I can feel what India was saying. I have a personal experience of it. I was in Sédhiou in 2016. I was with a group of friends, and we were at the festival. the festival was really white-centric, even though we were in Senegal. It was three in the morning. I was walking. I was in a short skirt. I was the only dark Black woman. I was picked up by the police, and when I answered to the police officer in Wolof, he told me the only reason I could be hanging there with white people is because I am a prostitute, and for that, I was taken into custody. When I was sharing that story with a lot of Black women and mostly with a lot of dark-skinned women in Senegal, it was not unique. Most of us were just target on the street because the police officer felt that we must be a prostitute, dressing a certain way.
Liberating people through fashion is something that I did not even understand I was doing because it was like we are wearing African print. We are wearing a short dress. We are changing things that are traditional. We are embracing our body. We are working on doing things and being free. When you realize that this is actually going to war against the patriarchy, this is actually going to war against men—and the conversation is always around, “Oh, what was she wearing?” What a woman is wearing, where she is, what she is eating, or where she was has nothing to do with the fact that she was assaulted. The only person responsible is the man, and I think in our society, we have made sure that we always find a way out for men.
When we go out and start to speak about those things, the outrage is always for men. It is always very hard to talk about being a Black woman, being a feminist, and talking about my relationship with the police, because on a personal level, I have a very hard situation with them. On a professional level, I can go and use them to work on some issue, and I think we will talk about that a little bit more later.
Michele Bratcher Goodwin
What you bring to mind is the question, as a survey, how many of you have had a police encounter? I know I have. One hundred percent of us on this panel have had an experience. Aissatou, when you were mentioning being arrested, it reminded me of friends from Europe visiting me from Italy. We were driving between states, and we had entered the state of Indiana. I was taking them to the airport in Chicago. We were pulled over by an officer, and the officer tapped on the window with this flashlight, looked in, and it was broad daylight. The officer said, “What is the situation here?” because my friends were white Italians. Clearly, there was some suspicion. I said, “We are friends,” and then the officer went around to the other side of the car to one of my friends to just confirm that we were friends. But these kinds of issues that you experienced or that I have experienced—and that is a mild experience compared to what you experienced or what else I have experienced—are not the kinds of things that others have to go through.
Ana, I want to turn to you as we continue to circle the globe of our African diaspora. So often people may think about the questions that relate to race and policing and criminalization as being something that is either American-centered, people think about the Caribbean, or they may think about the continent, but they miss all of Central and South America. I want to know what has that been like for you, filling in the blanks and being a real warrior and voice for lifting up and recognizing the African diaspora through your work in Brazil and elsewhere.
