Global gendered anti-Black belonging and racial ideology

We review theorizations of gendered anti-Blackness and the scholarship on the politics of belonging. Bridging together this literature, we propose gendered anti-Black non-belonging as an alternative framework for addressing African descendant women's expressions and realities of belonging in the United States and Portugal. We select these two cases for their remarkably distinct—yet related—racial ideologies of the state. In the United States, colorblindness is the main ideology of the state whereas in Portugal anti-racial ideology pervades. As we will highlight, the experiences of belonging among African descendant women in the United States and Portugal challenge the veracity of these racial ideologies which work to render gendered anti-Black oppression invisible. In both cases, anti-Black non-belonging means that African descendant women are vulnerable to gendered state violence and racist practices impacting their individual and group belonging; as a result, the right for Black bodies to be in a particular place and space is constantly contested, and, often, violently regulated and disciplined. Yet, anti-Black belonging is both a matter of oppression and resistance. African-descendant women draw from their everyday knowledge of domination to employ resistance. In doing so, as we will argue, they rewrite the national narrative of race, gender and belonging in Portugal and the United States.