ANGELA PERES SAID: "I’m tired of being seen as if I were for sale.".

Ever since I started having esthetic concerns during adolescence, wanting to appear beautiful, I confronted a big dilemma. Where could I feel good about myself with my appearance without reinforcing stereotypes regarding the black woman’s body? for many years I didn’t know what was happening, and when I went to live in Rio de Janeiro, I encountered another kind of racism that made me understand what I had always gone through. Every time a “gringo” would come close to me to give me a “compliment” it was if I was getting punched in the stomach. It happened each time a guy would flatter me, “You’re so pretty,” depending on the tone or the look that accompanied the compliment it was possible to understand: yes, it’s a compliment; or no, he’s being racist, imagining how much pleasure I – as a “mulata” - could give him in bed. I don’t know if white girls go through this every day like I do, but I know that the mulata stereotype makes me go through these violent situations clothed as compliments every day. The truth is that most of the time they don’t even have to open their mouthes, just the way they look at me and I already know what’s happening, I know that that’s the racist look of the slaveowner who thinks he’s owner of a sexual slave. My freedom  didn’t come with the Lei Áurea [law that abolished slavery in Brazil]. It came when I was able to understand what was happening around me. I’m not going to buy myself with compliments, not even with the money the white man can give me. They say that I’m arrogant, but why is that? I’m free. Yes, I’m tired of this!