Isabel Salgado sends a public letter to Ana Paula Henkel: "you are doing a disservice to the fight against racism"

247 - Former volleyball player Isabel Salgado sent an open letter to her former teammate Ana Paula Henkel, also from volleyball, in which she criticizes Ana Paula's disregard for racism.

Isabel says that Ana Paula "is doing a disservice to the fight against racism".

Read the full text:

Letter to Ana Paula Henkel, 

Ana Paula, after seeing some of your posts, I wanted to reply. Since I've never had the patience for social media, I kept putting it off. Besides, we can't forget that social media is there to give a voice to everyone: many fantastic people and many... That's the price of so-called digital democracy – which should always be debated, of course – but let's get to what matters now. First, I also need to admit that I've always felt uncomfortable when reading your posts. 

The thing is, your name is linked to volleyball, a sport I played for many years, and unfortunately, many people generalize this kind of talk and ask me if most female volleyball players are far-right. In those moments, I always try to explain that you are far from representing a profile of Brazilian women's volleyball. And that, in fact, volleyball, like most professional fields and activities, cannot be categorized into any ideological profile. I also explain to these people that perhaps because you married a white American, you felt the need to align yourself with a whiteness that has as one of its main characteristics the inability to perceive its place of privilege, a whiteness that naturalizes the position of white power and makes white supremacy a norm. After all, we know that being an immigrant in those parts isn't very easy, especially with a Latino physique.

During the colonial period, the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon aptly explained the emergence and formation of this desire for identification with the oppressor among many colonized people. It is a neurosis that leads to unhealthy and alienated behavior, due to an inability to cope with the reality surrounding them. History teaches us that colonialism ended, but it also shows us that it persists in neocolonial guise. The video you posted of the young Black woman is exemplary of how this alienation remains.

Here in Brazil, we have a caricatured example of this unbalanced behavior: the president of the Palmares Foundation. Therefore, I suggest you pay attention to what is happening around you. There are many people who cannot escape this denialist behavior regarding racism, which manifests itself in many forms and degrees; from the most subtle denial to the most exacerbated pathology, leading someone to say that slavery was a beneficial circumstance for Black people, as Mr. Sérgio Camargo did.

You constantly post phrases and ideas that are steeped in prejudice. But your last post was the last straw; it shocked and revolted me because of its profound ignorance and irresponsibility. Your lack of knowledge about racism and what it means is appalling. Unfortunately, racism exists in Brazil, the US, and the world, and many people are still unable to see a reality that screams at the top of its lungs. If you want to use statistical data as arguments, look for serious and unbiased sources. Then you will understand that racism is a structural issue that operates in politics, economics, and subjectivity, as the philosopher Sílvio Almeida explains so well.

Your defense of the Trump administration reflects much more your unease and perhaps a desire to belong to a society that you imagine only upholds WASP values, a society that had to show the world the most terrifying forms of racial violence until the first major changes emerged with Martin Luther King. Fortunately, racism not only impoverishes human beings but also produces ever greater strength and resistance. And that is what is happening right now in the USA, when millions of people from all ethnic groups are uniting to demonstrate their repudiation of the racism that still disproportionately affects Black people. 

Look closely around you and you will see that, at the present moment, American society seems to be on the path to yet another change and another achievement toward equality.

By using social media the way you have been, you are doing a disservice to the fight against racism.

Black lives matter!