How much racism is there in Colombia?

 Hi, everyone!

Colombia (my country of birth) has the second largest population of Afrodescendants in Latin America, after Brazil (9,34 % of the national population in 2018 census). It is often referred to as a country of regions, each with a supposedly particular racialized identity, being blackness stereotypically associated with the Pacific and the Caribbean lowland coastal regions, and being mestizos more associated to whiteness (located more in the highlands at the center of the country) than blackness.

Before the expedition of our current Constitution (1991), which has led to many multiculturalist reforms, the social mobilization of Afro-Colombian was incipient, at the point to look somewhat "invisible" in the eyes of the State and the rest of the society.

In this sense, considering a long time tradition of armed internal conflict (guerrilla, paramilitary forces, and drug trafficking violence), I must agree with many others (Lapora, n.d.; ONIC, 2009; Restrepo, 2018; Ospina, 2020) in asserting that the exclusion of racialized minorities in Colombia works more through violence and forced displacement, rather than racism in the way that is still deep-rotten in the US.

Racism in Colombia is not a problem of rejection (slavery was abolished in 1851), instead, it is a matter of invisibility, a taboo, that works against Afro-Colombian people in a mix of violence, poverty, and lower access to education, health, and other vital resources with no whatsoever protagonism in our proclaimed "multiethnic and multicultural" State governed under the Rule of Law (Ospina, 2020), where people suffer from racial discrimination, understood as a sadly kind of structural historical discrimination (Almario et al, 2007; Quiroz, 2018; Galicia, 2020; Semana, 2020), that condemns them to be treated as citizens of the third category, without the visibility that in a tragic sense has in the US, as you can see in recent riots during 2020, with and without the pandemic.

Sources:

(n.d.) Latin American Anti-racism in a 'Post-Racial' Age - LAPORA. Colombia. Retrieved from: https://www.lapora.sociology.cam.ac.uk/countries/colombia

(2020, January 1) "El racismo en Colombia es estructural e histórico". Semana. Retrieved from: https://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/racismo-en-colombia-es-estructural-daniela-maturana/675452

Almario, O., et al (2007, August 27) Aproximaciones a los estudios de raza y racismo en Colombia. Revista de Estudios Sociales (II) 184 - 193. https://journals.openedition.org/revestudsoc/20317

Autoridad Nacional de Gobierno Indígena de Colombia - ONIC & Observatorio de Discriminación Racial, Comisión Colombiana de Jurista (2009) Discriminación racial en Colombia: informe alterno ante el Comité para la Eliminación de la Discriminación Racial de la ONU 2009. Retrieved from: https://www.dejusticia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/fi_name_recurso_206.pdf

Galicia, C. (2020, July 14) ¿Por qué hay que hablar de racismo en Colombia? Retrieved from: https://www.radionica.rocks/artes/racismo-en-colombia

Quiroz, F. (2018, December 27) Parece mentira, pero Colombia es un país tremendamente racista. Retrieved from: https://programaacua.org/testimonial-item/parece-mentira-pero-colombia-es-un-pais-tremendamente-racista/

Ospina, C. (2020, June 16) ¿Y con el racismo en Colombia, qué? Retrieved from: https://semanarural.com/web/articulo/y-con-el-racismo-en-colombia-que/1486

Restrepo, E. (2018, March 28) Talks and disputes of racism in Colombia after multiculturalism. Cultural Studies 32 (3), 460 - 476. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017.1420090