Epistemic indignation and decolonization of the concept of minorities/Indignação epistêmica e decolonização do conceito de minorias.
| Autor | de Freitas, Raquel Coelho |
Introduction
This paper considers the epistemic indignation (FREITAS, 2020) as a logical and decolonizing (1)way to reflect on the concept of minorities in contemporary Law as well as the implications on its accuracy.
The arguments in this paper are based on theoretical guidelines from the Modernity/Coloniality group intellectuals, who understood coloniality as the violent face of modernity, which could only be reversed through epistemic disobedience (QUIJANO, 1992; MIGNOLO, 2010). Under these theories, we must distinguish the concepts of colonialism and coloniality, as defined by AnÃÂbal Quijano (1992, 2005). According to Quijano, while colonialism refers to the political and economic relationship of colonial domination of one people or nation over another, coloniality is a pattern of power which remains in force in social and institutional relations even after the end of colonization. Therefore, hierarchy and subalternity positions marked by multiple factors, especially race, continue to shape epistemology, science understanding, aesthetics and intersubjective relationships within former colonies, now formally independent, or in the relationship between these and other countries. According to Quijano:
[...] if you look at the main lines of exploitation and social domination on a global scale, the main lines of current world power, its distribution of resources and work among the global population, it is impossible not to see that the vast majority of the exploited, dominated and discriminated people are exactly the members of the "races", "ethnic groups" or "nations" under which the colonized populations were classified under the world power formation process, since the conquest of America (2) (QUIJANO, 1992, p. 61). Coloniality is an extension of colonialism which updates it and creates collective identities in former colonies to reproduce hierarchies of power, knowledge and existence (MIGNOLO, 2003). The Eurocentric standard is thus presented, understood and incorporated as universal in the individual and collective imaginary of the subjects, being a reference and model which all knowledge and subjectivities must aim and seek to mirror.
However, disobeying this dominant episteme requires indignation (FREITAS, 2020; SANTOS, 2018) with its socio-legal and cognitive consequences, which impacts both the world power distribution and the intersubjective constructions that generate social discrimination.
In this sense, indignation is a sociopolitical feeling-thinking-acting against situations of social and cognitive injustice, resulting from the modern hegemonic political project regarding denial of rights to subordinate social groups. It expands the new theoretical and methodological possibilities of understanding these groups, known as 'minorities' in academic-legal literature due to economic conditions, gender, sexuality, age, ethnic-racial belonging, among other social markers.
While the current definition of 'minorities' is linked to the European project of epistemic, theoretical and political domination of the western world, the decolonial theory instigates the reinterpretation of these situations from territorial, temporal and political limits, allowing some social groups to have its history understood and considered through other social practices, political resistance and legal reorientation. For this reason, a reflection on the concept of 'minorities' becomes urgent, since it was originally defined under the European hegemonic project which reproduced the binary logic of subalternization of different others, particularly related to "us superior and civilized versus them inferior and savage" (MAGALHÃES; ÃLVARES, 2017, p. 69).
The "us" preferably refers to male, owners and/or traders (including slave owners) white people for whom the law organized its political, civil, economic and cultural relations basis in order to expand and protect them. This reached contemporaneity properly regulated and implemented without further questioning. On the other hand, "them" were not necessarily defined in biological terms, but as a circumstance, a thing, a meaning, a concept, a theory that reinforces the idea of others as inferior, barbaric, uneducated, rude, incapable of developing their intellect and, therefore, to build a civilizing project. According to feminist sociologist MarÃÂa Lugones:
The colonial civilizing mission was the euphemistic mask of brutal access to people's bodies by unimaginable exploitation, violent sexual rape, birth control and a systematic horror [...] turning colonized people into human beings was not the colonists' goal (3) (LUGONES, 2019, p. 360). In modernity, this speech structures a way of thinking and arguing in the most diverse areas of knowledge, with emphasis on theology and philosophy of 16th and 17th centuries (4). But only in the development of liberal political thought of the following centuries the 'other' differentiation becomes more evident and widespread with the aim of sustaining its political, legal and cognitive subalternization, such as in Hume's, Voltaire's, Kant's, Hegel's and other European thinkers' work, which had great influence on Law. The philosophical and political basis of the Liberal State and its institutions' formation process after Liberal Revolutions is founded in this period, resulting in denial of rights to multiple social groups. As an example, we quote an excerpt from Kant which Mignolo (2006, p. 670) defined as a 'blind arrogance':
The Negroes of Africa by nature do not have any feelings that rise above the insignificant. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example and a Negro who has shown talent and states that among the hundreds or thousands of Negroes who are transported from their countries to other places, even though many of them have become free, none has been found yet with anything great in art or science or any other quality worthy of appreciation, though among the whites there have always been some who have risen from the lowest classes and who have won the world's respect through superior gifts. (5)(Kant, 1763, secção IV). In his book The Philosophy of History, Hegel (1837), in turn, supports the idea of Europe as the origin of universal history and America as an extension of the European spirit, having succumbed to the colonizer's project. For him, black Africans were considered savages, devoid of human character and therefore they did not bring any important contribution to the world's history. It is in this sense that slavery, associated with black skin color, is recognized by some historians as a cultural and "social death" (GOMES, 2019).
Since European colonization in America and Africa was structured in practices of violence, exploitation and slavery of blacks and indigenous people (6), the most natural consequence of this process is that the identity formation of these groups was devalued, barbarized or even made invisible in order to conform to a unique national identity, which would serve as the basis for the Nation-State model in formation (MAGALHÃES; ÃLVARES, 2017). While the ones who were similar to the dominant pattern had their identities uniformed under civil legal norms, the most different ones were marginalized in political relationships which involved ethnicity, race, gender, age etc. These differences symbolized inequality in terms of recognition and access to rights and power.
In its classical liberal standardizing purpose, the European Nation-State only recognized as different and qualified to distinct legal protection the quantitatively minority groups whose identities of nationality, ethnicity (white European) and religion were well defined and did not represent structural or counter-hegemonic threats to its political-institutional model (7). Therefore, based on these categories of people with a nationality bond and isolated within the European Nation-State having their own cultural and ethnic characteristics, the concept of minorities was developed in Europe and started being generally used for other social groups, in other spaces and temporalities.
The importation of the concept of minorities from the local European reality, where it emerged, and from the North American reality, from where it took a transnational impulse (BOURDIEU; WACQUANT, 2002), raises the need to reinterpret this concept in different Latin America societies, arguing its normative efficacy, its political-theoretical ties and its usefulness under epistemic domination. This is because the struggles that social groups face in different places, with their own historical experiences and ways of life, present different meanings in the many ways they find to achieve the recognition of their existence and condition as subjects of rights that are part of a State.
For this reason, the application of the concept of minority to a different reality has been justified in socio-legal academic studies with many reservations and contradictions. Specifically, many authors who discuss the issue of minorities emphasize this is not a numerically defined category. For example, women and black people, which are majorities in the Brazilian population, are often considered as minorities in these studies.
This leads us to believe that it is a concept that does not conceptualize because it is disconnected from political-institutional conditions that can enable its construction along the lines of "common participation" and "inter-epistemic relations" (MIGNOLO, 2006, p. 691). Even when the use of 'minorities' conceptualizes, it limits the analysis of the social group associated with demands based on recognition, however, related to the principles of "tolerance" and "difference" and not of interculturality (FORNET-BETANCOURT, 2017), keeping unchanged the power relations of one group over another.
The right to difference, associated with many studies on minority rights in the Latin American context, tends to presuppose a pattern of...
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