Semana_Festival de Cinema 9aSEMANA_CATALOGO_WEB | Page 175

DEBATE 3
EQUALITY IS WHITE: CINEMA, RACE, AND POWER
The main objective of this panel is to remove the white racial experience
from invisibility, hence from normality. In cinema, as in other fields,
only non-white bodies are usually marked by an idea of ​​"raciality". Our
horizon here is to produce advances in "naming the norm", giving clear
outlines to this experience, in a kind of whitenography, as Michelle
Matiuzzi affirms.
The idea of ​​calling marked people as white also comes from observing
the constant updating of the historical division of labor, where black
bodies are called to speak only when their speech is confined within
the trace race. We want to create an environment where the white
anti-racist work, here connected to cinema, can be thought, mapped,
visualized. Racism, as Grada Kilomba says, is a problem for the whites,
after all. That the nonwhites have to solve it is, therefore, a double
exploration: this panel wishes to act against it.
Assuming the ambiguity of replacing white bodies in an interface of
visibility, it is desired here that the political works of these people must,
necessarily, operate according to a certain negative program, in which
"unlearning, undoing, silencing and boycotting cease to be mechanisms
against black people and dissenters in general to become a sort of self-
destructive ethic of which the white alliance work depends," as Jota
Mombasa says. After all, a white anti-racist program that doesn’t go
through paternalistic strategies of maintaining power, as for example the
rhetorical figure of "giving the voice".
How, at last, does "being white" produce a mode of circulation and
access within the field of cinema and festivals? How did this marker
act in the cinema environments, sets and in the paths in relation to this
circuit? How do the ideas of "equality", "plurality" and a demand for
"union" act as disguises for the maintenance of privilegie structures?
These are some of the basic questions that make up this proposition.
Suggested readings
http://bit.ly/2hEVUjD
http://bit.ly/29Ol8X8
http://bit.ly/2zHuJvQ
DEBATE 3
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