Black Families, Damned Territories: Anti-Blackness and Black Motherhood in (White) Portuguese Parliamentary Debates (1995–2001)

Abstract

The perceptions and representations of whiteness around motherhood, family, and black sexuality reproduce the logic of what Hortense Spillers calls “captive flesh”, controlling understandings about femininity, motherhood, and gender. This debate is guided by the politics of the racial neoliberal agenda that works to control the urban territories largely inhabited by black people in the name of preventing “situations of risk” and “juvenile delinquency”. This article seeks to unveil the ideological bases of public policies primarily aimed at “urban development” and “internal security” that connect black maternity to “unstructured families” and “criminal black youth”. This paper examines how notions such as “single mothers”, “isolated women”, “deficient parental capabilities” in Portuguese parliamentary debates by the Parliamentary Commission for Parity and Equal Opportunities and Family (CPPIOF), mainly in the 1990s, foreground colonial representations about the black woman as a threat to white supremacy.