INTRODUCTION
“I barely remember my past in Africa,” said Kaline one afternoon as we sat in her tenth-floor apartment located in the outskirts of Lisbon, Portugal. Born in São Tomé and Príncipe, West Africa, to Cape Verdean parents, Kaline was just five years old when she came to Portugal in 1975, on the eve of Portuguese decolonization. As a child, Kaline recalls living in a moment in Portugal in which decolonization was very much fresh in the minds of White Portuguese, and African descendants alike. On one occasion, as she strolled the streets with her siblings in Lisbon, a White Portuguese child walking hand-in-hand with his parents pointed to her, wide-eyed, and said, “look, mom, a monkey!” Kaline knew that this targeting of Black people is not something of the past. During our interview, she sighed as she looked out her kitchen window and told me about the everyday forms of racism she and others encounter in Lisbon. “Racism exists here. It always has. When I go on the bus, some White Portuguese woman or man will enter and begin making that face. That look of disgust, “Pretos (racist and derogatory word for Blacks)! Go back to your country. What are you doing here? Dirty pretos!”
Kaline’s experiences are strong reminders of the contradictions of the Portuguese context, a “new” immigrant-receiving nation that is often lauded for being a migrant-friendly country with successful integration policies (MIPX 2015). As a post-colonial migrant who has accessed naturalization, she is not truly considered a migrant by contemporary migration scholarship, which grants primacy to the experiences of “new migrants” that hail from sending contexts that possess minimal colonial links to Portugal (for a discussion see Araújo Reference Araújo, Kretsedemas, Capetillo-Ponce and Jacobs2013). As a Black woman who lives within a context where anti-racialism (Araújo and Maeso, Reference Maeso2016; Boulila Reference Boulila2019a, Reference Boulilab; Goldberg Reference Goldberg2009, Reference Goldberg2015; Lentin Reference Lentin2008; Wekker Reference Wekker2016), or the denial of race and racial thinking, is substantiated by the state, her experiences are often ignored by academics and politicians who avoid talking about race and racial oppression. I met other Cape Verdean women during my field data collection in Lisbon who echoed Kaline’s experiences; they described how they had been personally harassed by White Portuguese in public spaces, and many had likewise painfully witnessed the harassment of other Africans and Afro-descendants on the streets. As I listened to them passionately describe these scenarios, it was clear that these moments were not fleeting feelings for them, but fundamental components of their lives.
Building on work that aims to incorporate anti-Blackness in the discourse around race, migration, and racism in Europe (Fanon [1952] Reference Fanon2008; Essed Reference Essed1991; Carvalho et al., Reference Carvalho, Fernandes, Lima, Graça, Carlos, Pires, LuZGomes and Té2017; Gilroy [1987] Reference Gilroy1991; Kilomba Reference Kilomba2008; Perry Reference Perry2015; Small Reference Small2018a, Reference Smallb), my goal in this article is to give primacy to the challenges that African-descendant women, like Kaline, experience and associate with their feelings of belonging in Portugal. Based on research conducted in the greater metropolitan area of Lisbon, I interrogate research on citizenship and belonging that fails to account for the specificity of everyday anti-Blackness and I illustrate how Cape Verdean women’s experiences and voices both reflect and disrupt what I call anti-Black non-belonging in Portugal. Importantly, this article builds on work that aims to reconfigure anti-Blackness as a global and local gendered racialization phenomenon.
EUROPEAN ANTI-RACIALISM
Anti-racialism is a global force that resists the acknowledgement of contemporary patterns of racial oppression (Boulila Reference Boulila2019a, Reference Boulilab; Essed Reference Essed1991; Gilroy [1987] Reference Gilroy1991; Ku et al., Reference Ku, Bhuyan, Sakamoto, Jeyapal and Fang2019; Lentin Reference Lentin2008, Reference Lentin2014; Weiner Reference Weiner2014; Wekker Reference Wekker2016). Across Europe, a collective political imagination is based on the notion that Europe is an anti-racial setting where racism is a thing of the past and not a relevant social category today. This development of a “historicist” (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2002) understanding of race divorces the impact of colonialism from a European present. The uniqueness of Europe stands at the forefront and the problem of “race” is placed elsewhere—specifically, in places like the United States, where the age-old problem of the “color line” (Du Bois [1903] Reference Du Bois1965 endures. In contrast, European anti-racialism invalidates the racial problem in former colonial empires, such as France, the UK, the Netherlands, and Portugal (among others), where contemporary patterns of racial inequality and White supremacist actions are taken as exceptions rather than the rule.
Anti-racialism was not always readily accepted throughout the European political community. The ideological “death” of racism traces back to the aftermath of the Holocaust when scientific racism and the formal racial categorization of the human species was disavowed by a global community. Western elites also promoted anti-racialism to curtail claims for redistributive politics made by growing anti-colonial and anti-imperial political movements (Araújo and Maeso, Reference Maeso2016). With anti-racialism the reference point became Nazism of the twentieth century; slavery and colonialism as a determining factor in producing the modern nation-state, and the racialized relationship between the “West and the rest,” became obscured if not ignored (Hall Reference Hall, Gupta, James, Andersen, Galabuzi and Maaka1992).
The power of anti-racialism lies in its ability to ideologically transform race and racism as counter to national identity even while simultaneously naturalizing their existence (Wekker Reference Wekker2016). For example, the globalization of the neoliberal economy, alongside massive decolonization campaigns of the twentieth century, has been accompanied by colonial out-migrations from former African colonies to the metropole. Yet, political anti-racialism is one mode through which a global anti-Blackness operates through “racial Europeanization” (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2006); that is, the socio-political denial of European racial heterogeneity cements the falsity of a racial homogeneity of belonging. This, argues David Theo Goldberg (Reference Goldberg2009), includes “criminalizing not just immigration but (those perceived as) immigrants by state agents” and by “a state citizenry frenzied by fear” (p. 181). Further, the immigrant, or those perceived as immigrant in Europe today, also labors within an economy that reflects a racially ordered social landscape where immigrants and their progeny are treated as perpetual outsiders even while many labor within stigmatized, precarious, and low waged service and caring work (Andall Reference Andall2000; Fikes Reference Fikes2009; Henriques Reference Henriques2018; Lucht Reference Lucht2011; Small Reference Small2018a).
Anti-racialism also curtails serious political directives towards ameliorating racial discrimination as states promote a colorblind or postracial political agenda (Boulila Reference Boulila2019b). The denial of race that accompanies anti-racialism means that political conversations around inequalities that are patterned by race—in housing, education, and policing, to name but a few—may often occur with no mention of race at all (Gilroy [1987] Reference Gilroy1991; Goldberg Reference Goldberg2015). The logic underlying anti-racialism—that no individual should be categorized socially, politically, or legally on the basis of race—is also expressed in the State’s refusal to collect any form of official racial statistics (Beaman Reference Beaman2017). As anti-racialism is to stand “against a concept, a name, a category,” individuals and groups that express that they have encountered racial oppression are silenced, chastised, or deemed ignorant in civil society (Fleming Reference Fleming2017; Goldberg Reference Goldberg2015, p. 10). This is reminiscent of how colorblindness in the United States both perpetuates and minimizes the importance of race and racism (Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva2014). Similarly, anti-racialism naturalizes racialized social difference even while it denies it.
THE PORTUGUESE CONTEXT
The Portuguese context presents an important case study of European anti-racialism, for a number of reasons. First, Portugal was the first empire to initiate colonialism and the last empire to carry out decolonization. Even after African liberation movements fiercely shook the global community in the 1960s and 1970s and forced former colonial empires in Europe to decolonize, contemporary migratory flows toward Portugal continued to be linked to its colonial history, with a continuous flow of people from its former African colonial territories—Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Guinea Bissau (also referred to as PALOP)—settling in Portugal (Batalha Reference Batalha2004; Carreira Reference Carreira1982).Footnote 1 Cape Verdeans, in fact, constitute the largest contemporary PALOP African-descendant group in Portugal, and research reports that they continue to face racial marginalization via residential segregation, in education, in the job market, and by law enforcement (Fikes Reference Fikes2009; Góis Reference Góis2008; Marques et al., Reference Marques, Rosa and Martins2007; Raposo et al., Reference Raposo, Alves, Varela and Roldão2019; Seabra et al., Reference Seabra, Mateus, Rodrigues and Nico2011, Reference Seabra, Roldão, Mateus and Albuquerque2016). Given the pre-eminence of the Portuguese ex-colonies in the dominant immigration flows spanning back to the early 1900s, multigenerational networks of Cape Verdean migrants in Portugal are fairly common today.
Second, and perhaps paradoxically, Portugal provides a unique comparison to the United States as a context where racial labelling is unsubstantiated by the state. This principle has been further transposed to the Data Protection Act, which forbids the collection of information regarding ethnic or racial origin. In this sense, anti-racialism acts as one of the main ideological mechanisms in contemporary Portugal today (Araújo and Maeso, Reference Araújo and Maeso2016). Within the Portuguese academy, anti-racialism means that many researchers avoid studying race and racial oppression (Araújo Reference Araújo, Kretsedemas, Capetillo-Ponce and Jacobs2013). Anti-racialism operates in the educational setting, with Portuguese history textbooks largely reducing racism to nineteenth century imperialism only and therefore racism is not conceived as a contemporary possibility (Araújo and Maeso, Reference Araújo and Maeso2012). As argued by Marta Araújo and Silvia Rodriguez Maeso (Reference Maeso2016), the pervasiveness of anti-racialism in Portuguese society serves the political function of de-politicizing an anti-racial agenda while reinforcing a cultural commonsense which attests the alleged tolerant nature of the Portuguese nation. Importantly, the existence of Portuguese anti-racial ideology reflects a broader collective political European consensus regarding Europe’s allegedly tolerant and anti-racial nature.
The pervasiveness of Portuguese anti-racial ideology cannot be understood divorced from the historical context. Influenced by Brazilian elite Gilberto Freyre’s (Reference Freyre1944, Reference Freyre1952) scholarly work, cultural narratives of “lusotropicalism” posit that Portugal is an exemplar case of “benevolent colonialism” due to a history of increased “miscegenation” in the former African colonies (Vala de Almeida Reference Vale de Almeida2006). These cultural narratives also held particular political sway in the midst of global African national liberation movements of the twentieth century when the then fascist dictator of Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar, sought to rebrand colonialism by advertising the idea that Portugal was a racist-free multiracial nation (Araújo Reference Araújo, Kretsedemas, Capetillo-Ponce and Jacobs2013). Still, lusotropicalist narratives served the political function of hiding or obscuring injustice, as Salazar and others promoted White supremacy and the inferiority of people of African descent (Vale de Almeida Reference Vale de Almeida2006). Freyre’s optimistic vision of racial mixing also ignored the relationship between sexual violence and colonialism, thus presupposing the sexual availability of the Black or “native” woman in the colonies. Further, de facto slavery continued well into the twentieth century in Cape Verde due to the existence of a system of labor contract that was reminiscent of slavery in terms of working conditions (Carreira Reference Carreira1982; Meintel Reference Meintel1984).
During 1975 decolonization, the Portuguese state also reinforced racial division by reversing the principle of jus soli (nationality based on land ties) to jus sanguinis (nationality based on blood ties), thereby retroactively stripping African-descendants of their citizenship and ensuring that many would compose an exploitable labor supply for decades (Fikes Reference Fikes2009). The 1981 Portuguese nationality law further excluded children of immigrants from immediate access to Portuguese nationality and changes implemented in 2006 (Organic Law no. 2/2006) and 2018 (Organic Law no. 2/2018) continue to disadvantage African-descendant families with ties to former African colonies (Gil and Piçarra, Reference Gil and Piçarra2020; Piçarra and Gil, Reference Piçarra and Gil2012). In this sense, anti-Black ideological notions, rooted in colonialism, were embedded at the level of social practice during decolonization and continue to impact social relations between “citizens” and “non-citizens.”
Today, Portugal remains constitutionally and ideologically anti-racial where the image of an exceptional Portuguese colonial legacy of racial tolerance is considered part of Portuguese national identity (Araújo Reference Araújo, Kretsedemas, Capetillo-Ponce and Jacobs2013; Arenas Reference Arenas2015; Henriques Reference Henriques2018; Maeso Reference Maeso2016). Yet scholars argue that the intersection of Portuguese anti-racial and lusotropicalist ideologies naturalize the inequality faced by African and African descendants in Portugal (Araújo Reference Araújo, Kretsedemas, Capetillo-Ponce and Jacobs2013, Reference Araújo and Maeso2016; Dias and Dias, Reference Dias and Dias2012; Fikes Reference Fikes2009; Maeso and Araújo, Reference Maeso, Araújo, Alana and Hund2014, Reference Maeso and Araújo2017; Small Reference Small2018a). Though anti-racialism translates over to a scarcity of data statistics on race and ethnicity, research finds that PALOP groups are heavily concentrated in racially segregated neighborhoods in the outer fringes of the Lisbon metropolitan area, with significant numbers of the PALOP immigrant population occupying low-waged, precarious, service and care jobs (Batalha Reference Batalha2004; Fikes Reference Fikes2009; Pereira Reference Pereira2010, Reference Pereira2013; Wall and Nunes, Reference Wall and Nunes2010).
Researchers on second-generation Cape Verdean youth also report that Africans “are more prone to be perceived as immigrants than any other category” (Marques et al., Reference Marques, Rosa and Martins2007, p. 1149). Scholars find alarming disparities in the area of education with African students most likely to be grade-retained and referred to vocational courses, a reality scholars attribute to the existence of institutionalized racism within the educational system (Roldão Reference Roldão, Oliva, Chaves, Filice and do nascimento2019; Seabra et al., Reference Seabra, Mateus, Rodrigues and Nico2011, Reference Seabra, Roldão, Mateus and Albuquerque2016). While this research does not fully account for the racialized and gendered experiences of African-descendant women, Kesha Fikes’ (Reference Fikes2009) work on Cape Verdean women peixeiras (fishmongers) in Portugal illustrates how many Portuguese White citizens reproduce their citizenship and reconfirm their Whiteness by means of “encountering” the African migrant woman and vehemently questioning her right to public space as well as national belonging. But what the research has not fully addressed is how Afro-descendants, who have achieved legislative status, conceptualize, experience, and contest their own sense of belonging in the anti-racial ideological context of Portugal.
BELONGING, RACIALIZATION, AND THE SPECIFICITY OF ANTI-BLACKNESS
In this article, I argue that African-descendant women’s everyday experiences of belonging in Portugal challenge ideologies of anti-racialism, which posits that citizenship and nationality are the primary social legal marker of differentiation. Indeed, citizenship is commonly understood as a legal institution that governs rights and responsibilities, in which individuals are either holders (citizens) or non-holders (non-citizens) of those rights and responsibilities (Marshall [Reference Marshall1950] 1992). Although this model represents the experience of undocumented individuals who must contend with internal and punitive immigration enforcement, the institution of citizenship also differentiates among holders of legislative citizenship (Glenn Reference Glenn2011). For this reason, Jean Beaman (Reference Beaman2017) utilizes the term “citizen outsider” to account for how second-generation, middle-class children of North African immigrants in France are both citizens yet kept on the margins of society, due to their racialized identities. Similarly, historian Mae Ngai (Reference Ngai2007) posits that an “alien citizen” is a citizen “whose citizenship is suspect, if not denied, on account of the racialized identity of her immigrant ancestry” (p. 2521). Perceived as non-citizens, they often become targets of “racialized nativism” based on racialized notions of foreignness, or non-belonging (Sanchez Reference Sanchez1997).
To address this gap, scholars argue that the politics of belonging is a more adequate analytical framework than citizenship status for considering the integration of racialized immigrants and their offspring (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2009; Keaton Reference Keaton2010). According to Evelyn Nakano Glenn (Reference Glenn2002), “[C]itizenship is not a matter of formal or legal status; it is a matter of belonging, including recognition by other members of the community” (p. 52). Belonging is thus a collective and local process, as members of community reinforce and maintain its boundaries (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2009). The politics of belonging also encompass the political projects of the state and civil society that construct belonging and maintain and reproduce boundaries around communities (Yuval-Davis Reference Davis2011). In this sense, citizenship itself is a political project of belonging as states reinforce quotidian feelings of belonging as they control the conditions by which groups may be expelled or seek and gain entrance. Belonging, therefore, is relational; nation-states define themselves against those who belong as well against those who the state excludes from belonging.
While viewing citizenship as a matter of belonging does go beyond legislative status, the politics of belonging framework does not fully address the experiences of Africans and Afro-descendants in European contexts such as Portugal. This is because the conditions of anti-Blackness, not as an ideology in itself but as a racializing power structure, often escape general theorizations of belonging. Anti-Blackness is a structure of racial dominance that acts as pillar of White supremacy such that those who are racialized as Black are rendered non-being, foreign, out of place and therefore subject to scrutiny, gratuitous violence, exploitation, and enslaveability (Hartman Reference Hartman1997, Reference Hartman2016; Saucier Reference Saucier2015; Sexton Reference Sexton2016; Spiller Reference Spillers1987; Wilderson Reference Wilderson2003). Anti-Blackness also refers to how categories such as citizenship and humanity “stand beyond and against, and thereby derive definition from the subordination and exclusion of, blackness” (Jung Reference Jung2015, p. 195). Colonialist regimes constitute highly consequential political projects of racialized anti-Black non-belonging where slavery, exploitation, and coercive labor schemes ushered in the political and social differentiation between different types of bodies (Menzel Reference Menzel2013); that of “Black” was legally constructed in relation to that of “free,” “White,” and “human,” thus legally demarcating the boundaries around those who legitimately belonged to the nation and metropole, both racially and culturally (Fanon [1952] Reference Fanon2008; Mills Reference Mills1997; Wynter Reference Wynter2003).
In the case of Portugal, for example, slavery and coercive labor migration schemes established heinous patterns of inequality among African and non-African workers, Blacks, Whites, and varying degrees of racialized others, such as mulattoes, within the former Southern colonies and within the colonial metropole (Carreira Reference Carreira1982; Saunders Reference Saunders1982).Footnote 2 This European colonial racial formation meant that small numbers of Africans were allowed entrance into Europe. As European nations engaged in Empire building, the simultaneous disenfranchisement of Africans in the overseas colonies, along with the relative exclusion of Africans from entering Europe, buttressed Whites’ own sense of racial and national belonging (and Black non-belonging) in the process (Small Reference Small2018a, Reference Smallb). In other words, the socio-political construction of Whiteness and belonging hinged on the non-belonging of those who were racialized as Black, and therefore non-citizen and non-human.
Colonialism also transplanted racialized and gendered conceptions of belonging in the metropole that constructed and normalized White masculine national identity and granted White women national belonging while denying them an independent identity from that of their husbands (Hartman Reference Hartman1997; Kilomba Reference Kilomba2008; Oyèwùmí Reference Oyěwùmí1997). This normalization of feminine Whiteness, however, rested on the racialization and dehumanization of Black women as Black women’s sexual reproduction played a pivotal role in expanding the legal conception of racial slavery (Hartman Reference Hartman2016). In the case of Cape Verde, for example, African women were omitted from national belonging even while their bodies and reproductive labor were strategically regulated to extend colonialist regimes, even after legal emancipation. The “Law of the Free Womb” of 1856 mandated that the children (under the age of thirteen) of an enslaved mother be bound to serve their mothers’ masters without payment until the age of twenty, even after emancipation (Carreira Reference Carreira1982, p. 107).
Further, de facto slavery took the place of nineteenth century chattel slavery through the colonial administration’s implementation of vagrancy laws and labor contracts that recruited men to work in deleterious conditions (Lobban Reference Lobban1995). African women, whether enslaved or free, were likewise compelled to engage in subsistence agriculture and the labor peonage system and were therefore not afforded the same feminine status as White women (Carter and Aulette, Reference Carter and Aulette2009). Hortense Spiller (Reference Spillers1987) refers to this process as the dehumanized ungendering of Black women where historical violence, such as the reproductive economy of chattel slavery and the post-emancipation labor peonage system, restricted Black women from normative kinship structures such as the nation. This ungendering of Black women meant that they and their families could not belong to the colonial empire outside of exploitative commodification. This is not to say that gender does not matter. Rather, gender alone reflects gendered Whiteness, and the dominant gender norms associated with the human category “woman” never applied to bodies that have been racialized as Black and therefore non-human. Instead, gratuitous violence directed at Black women of the African diaspora incited a human/inhuman and masculine/feminine categorization system which placed the Black women within a structural system of servitude within the gendered and racialized White human gaze (McKittrick Reference McKittrick2006).
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
While access to citizenship and legality represent an important issue facing Portugal’s Afro-descendent communities, in this article I home in on the experiences of citizen and permanent resident African-descendant women. Similar to past research on African descendants in other European contexts, their experiences and perceptions of belonging illustrate an on-going process in Portugal where those who are perceived as Black are rendered foreign, regardless of one’s legality (Beaman Reference Beaman2017; Fanon [1952] Reference Fanon2008; Frisina and Hawthorne, Reference Frisina and Hawthorne2018; Perry Reference Perry2015). I extend this research by bridging anti-Blackness with belonging to illustrate the ontological character of what I refer to as “anti-Black non-belonging” in Portugal. My argument is that Black womanhood is not intelligible within an understanding of belonging given that historical violence resulted in the dehumanization of Black women and their kin groups from the perspective of Whiteness as the overrepresentation of the feminine and masculine citizen human (Hartman Reference Hartman2016; McKittrick Reference McKittrick2006; Smith Reference Smith2016a, Reference Smithb; Spillers Reference Spillers1987; Wynter Reference Wynter, Davies and Fido1990). In this sense, anti-Black non-belonging is relational. Others are able to reinforce their security as part of the dominant racial group in Portugal through the rendering of Black women and their families as foreign and out of place, regardless of their legality.
This framework of belonging also recognizes that contemporary everyday practices of anti-Black non-belonging in Portugal are not essential facts, but rather reflect how structural anti-Blackness impacts the way bodies are read for signs of non-belonging. While anti-Black racism refers to exclusion based on one’s identity, anti-Blackness refers to how Blackness reflects the category of ontological non-being. As I will illustrate throughout, it’s not that discrimination based on one’s racial identity is not relevant, but rather how a larger ontological structure of Anti-Blackness facilitates the racialized exclusion around belonging encountered by Black people day to day (Fanon [1952] Reference Fanon2008). The framework of anti-Black belonging also recognizes how everyday acts of anti-Black non-belonging are interwoven into the fabric of the social system, yet this system is continuously constructed in everyday life through the performance of practices that reinforce, activate, and reproduce existing structural patterns of inequalities (Essed Reference Essed1991; Kilomba Reference Kilomba2008).
However, the women’s narratives I present in this paper convey how there are two sides to everyday acts of anti-Black belonging and non-belonging in Portugal; on the one side, others mark women’s bodies simultaneously as both Black, foreign, non-being, and out of place while they reconfirm their status as both White and citizen. Yet, as individuals are “Blackened” they also draw from their oppositional knowledge to envision a world beyond a hierarchical patterning of human belonging. They challenge anti-Black non-belonging by affirming their children’s right to belong and they reject the anti-Blackness of European anti-racialism. Their collective response to the domination they face therefore illustrates how anti-Black non-belonging is a matter of both oppression and resistance.
DATA AND METHODS
I draw on data from an ethnographic study I conducted in the Lisbon metropolitan area between 2014 and 2016 that was designed to explore Cape Verdean elder care workers’ lives in Portugal. This larger study focused on care workers, given the PALOP communities’ disproportionate representation in this occupational sector (Abrantes Reference Abrantes2014; Fikes Reference Fikes2009; Pereira Reference Pereira2010, Reference Pereira2013; Wall and Nunes, Reference Wall and Nunes2010). With a population of approximately 10.5 million, Portugal’s foreign-born population constitutes about three percent of the population; approximately 150,000 immigrant-origin Afro-descendants reside in Portugal, the majority of whom reside in the Lisbon metropolitan area (Small Reference Small2018a). As Portugal does not collect ethnic and racial data, this number is likely larger if subsequent generations are considered. Among legal foreign residents, Cape Verdeans comprise the largest African immigrant group (approximately 40,000), followed by Angolans (approximately 27,0000) (Statistics Portugal Reference Portugal2018).
With the use of chain referral sampling techniques, I recruited thirty-two Cape Verdean women care workers. I initiated chains by distributing recruitment flyers throughout public spaces in Lisbon, such as bus and metro terminals, commercial centers, and indoor markets, and I began assembling potential research participants through these referrals. In order to ensure that my recruitment did not target a specific neighborhood, I distributed these fliers both in heavily trafficked spaces located in central Lisbon as well as in heavily trafficked spaces across the Lisbon metropolitan fringe areas that are home to a larger segment of multi-generational Cape Verdean and PALOP families. Thus, multiple networks were strategically accessed to expand the scope of investigation.
I conducted all the formal semi-structured interviews in Portuguese, though I gave participants the option to answer in either Portuguese or Cape Verdean kriolu. Interviews lasted sixty to ninety minutes and the majority of interviews were conducted in the private homes of respondents. Approximately half of the sample consists of naturalized citizens, two participants are Portuguese-born citizens of Cape Verdean descent, and the remaining half are permanent residents on the pathway to naturalization. All but two of the participants were mothers. Among the foreign-born, the women I interviewed had been in the country for an average of twelve years at the time of their interviews. All but one participant cites lineage to the Cape Verdean archipelago island of Santiago. This is significant, given that Santiago has the strongest historical ties to the transatlantic slave trade and the majority of Cape Verdean-origin individuals in Portugal today have ties to Santiago, the majority of whom are of darker complexions (Batalha Reference Batalha2004; Fikes Reference Fikes2009).
My aim was to gather detailed data on the quotidian and participant-driven meaning making among Cape Verdean care workers who reflect an important segment of the racially segregated service work force in Portugal (Fikes Reference Fikes2009). To do this, I utilize a counternarrative methodology (Solorzano and Yosso, Reference Solórzano and Yosso2002). As argued by Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins (Reference Collins2000), oppositional knowledge developed from oppositional, outsider-within locations remains cognizant of power and therefore simulates resistance. Taking this one step further, Katherine McKittrick (Reference McKittrick2006) argues that the gendered anti-Blackness confronted by Black women results not only in their marginalization and erasure; Black women also draw from their marginalized subject position to initiate “everyday contestations” and “philosophical demands” (p. 121). A counternarrative methodology therefore builds from the subaltern subject position and explores the stories Black women tell that resist the dominant classificatory order. In their claims they make at a particular moment, speakers employ oppositional knowledge to “expose the construction of the dominant story by suggesting how else it could be told” (Harris et al., Reference Harris, Carney and Fine2001, p. 13).
One way I utilized this methodological approach is by augmenting the interview protocol early on to reflect the theme of anti-Black non-belonging that was gleaned during every day conversations in the field and which emerged from the iterative process of going between memo-ing and collecting data. I posed the following questions:
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1. If you are walking down the street, how do you feel others perceive you?
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2. Have you ever experienced discrimination based on skin color or nationality? Did you respond to these instances? If you could respond now, how might you respond or speak back?
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3. What does being Portuguese and/or having Portuguese citizenship/residence mean to you?
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4. Do you think others see you and/or your family members as Portuguese?
These questions sought perceptions and explanations of belonging as well as changes the respondents would make if they had the power to do so. Interview questions were structured in a way that did not assume race, nationality or gender were the most salient categories, but rather allowed participants to reflect on how, if at all, these categories may surface in any way during the politics of everyday life.
All interview data was transcribed through professional transcription services and I utilized pseudonyms to protect participants’ identities. I also obscured or completely omitted non-material information that could identify participants. Additionally, I utilized grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin, Reference Strauss and Corbin1997) for qualitative data analysis. To do this, I entered all data from interviews into NVivo, a qualitative software program and coded it line by line, analyzing the transcripts iteratively by switching between coding and memo-ing in order to allow for the ongoing revision of questions and theoretical claims in light of new data. I then aggregated codes thematically by grouping material around substantive emergent themes, first at broad levels and then into more specific categories within those broad levels. I gradually developed the concept “anti-Black belonging” and further developed this concept by engaging in theoretical dialogue with the existing literature.
As cultural experience is essential to a grounded analysis of Black women’s lives (Collins Reference Collins2000), I discussed some of my own family background with participants, who were curious as to why I was interested in their experiences. Upon learning that my partner is Cape Verdean, that I had travelled to Cape Verde extensively, that my stepfather was an immigrant, and that some of my African American relatives also work in home care agencies, many of the women I met seemed at more ease. I also found it important to establish relationships with anyone who I planned on interviewing. I did this by accepting invitations to spend time together and participate in culturally meaningful community events, such as baptisms, birthdays, and parties. I also brought participants and their families gifts, such as Black hair products, and they entrusted me to carry gifts for their families from one country to the next. The nature of the activities do not find place in the data for this paper, but I believe they strengthened the research relationship as respondents passionately offered information around anti-Blackness and belonging, often without being prompted.
EXPERIENCING ANTI-BLACK NON-BELONGING IN PORTUGAL
In 2013, a Cape Verdean friend vividly described some of the everyday racist incidents he encountered as he went about his day while visiting family in Lisbon. What particularly struck me was his description of graffiti that had been present on a side of the building during a visit in 2007. He explained that the graffiti read, “Negro [Black], don’t make me be racist, go back to your country.” But someone had responded to this proclamation by tagging the building with equally strong words: “We are here because you were there!”
In the first quote, racism is framed as a response to migration and the presence of Blacks in Portugal—in this sense, Blacks or “negros” are the problem that needs to be addressed. The unknown author (or authors) of this message frames Blacks as immigrants or foreigners who do not belong and who, in effect, enter Portugal of their own free will unencumbered by larger systemic processes. The response to this declaration, “We are here because you were there,” alludes to histories of colonial pasts and frames Blacks not as immigrants or foreigners but as “being here” due to socio-historical-political ties between Portugal and Africa. Most importantly, this response squarely connects belonging to non-belonging as one cannot exist without the other.
Indeed, a clear message prevails on the wall. Despite the long-standing socio-political history between Africa and Europe as well as a long-standing presence of African and African-descendant communities in Portugal, the initial message portrayed in the graffiti does not portray Blacks as truly Portuguese. The same message had been conveyed to several of my participants. As they explained, they face increased scrutiny and aggression by “rank and file” White citizens on their commute to and from work, who continue to feel and express the opinion, during everyday interaction, that Blacks do not—and should not—belong to the nation. In their view, the aggression that they confront “blackens” them from the perspective of Whiteness as the over-representation of who belongs. This blackening, I argue, illustrates how being Black in an anti-Black world, extends over to their own self-understanding.
Challenging “Being” in Space
A major mode in which anti-Black non-belonging plays out is through White citizens’ challenging of Black women’s general right to “be” in certain spaces. As Tryon Woods (Reference Woods2013) has argued, Blackness lies in negativity, “encompassing bodies (black people), social spaces (black neighborhoods), and geo-political regions (Africa and the diaspora)” (p. 126). Katherine McKittrick (Reference McKittrick2011) has similarly described how anti-Blackness has persistently denied a “black sense of place” (p. 948). In her view, the colonial violence of the transatlantic slavery and post-slavery labor regimes profited from spatialized violence such that Black bodies were marked as “without Euro-centric history narratives, without land or a home, without ownership of self” (p. 948). I therefore see “being” in place as an ontological expression of negation, since the human who is understood as socially belonging in place is not Black but, rather, normatively White. Indeed, all but one of the thirty-two Cape Verdean women I interviewed had either witnessed others being racially harassed or had been directly accosted or harassed by White Portuguese in public spaces, such as schools, commercial centers, on sidewalks, in public parks, at transportation terminals or stops, or at restaurants. They express the general feeling of being treated and targeted as displaced. For example, when asked whether they had experienced any sort of discrimination, participants said the following:
Suely: In school, they always put the Black students to the side. On the streets, people sometimes scream out, “Oh go back to your country, fucking Preta (derogatory word for Black women)” [chuckles nervously]. Sorry, but they called me that. Preta. Yes, they said to me on the streets, “Go back to your country. Don’t come here. You don’t rule here, pretos”.
Francesca: There’s always something that they [White Portuguese] don’t like. Sometimes in the transportation when there are a lot of Africans (there’s) always someone who gets up and goes to sit in another seat. I have been told that I smell bad, directly. And I have been told to go back to my country, just like that. “Go back to your country!” They told me that when I was on the bus.
Dalgiza: I saw this happen to another African person, too. We were in line to catch the bus and so … I don’t know if that man had been here [in the country] for a little bit of time, and he didn’t know the rules. So, he walked through the line of people and tried to enter the bus right away. And when he entered the bus, a woman says, “Ahh, I don’t know why you all don’t go back to your country. You all don’t know anything. You come and do things like that. Don’t you see there’s a line…[pauses]…pretos”.
Above, the respondents detail how, in everyday interactions, Whites in Portugal simultaneously draw from notions of foreignness (i.e. “go back to your country”) and gendered Blackness (i.e. “preto/a”) in their assaults on Black people in public spaces. In the cases described above, private actors—pedestrians on the street and a patron at a bus stop—become self-appointed enforcers of anti-Black non-belonging. A thirty-five-year-old informant similarly described how a White man had physically pushed her out of a line at a grocery store, immediately after telling her to go back to her country. A twenty-seven-year-old Portuguese born informant also recounted how a White man who walked hand in hand with his daughter called her a Preta and told her to go back to her country as she waited outside of her school yard as a child. She said, “I remember feeling confused and wondering why someone would attack a child like that.” These scenarios are illustrative of how White citizens may use several forms of everyday physical and epistemic violence to challenge Black woman’s being. For centuries, Black women’s existence has been violently denied through regimes of slavery, heteropatriarchy, labor peonage, and, indeed, though the epistemological challenging of one’s right to exist in space (Smith Reference Smith2016a, Reference Smithb).
These everyday private actors who challenge Black women’s belonging have less connection to the state as do individuals who are conventionally thought of as state actors, such as law enforcement or immigration officers or public officials; yet, they still wield a level of power by treating Blackness as a problem. The message they convey by telling informants to go back to their countries signals to Blacks that they do not belong in the national polity and are therefore foreigners or strangers, even though they may be citizens by naturalization or by birth. Significantly, it is anti-Blackness (telling “Pretos” to go back to their countries) in these scenarios that acts as the determining factor of legitimate belonging, as the negation of Blackness is used to draw boundaries between “Whites” and “Blacks,” between those who are told to go back to their country and those who are empowered to tell others to leave. Indeed, it is through the rendering of Black women as foreign and out of place, regardless of their legality, that others are able to reinforce their security as part of the dominant racial group in Portugal. In this sense, the structuring ideology of anti-Black non-belonging also empowers individuals by providing a sense of racialized group membership to those who “belong” to the dominant group and therefore the nation (Arendt Reference Arendt1970).
Dilza, a thirty-year-old naturalized Portuguese citizen who initially migrated some fifteen years prior through family reunification, also had a lot to say about the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in Portugal. Though Dilza is a citizen, she does not feel especially integrated into Portugal and believes that she and her daughter will never be truly considered Portuguese in Portugal, regardless of their legality:
Someday…I’m going to go back [to Cape Verde] because here, even if you have Portuguese nationality, you will never be the same! Never. An immigrant will never stop being an immigrant in any part of the world. Today, I have Portuguese nationality, but I am never considered Portuguese. According to the Portuguese, a Cape Verdean that is naturalized or born here will NEVER [emphasis, hers] be Portuguese! Oh, they may have the passport, but the Portuguese do not view them as Portuguese. Because your color will always say something about you. Or the way you live, your culture is not accepted here. I am Preta; that’s who I am to them.
Dilza’s comments refer to a racialized conception of citizenship that goes beyond mere legislative status. In Dilza’s view, holding a passport does not extend feelings of national belonging because her Blackness is understood by White others in opposition to citizenship. When she states, “I am Preta, that’s who I am to them,” she clearly positions the intersection of her race and gender as salient statuses, and the message she conveys is one of racialized exclusion anchored in gendered anti-Blackness: Black women are unwelcomed. In order for Blackness to hold meaning it must be contrasted to Whiteness, just as the racialized subject position of (White) citizen is constructed in relation to Black non-belonging and non-citizenship. In an Anti-Black world, her Blackness is circumscribed by negation.
As anti-Blackness is interwoven in the fabric of the social system, ideological forms of anti-Black non-belonging combine with structural processes of the state to regulate the position of the “Portuguese” dominant group vis-à-vis African descendants. During one field visit in 2015, many people I met had been distressed over a recent incident in the Lisboan neighborhood of Alfragide involving law enforcement. The scenario, they argued, served as testimony to how exclusionary practices of anti-Blackness are buttressed by actors of the state, such as law enforcement. During the early morning of February 5, a Cape Verdean man was badly beaten by a “Rapid Intervention Team” of police officers in Cova da Moura, a neighborhood located in the Lisbon periphery and home to Africans and African descendants. As a group surrounded the party in protest, the officers shot rubber buckshot into the crowd, injuring others. Later, a smaller group stood outside of the police station in protest of what had happened only to be arrested themselves and humiliated, handcuffed, and beaten by officers as they spewed racial hatred that framed Blacks as undesirable non-citizens. The police officers’ words, “I want to exterminate all of you from this land,” are clear markers of how Black migrants and their descendants are seen as degenerating the nation; they were attacked not for what they had done, but for how they were perceived as not-White, not-citizen, and not-human subjects, which resulted in violence and calls for extermination.Footnote 3
On another evening during fieldwork, two of my Cape Verdean women participants, both of whom are naturalized citizens, and I came across fifteen of Portugal’s Rapid Intervention Team officers in full combat uniform in a small African neighborhood club. The officers instructed all standing patrons to stand against the wall while they tore through the sofas, inspecting the seams, crevices, and corners of the furniture. As we stood against the wall, the officers searched the bathrooms, closets, and the bar. My participants were both visibly anxious because they left their identification at home and discreetly texted their partners to get there as soon as possible with their identification. In short, though they possessed legality, they were afraid.
Mothering “Bona Fide” Citizens
Black women care workers are especially vulnerable to racist harassment in public spaces, not only due to transient nature of their work (traveling to and from care recipients’ homes, often in predominately White sections of the city), but also due to how gendered anti-Blackness restricts (White) feminine innocence from Black women and therefore constructs them as appropriate for insult (Collins Reference Collins2000; Fikes Reference Fikes2009; Frisina and Hawthorne, Reference Frisina and Hawthorne2018). This especially plays out in the micro-politics of daily life among mothers who carry out the daily caring of their kin. One mother told me about a time that she was walking with her daughters to school when a White Portuguese woman, walking hand in hand with a child herself, abrasively told my informant that she “detests anything Black.” What struck my respondent the most was how this White woman gazed fiercely upon my respondent’s daughter when she uttered these hateful remarks.
Of the thirty mothers I interviewed, twenty-four had indicated that their mothering of so-called “legitimate” citizens had been called into question by others in public space, both implicitly and explicitly. Indeed, this denial of Black motherhood as experienced by participants deserves considerable interrogation. Across cultures, women’s role as mother has historically been considered their ultimate moral obligation and motherhood has played a critical role in women’s subordination to men (Collins Reference Collins2000). Yet, the Portuguese colonial Empire minimized—if not denied—this role to African women through their dehumanization on the basis of race and the state’s control of enslaved African women’s sexual reproduction. As reminded by Saidiya Hartman’s (Reference Hartman1997) work, women’s sexual and reproductive labor acted as the definitional site for legitimating and inheriting racial slavery as the “natal alienation” of colonialism denied enslaved African women the claims of kinship (Hartman Reference Hartman2016). In this sense, when Black women are denied “motherhood” they are also “de-gendered” from the perspective of Whiteness as the overrepresentation of the feminine citizen human (Wynter Reference Wynter2003).
For example, Luana, a Portuguese citizen herself, also recognizes that Afro-descendants are largely omitted from the national polity that is associated with Whiteness, despite their legality. As she explains below, this is especially concerning to her with regard to raising a child in Portugal:
In part, I don’t feel very good about raising a Black son here in Portugal. I tell my son, “you are both Portuguese and African.” Many White Portuguese people have told me outright, “No, he is not a Black (Preto) Portuguese because Black Portuguese people don’t exist!” The rest of the majority feign as though they accept us, but they don’t.
Above, Luana reflects on how her five-year-old son, a native-born Portuguese citizen, is not recognized as legitimately embodying the subject position of citizen because he is Black and because she is a Black woman. In this sense, her mothering of a “legitimate” citizen is called into question. The rejection of her son’s belonging by White Portuguese cannot be understood divorced from the historical context, as the colonial and post-colonial Portuguese state has historically regulated Black women’s bodies to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate belonging. While the precedent of jus sanguinis has been diminished by Organic Law no. 2/2018, Portuguese-born children are only legally considered Portuguese if one of their parents has been residing legally in Portugal for at least two years. In this sense, the notion that “Black Portuguese people don’t exist” reflects the intersection of gendered anti-Blackness and Portuguese anti-racial ideology which inadvertently tells Luana that she is unable to birth a human being deserving of Portuguese citizenship. While both she and her son are citizens, this does not stop the denial of her motherhood, given that she is racialized and gendered as Black woman and therefore her citizenship is subject to scrutiny. Later, I asked Luana whether she felt her Portuguese nationality was validated by others, and Luana added:
They will look for your roots… It happens every day, in the little things. I brought my son to the doctor. And the White doctor, before even looking at our paperwork, he looks at me and my son and asks, “When did you bring your son to this country?” Because they look at my son and me and they don’t consider the possibility that he is or I am Portuguese.
As evidenced by the above narrative, anti-Black non-belonging is not one-directional. The doctor in the above scenario not only misinterprets Luana and her son as “foreigners,” but in the process he re-confirms his racialized group membership and status as normative (White) citizen. To put it in another way, as Luana and her son are Black, they experience what it is like to occupy a different subject position—that of foreigner, even though they are citizens and carry protection from deportation. Significantly, what is actually being conveyed to her is that those who can legitimately embody the subject position of Portuguese mother, and those who can legitimately give birth to a so-called “bona fide” citizen human, are White women and, in effect, not Black women like her.
CHALLENGING ANTI-BLACK NON-BELONGING
I have illustrated how denying Blackness from the essence of being Portuguese is central to how Whites contest Cape Verdean women’s belonging, such as by questioning their rightful identity or legitimate mothering, or by vehemently telling Black people to “go back to their countries” of origin. These practices of anti-Black non-belonging reflect the ongoing racialization of Black women care workers in Portugal who frequently encounter White citizens in public space. But my informants were far from silent; they used their voices and emotions to passionately speak back to devaluation and to resist the intersections of anti-Blackness, gender oppression, and non-belonging they have confronted in everyday life. As argued by Patricia Hill Collins (Reference Collins2000), such activities are illustrative of how collectively shared “oppositional knowledge” emerges from marginal locations where groups enact resistance. Philomena Essed (Reference Essed1991) similarly argues that Black women’s critical knowledge of everyday racism provides practical tools for questioning the ideological pervasiveness of racial dominance and subordination in society.
Taking this a step further, scholars argue that Black women exist in both a subaltern and generative space (McKittick Reference McKittrick2006; Wynter Reference Wynter, Davies and Fido1990). These “demonic grounds,” or the space of Otherness in an Anti-Black world, encompass both literal and figurative spaces where Black women imagine a world that is not circumscribed by hierarchies of humanness (Wynter Reference Wynter, Davies and Fido1990). Black women create “new forms of life” which exist altogether outside of the “partial human stories” engendered by the structuring logic of anti-Blackness (McKittrick Reference McKittrick2006, p. 135). The Cape Verdean women I met not only seek to be recognized as belonging to the Portuguese nation itself. By challenging anti-racial ideologies of the state and the everyday practices of anti-Black non-belonging, Cape Verdean women also form a radical worldview that is not circumscribed by racialized human hierarchies at all.
Challenging the Right to Belong
Public space in Portugal acts as a space of everyday oppressive racialization as well as a space where those who are marginalized may draw on their everyday oppositional knowledge to challenge the status quo. This is especially powerful given how African-descendant care workers’ labor market position requires that they leave residentially segregated neighborhoods and move through public space on their way to and from work. Jamilah, a twenty-four-year-old Portuguese woman of Cape Verdean descent, had a lot to say about the everyday anti-Black racism she and others experience in public places. She recalls how she responded to a racist scenario she encountered while entering a mini-supermarket, or mini preço, that was nearby her client’s apartment:
They think all Blacks come from Africa! Just recently, this one White woman told me at the supermarket, “Ah, go back to your country. You lack education!” And I told her, “Listen, if have a lack of education, it’s because I was born here! Because if I had been born in my parents’ country, I would have been very well educated. But I am like this because I was born here in Portugal!” That’s how I responded. So, she started muttering and muttering blah blah. And she left. She didn’t like my response [smiles].
Though the White Portuguese woman in the above narrative challenges Jamilah’s belonging in Portugal by assuming that all Blacks are not of Portugal, Jamilah disrupted conventional notions that assign non-citizenship status to Black bodies. As a Black woman who was born in Portugal, she speaks from a subject position of being excluded from the universal, which enables her to resignify citizenship by challenging anti-racialism that renders Black bodies invisible from the national image of legitimate belonging. Here, she also flips the White women’s remarks upside down by devaluing her Portuguese birthplace and instead assigns greater value to Cape Verde—the opposite of what the woman aimed to do.
Another participant, Diana, also shared how she responds to incidents in which private actors contest her belonging. Like Jamilah, her narrative highlights how Cape Verdean women may tacitly or overtly engage in resistance in a way that challenges the anti-Blackness of Portuguese anti-racialism:
Racism exists here. It always has. “Preta! Go back to your country. What are you doing here?!” That’s what a White Portuguese told me. And, I say, “We aren’t here by choice! We are here to work!” And some people say things like, “If I were a politician, if I were someone with power, I would send you all back to your countries!” I see this all the time, I experience it, and I see it. And I detest, detest, detest injustice. For me injustice just doesn’t work. It’s not right. And when you see something like that, you feel the rage, and you begin to speak out! We speak out! I say, “We are here to work. And when we left our countries you were there too! You were all there in Africa, and you are still continuing to stay in Africa! You were there before we even left!”
Diana’s claim, “We aren’t here by choice,” pushes against characterizations of “voluntary immigration” that scholars have assigned to contemporary individuals like herself who allegedly migrate at their own will as opposed to through forced or coercive labor schemes (Batalha Reference Batalha2004). She disrupts the inherent individualism of the verbal assaults she encounters by evoking colonial histories and the importation of labor as a determining condition of migration, thus challenging how everyday citizens frame the entry of Black immigrants to Portugal as a “problem” to be solved by expulsion and expulsion only. Diana’s final comments, “When we left our countries, you were there too,” mirror the words that were graffitied on the side of the building in 2007 and lay to bare the paradoxes of anti-Blackness in Portugal; as a post-colonial migrant, she is well aware that the Portuguese were always physically as well as symbolically present in their former African colonies. As anti-Black non-belonging is relational, her remarks illustrate how there would be no ontological category of Blackness without the Portuguese. Indeed, despite the colonial history, White Portuguese have been paradoxically absent from the racist discourse around immigration due to their subject position as “colonialists,” “Whites,” and “Portuguese.” While these narratives occlude how legacies of colonialism and coerced migration are implicated in the relationship between Portugal and its former African colonies, Diana’s remarks disrupt false narratives of peoplehood that construct Black people, like herself, as other, non-human, and antithetical to the nation. Later in our conversation, Diana also added:
I have also responded like this: “Your land is the same as mine! We come from the same land. So, your land is also mine.” Because, also, it’s almost that nobody has one land because the whole world has one area below the ground where we all go when we die. Listen, people should ignore when people say, “go back to your country”. Turn your back to them and don’t respond at all. Because land…not a single person has land. No one!
When Diana voiced these remarks, one could see the intensity in her eyes. Her challenging of the all too common attack on Black people’s belonging does more than just express disagreement. Rather, she interrogates the notion of human difference; it is in living in the space of Other through which a radical sense of place is imagined by Diana. She does not simply want to be recognized as a “Black woman” in an anti-racial context like Portugal. She instead dares to imagine a world that goes beyond the hierarchical humanness that organizes the very nation itself. In her view, nobody can make claims for land, given that everyone is equal in terms of their humanity.
Judith also recalled how Whites have spewed racial epithets at her family in public venues. A beach incident that occurred in 2014 is most memorable to her. She sat on the sand with her family when a group of young White Portuguese men with strong Lisboan accents abruptly pointed to them and called them “Pretos,” telling them to go back to Africa. Like Diana, Judith spoke back that day. As she illustrates below, her response references the paradoxes of discourses around immigration and practices of anti-Black non-belonging in the Portuguese context:
They told me to go back to my country! And I respond! We respond. I say, “we are here just like they are also in Africa.” There are so many Portuguese outside of the country that if someone [told] to them all to “Go back to your country,” they wouldn’t all fit here in Portugal. They have always been in Africa!
While anti-Black narratives of belonging frame the subject of border crossing as an African person only, like Diana, Judith recognizes that the “Portuguese” are also implicated in border crossing. Significantly, Judith’s sentiment reflects the exclusionary nature of national belonging, by which citizen is constructed in relation to immigrant and Black Africanness, with the latter only referring to those who are racialized in juxtaposition to Whiteness and legitimate belonging. Diana’s words, “We speak out,” as well as Judith’s “We respond,” therefore represent a collective claim that is not only about recognition within Portuguese citizenship but also how everyday practices of systemic anti-Black non-belonging renders people like her as non-citizens and the contradiction that this rendering entails. By extending the subject position of “immigrant” to “Portuguese” and by explicating the link between Portugal and colonialism, study respondents transform their experiences into a collective experience and move the question of Black people into the center of the politics of citizenship and Portuguese nation building itself.
Parenting Belonging
Mothering is often, in itself, a radical act for African descendant women (Collins Reference Collins2000; James Reference James, James and Busia1993; Jordan Reference Jordan, Gumbs, Martens and Williams2016; Oyěwùmí Reference Oyěwùmí2016; Ross Reference Ross, Gumbs, Martens and Mai’a2016). As Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (Reference Oyěwùmí2016) states incisively, motherhood encompasses the “normative values and humanistic ideologies that embrace the notion of preservation of the past, present and future generations…the promotion of equality, peace and justice” (p. 219). Further, as Christen Smith (Reference Smith2016a, Reference Smithb) asserts, Anti-Blackness has a gendered impact on Black women because of the link between the proliferation of Black life and Black women’s mothering. The power of anti-Blackness, she argues, means that the state enacts physical, symbolic, and structural violence on Black lives due to the haunting assumption that Black mothering should not exist. Black motherhood, therefore, is a dialectical institution as it represents a multifaceted space of resistance as well as a space of oppression (Collins Reference Collins2000; Davis Reference Angela1983).
Indeed, it was through their mothering that study respondents activated their “creative spirit” (Jordan Reference Jordan, Gumbs, Martens and Williams2016) by linking their struggles as Black women with the struggles of their children and others’ children. It is worth mentioning that although all my respondents had access to legality and therefore did not fear expulsion as unauthorized individuals would, they nevertheless knew that their children’s citizenship status as Portuguese would not protect them from the everyday practices of anti-Black non-belonging. They believed their children’s racial identity dehumanized and marked them as unintelligent, violent, and foreign, and they knew that they would have to actively affirm their belonging and challenge that marking in mainstream society.
The controversy in Portugal around the use of the term preto highlights how respondents attempt to cultivate everyday resistance in their mothering. While preto is a derogatory and dehumanizing term for Black people, many of my informants insisted that the usage of the term is normalized to the point that many White citizens see no harm in the term, and see alternatives such as pessoa da cor (person of color) as signifying overzealous political correctness. Yet, in challenging that label, mothers simultaneously sought to challenge the structural ideology of anti-Blackness that places their children in a zone of non-being located outside of civil society. For example, Silvia, a mother of two, explains that she always told her children to reject the word preto: “I tell my daughter and my son to respond like this: ‘NO [emphasis hers]. I do not accept that vocabulary. I do not accept.’ That’s how I always prepared my children, to not accept. To not accept this type of treatment.” Other participants also agreed that the rejection of the term preto was central to how they prepared their children to carve out feelings of belonging. Carlota, a fifty-two-year-old Cape Verdean eldercare worker and mother of five, similarly tells her children and grandchildren to selectively reject the word:
I tell my children and my grandchildren that the ONLY person that can call you preto is your people. And when you tell them that, you tell them with pride. Because we are proud to be Black. We are Black and we are Portuguese!
Above, Carlota reminds her children that Blackness is not stigmatized but a source of pride for her and her family. And while she rejects the use of the word preto by the White Portuguese, she stresses that Blacks in Portuguese can rearticulate the word and use it among their community. Her remarks, “We are Black and we are Portuguese,” along with her rejection of outsiders’ use of the term preto, therefore challenges the intersection of Portuguese anti-racial ideology and anti-Black non-belonging which frame racism as a contemporary impossibility and locate Blackness as outside of the national—and human—imaginary. Importantly, by giving her own community members the power to employ the category preto on their own terms, she reclaims, as Khalil Saucier (Reference Saucier2015) argues, “a little bit of the organizing power of race” (p. 93). In knowing what it is like to be “Blackened” in a space of non-belonging where the structuring logic of anti-Blackness pervades, participants like Carlota use Blackness as a tool for establishing a sense of belonging within their community.
Luana, who earlier said that Whites have told her that “Black Portuguese don’t exist,” similarly resists how Whites in Portugal, through their everyday practices of anti-Black non-belonging, exclude her son from embodying the normative ideal of citizen. She recounted how she was particularly upset that her five-year-old son’s White teacher and White classmates referred to him as preto. In response, she not only confronted his teacher—who argued that she merely used the term out of innocence—but Luana now intentionally discusses her son’s racial and national identity with him. “I tell him that he is European and African, Afro-European. Or African and Portuguese,” she said forcefully during our interview. “Not preto, not preto.”
While Carlota and Luana stress the connection between Portuguese and Black African identities, other respondents similarly rejected the term preto but also implored their children to instead demand that others recognize their Portuguese identity. In fact, some participants explained that it is a political decision in the Portuguese context to demand that their children identify primarily as Portuguese and Portuguese only. Helen, a naturalized citizen who was born in Cape Verde and is a mother of two young children, reflects:
I tell them to always say they’re Portuguese. And they know it. No matter what people tell them…no matter what…they know to say that they are Portuguese. They say that their parents are African…Black, but they are Portuguese. They were born here, so I have always told them to reject that. To tell whoever it is that says otherwise, I AM Portuguese.
While I was in the field it was clear that Helen referred to her children as Black among family and friends and her children likewise self-identified as Black among friends. However, Helen also seeks to affirm her children’s belonging, both as Black and Portuguese, by affirming their national identity. Jean Beaman’s (Reference Beaman2017) work on French citizens of North African descent in France illustrates a similar dynamic; Beaman’s respondents identify with Blackness and are treated as foreign, or “citizen outsiders,” by the White French, yet they may also demand that they be considered as “just French” in public life. In a similar way, to identify solely as Portuguese in Portugal is not a distancing of one’s racial identity. It is also not simply that mothers want their children to take a seat on that stage as national subjects. Rather, by affirming their children’s Portuguese identity, they also envision a world beyond hierarchical categories of human difference. When parents train their children to demand that they be treated as Portuguese in a context where Blackness has been excluded from the socio-cultural conception of humanity and the nation, they are also challenging the very stage upon which the nation and civil society perform themselves.
Another mother, Elsandra, also had a run in with her granddaughter’s teacher. As she explains, the teacher referred to her granddaughter and her other Black classmates as “monkeys,” an illustration of how children encounter a structural logic of anti-Blackness that places Blackness outside of the human category:
[S]he told me that the teacher looked at her and her other black friends and told them, “you are all animals. Monkeys.” And she was left psychologically hurt from that. And so then my granddaughter told me, “oh grandmother, the teacher told me something that I didn’t like at all.” And she felt a bit hurt. She was very angry at that word, “monkey.” And so I went with my daughter to talk to the teacher. She [the teacher] said, “oh this is just how I play around.” And I remember saying, “No! This is not how you play. This is not a jungle, we are not animals. We are humans.” So I always told my children and their children to reject that type of treatment. To reject injustice, to reject racism.
A naturalized citizen and resident of Portugal for over twenty-five years, Elsandra insists that she has encountered similar situations throughout her time in Portugal where her “being” has been treated as suspect. In Katherine McKittrick’s (Reference McKittrick2006) words, Elsandra affirms her and her family’s humanity by demanding that the teacher treat the children “not as a genre or mode of human but as human” (p. 135, emphasis mine). Like other mothers I spoke to, Elsandra does not blindly accept this treatment and instead takes it upon herself to have candid discussions about race and belonging with her family. While respondents are well familiar with the everyday practices of anti-Black non-belonging that have denied their existence in Portugal, they draw from the knowledge engendered by their subaltern status and affirm their children’s and grandchildren’s rights to self-determination. In this way, study participants drew from racialization as a tool for social belonging. They envisioned other ways of belonging for their kin that were not circumscribed by the intersection of racialized hierarchies of humanness at all.
CONCLUSION
The women’s voices I present throughout this paper make us think hard about the meaning and consequence of race and Blackness in an allegedly anti-racial context like Portugal; though they are “included” in the nation, given their access to legislative status, their narratives convey how their exclusion is tied to broader conceptions of human life. As Black, African-descendant women, they are told that they do not belong and that their children are not bona fide members of the polity. They face physical and epistemological violence as they move through the quotidian activities of life which together inform the erasure of Back people. Yet, as Black, African-descendant mothers, they express an alternative worldview which places the negation of Blackness squarely at the center of nation building itself. Their accounts illustrate the continued need for African-descendant women to draw from their everyday knowledge of domination to affirm alternative models of belonging, whether through their own parenting or through their own reactionary voices in public space.
These findings suggest that a theoretical framework of belonging in itself inadequately addresses how Blackness fits within the Portuguese nation. Rather, anti-Black non-belonging is the result of an historic European racial formation resulting from the colonization of Africa which persists today. The framework of anti-Black non-belonging, therefore, not only highlights how citizenship effectively masks, rather than reveals, the implications of how people have differentially been made to be part of a nation; it also illustrates the broader ontological and epistemological frameworks of Blackness which locate Black families outside of the realm of citizenship and human belonging. This broader ontological issue as it relates to Black life pushes beyond the question of legislative status (citizenship) in itself by instead considering how civil society and the nation state defines “national belonging in contraposition of Blackness” (Smith Reference Smith2016b, p. 82).
Indeed, the current study reflects past scholars’ findings which similarly report that Blacks are treated as perpetual strangers in other European anti-racial contexts, a signal of the profound connections between nations with regards to the treatment of Black people across Europe (Beaman Reference Beaman2017; Fleming Reference Fleming2017; Kilomba Reference Kilomba2008; Perry Reference Perry2015; Small Reference Small1994). It is, nevertheless, important to stress that the consequences of anti-Black non-belonging may look similar and different across different national spaces. Portugal is a case with a proportionally large Afro-descendant population, but there are other former colonial contexts where the population of Blacks—both citizens and non-citizens—is proportionately larger (such as France and the UK) or smaller, (such as Denmark). Portugal is also a case where lusotropicalist and anti-racial narratives permeate popular culture. Yet, I have shown how a group that is often thought of as “very Portuguese” in terms of cultural affinity (religion, language) nevertheless encounters everyday anti-Black non-belonging within a society where race thinking remains unsubstantiated by the state. This suggests that lusotropicalist and anti-racial ideologies and discourses of the state merely work together to hide or obscure the pervasiveness of everyday anti-Black non-belonging, a structure that, I argue, is both local and global in character.
One limitation of the current study, however, is that I am unable to compare how other non-White ethnic and racial groups in Portugal, such as growing numbers of South Asian and East Asian immigrant groups, relate to anti-Black non-belonging. Given the importance of orientalism (Said Reference Said1979), one question is whether their experiences of belonging depart from that of people who are racialized as Black. On the other hand, future research should also consider whether these non-White groups internalize, challenge, or resist the anti-Blackness of Portuguese society. Another question is how anti-Black non-belonging may play out among Black Muslim citizens and non-citizens in Portugal. As Araújo (Reference Araújo2017) and others have argued, the relative paucity of literature on Islamophobia in Portugal may also contribute to a misunderstanding of its absence (Dias and Dias, Reference Dias and Dias2012). In this sense, Portugal’s anti-racial ideologies may intersect with the relative invisibility of a public discourse on Islamophobia in Portugal to further render the experiences of Black Muslims invisible.
Still, some scholars conflate the discrimination that Muslims face with that of racism (see Sayyid Reference Sayyid2014 for a discussion). Others, such as Inês Maria Calvo Brandão (Reference Brandão2016), argue that Islamophobia reflects “xeno-racism,” or discrimination directed against foreigners. Given how my participants’ everyday experiences of anti-Black non-belonging in Portugal draw from a combination of gendered anti-Blackness and perceptions of foreignness and non-being, I argue that anti-Black non-belonging may also play out among West-African and Sub-Saharan-origins migrants who are Muslim, such as the Senegalese, but their racialization will likely draw on religion cues in addition to other social-categories such as language and dress (Frisina and Hawthorne, Reference Frisina and Hawthorne2018). In this way, viewing Islamophobia and anti-Blackness not as simply singular and separate forms of prejudice but as intersecting structures of power in Portugal highlights fruitful avenues for future research on the growing African-descendant Muslim community (Beydoun Reference Beydoun2018).
For example, while non-Muslim mothers featured in the study drew on their knowledge of gendered anti-Black non-belonging to inform their own parenting strategies, how this plays out among Black Muslim women in Portugal is unknown. Black Muslim women, especially those wearing visible cultural-religious dress, may be especially vulnerable to street harassment. Unlike the Cape Verdean women included in this study, their parenting may address the intersection of their children’s religious and racial identity development. Undocumented African-descendant parents whose Portuguese-born children may also lack immediate access to citizenship may employ different strategies than those outlined in this paper as well. My goal in bridging anti-Blackness with belonging is not to essentialize Blackness but rather to re-focus on how the mark that accompanies the “fact of Blackness” (Fanon [1952] Reference Fanon2008) matters in the gendered racialization process in Portugal. My hope is that this work will therefore spark continued engagement with how pertinent social markers such as religion, skin color, and space, among others, intersect and are nested within feelings and practices of gendered anti-Black non-belonging in Portugal and abroad.
Another question is how Cape Verdean and Cape Verdean descendants create alternative spaces of belonging in Portugal. Research on Cape Verdeans in Sweden illustrates how their feelings of belonging draw from their transnational ties to the larger Cape Verdean diaspora, given that they are treated as perpetual Other by Whites in a multicultural Swedish society (Åkesson Reference Åkesson2011). Yet, alternative physical spaces in Portugal might especially provide important spaces for citizens and non-citizens’ resistance of the everyday toll of anti-Black non-belonging. For example, Sonia Vaz Borges’ (Reference Borges2014) important work illustrates how racially segregated barrios in Portugal, while a result of institutionalized racism, provide many Cape Verdean families a sense of community, identity, and belonging. Yet in the context of market liberalization, the city’s destruction of these spaces represents a critical blow to the African and African-descendant community. Uncovering the mechanisms that facilitate or hinder the other side of anti-Black non-belonging in Portugal therefore remains up for theoretical elaboration and empirical investigation (Hawthorne Reference Hawthorne2019; Pardue Reference Pardue2015).
Indeed, a growing anti-racist movement in Portugal led by many women of the African diaspora is a testament to how the community is aiming to rewrite the national narrative of belonging and non-belonging today. In reference to the increase in activism throughout Lisbon, a participant told me during a phone call that she was hopeful. “They need to see that we will never accept this treatment,” she stated emphatically, “The Portuguese think that slavery continues. But our eyes are wide open, and we will not accept this.” The point of ending with these comments is not to suggest that there is a greater awakening among the Afro-descendant community when compared to the past but, rather, to stress how the margins can also represent a source of subversion. Her reference to eyes, therefore, is reflective of how anti-Black non-belonging in the Portuguese context is both a matter of exclusion and resistance. Anti-Blackness structures nationhood and thus full belonging in Europe; yet, it also provides those who are excluded from full belonging with the ability to “see” the reality of anti-Blackness, express an alternative framework for belonging, and, at times, the power to “speak back.”
