By BLACK COLLECTIVE CALIBAN DIALECTICS*
Comments on the notion of recognition at USP.
“There is no open struggle between white and black. […] One day the white master recognized the black slave without a struggle. But the former slave wants to be recognized.”
(Frantz Fanon, Black skin, white masks).
“But as it is, we cannot do without him. He kindles our fire, fetches our wood, and performs tasks that bring us profit. – Hey, slave Caliban! Thou, creature of the earth, speak!”
(William Shakespeare, The storm).
On November 20, 2024, the first year that “Black Consciousness Day” (Zumbi dos Palmares Day) was celebrated as a national holiday, the website of the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH) of the University of São Paulo (USP) published a page in “tribute” to the day, focused on the context of the Faculty’s 90th anniversary. In an attempt to preserve a certain “black memory”, they released a series of photos that they titled “Black teaching at FFLCH: presence, memory, recognition”.[1] Among active teachers, we also have those who have already retired and those who have passed away.
The mapping, however, is surprising – especially to students in the philosophy department – when we see names like Marilena Chaui included in this list. It is surprising, less because of some prior judgment, as if we were acting as a hetero-identification panel, but rather because of the inclusion of one and more names that, until then, had never spoken from this field of experience of blackness.
There is a gap between those who build the foundation on a daily basis and those who establish institutional representations. For at least three years, black students who are eligible for quotas have been trying to build their meaning and sense of belonging and recognition in the university space of philosophy. The search for experiences, reports or archives has been arduous and has so far been unsuccessful. Or there are no records of any activity around blackness in the Philosophy Department of USP[2] or there is simply no interest in mobilizing on the institutional side to seek something about it.
In fact, this strange feeling of non-place and connection to which we do not seem to belong was the theme of a recent seminar held at the department: “References of Modern Politics in Debate”,[3] which took place this month of November, on the 7th and 8th, and featured a speech by our “Coletivo Negro Dialética Calibã”,[4] composed of black students who joined the course since 2019 – probably the only panel at a Philosophy Department event composed solely of black people (as far as we know).
The female presence in the history of the Philosophy Department is also a topic of debate, but it is already better consolidated – whether through the work of the “Projeto Contando Mulheres” (Counting Women Project),[5] born with the students of the Tutorial Education Program (PET) of the Philosophy Department and now counting on greater institutional and teaching support, whether due to the historical experience of the presence of teachers in the philosophy department (to mention just two names, we have Gilda de Mello e Souza and also Marilena Chauí).
The difference between the two cases is that in one case there was an elaboration based on historical experiences and debates from the student and faculty themselves that guarantee concreteness when it comes to recognition. In the other case, ours, when we find ourselves in a period in which there are more certainties of non-presence than presence, seeing the consecration of black faculty in the philosophy department where until yesterday there was none seems more like a way of avoiding conflict and covering up this very present historical absence than making it clear that there is a great debate that still needs to be held and constructed through collective efforts.
Recognition, as Frantz Fanon teaches us when reading Hegel, is a struggle for an achievement. Without struggle there is no recognition. When, then, recognition is “given” through institutional and representative means, and not achieved through a field of experiences, then it is not substantial. It is not a matter, then, of seeking satisfaction through symbols that universally synthesize diverse experiences. The demand for more black teachers, for more disciplines that address black history, for a change in methodological concepts that do not have only Europe as a constant reference is necessary, but not sufficient.
We emphasize the insufficiency of these demands because, ultimately, it is about discussing the “lived experience of black people,” that is, asking what black people are and discovering, behind this, the foundation of the notion of race – this modern mark that justifies processes of violence, inferiority, and exploitation of the Other as a non-being. As long as we maintain anti-racist positions that support the notion of race, we will continue to legitimize the ideological apparatuses that naturalize the same processes that produce and reproduce the colonial system.
Discussing the black experience means understanding how the notion of race still sustains our ways of existing socially and politically. Every space delimited by race is a non-place, because it concerns the exclusion of spaces. Therefore, thinking about the relationship between “race” and “university” today does not mean thinking only about the inclusion of young black people, since the university space was structured and organized based on the worldview of white people.
In this type of space, all production and reproduction corresponds to the exclusion of black people or their inclusion based on the image and imagination that white people have of black people (this includes all the variety of prejudices that we have heard about our hair, our behavior, our ability to study languages, to write texts, to understand and reproduce academic language, among others). We are not fooled by the integration of black people in the university, because we understand that the “integration of black people into class society” was also illusory. The horizon must be the removal of commonplaces and the restructuring of the university experience based on the debate about the notion of race.
We hope it is clear that this is not about defining who is or is not black. Identity, as Douglas Barros points out in What is identitarianism? (Boitempo), is a construction, an invention (although illusory and necessary), and not a discovery. We will not be the established blacks or the blacks that we are expected to be, but we will be black based on the experiences that we cultivate, also understanding the dimensions of class and gender that constitute us.
We hope that the new board of FFLCH, as well as all black faculty members, will focus on building a debate from the ground up and not just displaying representative symbols without material support, and will engage in dialogue with the collectives that are active in the space. More than just management, the meaning of the experience of being black within USP will be a collective construction.
*Black Collective Dialectics Caliban is made up of black undergraduate and graduate students in the Philosophy course at the University of São Paulo.
Notes
[1] The page can be checked here.
[2] The closest we got to archives was through the book The Black Elephant: Eduardo de Oliveira e Oliveira: Race and Social Thought in Brazil (2020), by Rafael Petry, based on his 2018 thesis from the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). In the book, we have some chapters that give an overview of the FFCL (Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters – located on Rua Maria Antônia, in Vila Buarque, before being transferred to Cidade Universitária, in Butantã, and becoming the FFLCH) and the black presence in these spaces (which is so minimal that it almost seems like there were no black people there). Apart from the event “USP’s Black Fortnight”, which Eduardo (sociologist) was involved in organizing, together with Beatriz Nascimento (historian), we have no further records of other similar activities, much less in the philosophy department.
[3] The schedule can be checked here: and the collective profile can be seen here.
[4] The speech can be checked here.
[5] The project's Instagram profile can be found here.
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