Coletivo Teia (Bloco das Pretas)

This group was founded in 2013 and is made up of young black feminist and peripheral women who have organized together to share knowledge that aims to empower black women. They follow a specific feminist approach that looks not only gender and sexual violence but also racial discrimination and institutional violence essentially. The collective appears with the intention of forming a struggle for the decolonization of the knowledge and bodies of the black women of diaspora  (The group identifies and understands diaspora as a process of compulsory exploitation and withdrawal of Africans from the African continent), Latin American and Afro Caribbean. By denouncing and combating racism, machismo, homo-lesbo-bi-transphobia, they seek to build a space in which they can share our experiences and resistances. The group believes that empowerment is essential for a return to their Afro-Brazilian roots, invisible to the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. “For us black women to be protagonists of our own history we adopt as principles the civilizational values ​​of the African peoples, fundamental for the rescue of our identity and ancestrality.”

The greatest achievement of Coletivo Teia has been to raise discussions and talks around the theme of gender and race, bringing the importance of intersectional dialogue in the city’s political debates, being a place of welcome for many black girls and women, constituting a network of support and mutual respect. “The support networks that we have built with other women militants now, with the intersectional perspective, have enabled several actions in the last 4 years,” they say.