as chemists Nicea Amauro, Denise Fungaro, and I BennettRosie Marie Isaiah, Biologist, Biomedicine Jacqueline goes And many black women in Brazil.

Among the Africans are the South African epidemiologist Quarraisha Karim, the Congolese parasitologist Francine Ntume, the Ethiopian biologist Segenet Kelemu, the Kenyan biologist Dorothy Ningye, and many others. Women who advance science on a daily basis all over the world and, therefore, are references for young people towards building another world in which history is more pluralistic, diverse and representative of its people.

In this month for women’s rights, we want to continue the struggle for the right to exist and develop our lives free from structural oppression, which insists on restricting and subjugating us in all areas of social development, as is the case in science.