Good evening.
(Plateia) Good evening!
Maíra Azevedo: I am Maíra Azevedo, known as Aunt Bad,
and when I was invited to speak here at TEDx,
TEDx Rio Vermelho,
I figured I could talk about various things.
But there’s one thing I could not stop talking about,
which is my daily struggle to combat the various forms of oppression.
I’m black, fat, northeastern,
candomblecist, lonely, peripheral, poor mother.
I am what nobody wants to see,
and all this defines me, but it does not sum me up.
And that’s precisely why I need every day, every day,
be prepared to fulfill my obligation
to fight for a more just and egalitarian society.
And, for many people, the fact that I occupy some spaces of power …
after all, as Renata said,
I know today that I am in some places that are key places,
I produce knowledge,
I am someone who generates information, which generates content …
And for many people,
to speak of my trajectory is to try to attest the discourse of meritocracy,
that you just dedicate yourself that you can.
In fact, I am proof of how flawed this is.
I am proof that it is fundamental that you have a collective struggle.
I am the result of the whole.
I am fruit and result of the struggle of several people who came before me.
So that today I can be here, on the TEDx stage,
it was necessary for several people to be silenced,
or that at least they had no idea that they could shout,
and that is why I often say that I am the voice of those who could never speak
or who is historically silenced.
That’s why every time someone questions that I talk too fast,
or that I speak loudly,
is because black women are eager to speak,
because we are rarely heard, we are hardly ever heard.
And then, I play jokes that say that when we will incarnate,
we tell God what we want to be, right?
And I said I said, “God, good afternoon, how are you?
I’m going to incarnate, and I want to be discriminated against! “
And then, God did it to me: “I have a great package for you.
You will be born black, fat, northeastern,
will live in Plataforma, will raise his son by himself
and, look, it’s going to take Periperi’s Lookouts- “I’ll pick it up once in a while,
that’s for you to see the taste! “
(Laughs)
And I said, “Gee, I’ll try to get even better.”
And when I got here, I was born with a trapped tongue and I still speak fast.
(Laughs)
Yes, but to be discriminated against,
where I have to fight every day against this,
will not stop me from moving forward
and, every time I move on and occupy some space,
I understand … I understand …
that I have an obligation to call other people to my side,
because this struggle is collective.
And what did I learn from all this?
I began to learn that the humor I have and that is peculiar
could be a great transformation tool.
It is possible to laugh and reflect,
and that’s when I created the “Bad Aunt with the Loose Language”,
that, for those who do not understand, it is because my tongue is arrested.
(Laughs)
And keeping your tongue loose is perhaps a
than to combat the various forms of oppression.
In a society that is racist, sexist, sexist, homophobic,
meritocracy does not exist,
and we can not fool ourselves with it,
or else try to reduce the pain of other people,
simply call it victimism or “mimimi.”
In fact, I even started saying it’s mimimi, yes.
Even because mimimi is a simplistic onomatopoeia
who wants to reproduce the crying, is not it? “Mimimi,” she’s crying.
Only our crying is not for nothing.
We cry because, every 23 seconds,
a woman is being beaten, raped,
We cry because every 17 seconds a young black man is murdered.
We cry because a black girl of candomblé, when she goes around,
gets stoned by the face.
So it’s mimimi.
It’s mimimi because we’re crying, crying to secure our lives.
We do not want to shut up anymore and that’s what bothers us,
because I can not admit it anymore
Let another person tell me the size of my pain.
The pain I feel alone I know,
and I can not accept that another person should judge for me.
A white man will not know how much it hurts to be a black woman.
You will not know.
And talking about it is in fact fundamental
so that we can understand that there are differences.
And another thing:
it is not normal, not natural, to live in places that do not have diversity.
Diversity is profitable, it shapes and it educates.
It is important that you see the different, the different,
for you to recognize yourself.
It is from there that you form your identity.
It’s important that I have a white man so I know I’m a black woman.
And often we do not understand that this formatting, this standardization,
is actually the fruit of discrimination.
When I say that I am the first black woman in Brazil to have a “standup”
I live in this space also the loneliness of the black woman.
which is not reduced to the affective question;
is reduced to the business question, the professional question,
when we arrive in certain spaces …
and to me the freak is nobody to scare
that does not have blacks and blacks in spaces of power.
That is abnormal.
It’s abnormal that we can still accept
discriminate against a child who is not two years old …
because racism is extremely democratic,
racism affects everyone.
And we want to live in this ledo mistake
that the problem is social and not racial,
and it is not true.
Increasingly, we know that thousands of black and rich people
are also discriminated against,
and racism denies our humanity,
like gophobia, too.
Only those who are fat, only those who are fat, know how painful it is to enter a space
and be looked at as if it were a freak.
Only a fat woman knows how bad it is to be ridiculed
when people look at it and say,
“But you’re so beautiful, why do not you lose weight?”
And we think this is silly,
and the argument of many people is to say:
“I’m just worried about your health,”
but it’s also important that you worry about your life.
and let the other person, right, take care …
because sometimes the person is happy, or sometimes, sometimes who is …
is looking great, right, and so is the person.
(Laughs)
It’s nobody’s business, right?
And I say all these things and many people do like this:
“But it seems like you just want to talk about it.”
Or, it has the classic phrase:
“The Negro himself discriminates,” “The woman herself depreciates,”
or “The fat man makes fun of himself.”
We are educated to be macho, we are educated to be racist,
we’re educated to be fat-phobic,
and often reproduce these biased phrases
is perhaps an undue form of assuring existence.
The black gaiato, the black gaiata, who arrives and makes a laugh,
which causes the entertainment,
This is accepted very well,
but the negro who goes there and touches the wound, who speaks knowing what he is going to say,
that bothers.
I learned
and I know that’s why I often arrive in some spaces and I uncomfortable
because I say every day:
I was educated, and very well educated,
to compete on equal terms with a white man,
and what I lack is opportunity.
It is an opportunity that takes people out of a space
and prevents it from reaching another,
and who does this are the various forms of prejudice …
when someone thinks that a woman can not be a leader
because she has too much maternal way,
and begin to doubt our capacity only for the sake of our gender.
This, even, is someone who can not keep up with statistics
because the ILO, the International Labor Organization,
has testified that women-headed companies make a lot more profit.
But machismo prevents it.
The ILO also notes, in some studies,
that companies that have diversity –
“diversity” is not just a word of effect;
diversity is something real –
these companies usually also have a much greater profit.
And what will it prevent, since international bodies
that where we can fight against prejudice
Can we make the change?
Why can not we put it into practice?
Because we have a lot of trouble taking over
that often prejudice lives in people.
Prejudice is the cousin of the devil, he lives in details.
Sometimes it’s the joke, it’s the jocular look,
is that derogatory way of addressing, or else of defining someone.
This is how you do it.
And I could get here
and speak of thousands of other things,
but while many people try to hide racism, machismo, homophobia,
more and more we have to talk.
There are people who say that it is fashionable now, but it is not fashionable;
it’s because now we decided to talk about these things
because, maybe, maybe, we’ll start to embarrass ourselves.
Because it must be very painful to assume that Brazil is the first country in the world
in death, in murder, of gay men, of transvestites.
And we think that this death is just the death of the bullet.
The death of the joke, the death that ridicules the person,
This death we do not want to tell.
The death of when we call a black child a “monkey”,
and maybe it will affect the life of this girl forever,
We do not talk about it.
And another thing: racism is no joke, racism is not opinion, racism is crime,
and we have to learn to call things by the right names.
Homophobia is not opinion.
There are a lot of people who say, “I do not accept gay marriage.”
But was it you who was asked to marry?
Who has to accept or not is who received the invitation!
It’s none of your business!
But people want all the time to question the right of the other person.
Opinion you guard … opinion, I always say what opinion is … ok …
Opinion is extremely private.
It’s the same as…
You have, but you do not always have to give, right?
(Laughs)
And we need to understand …
She understood now.
(Laughs)
Not always you have to give, or else, if you give, get it right, right?
It’s less painful.
And we can not confuse things.
Enough of putting a nickname in what has a name!
Racism is a crime. Homophobia has not yet been criminalized, but it also kills.
And we even have to fight for it to be that way,
because enough of being there every day seeing people being murdered
on account of its orientation,
on account of its condition,
because nobody chooses, nobody chooses.
I was not born asking to be discriminated against every day.
It’s too painful for me
When I have to open the door of my house, take a deep breath.
and can not just live.
I have to live
and to combat every day the various forms of oppression,
even when I’m not ready,
because living is the biggest challenge for me.
After all, I have an obligation to, every day,
dodging the most diverse and perverse statistics.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Live)
”
Be First to Comment