Are you racist?

I have been told that racism in the United States is on a different level, sure, there is racism here, but we excuse it by saying that we have not experienced it and we know someone who is black and maybe we’re tight and that automatically gives us an “I’m not racist” card. And in the United Sates people say that everyone is just oversensitive, here I can call someone “negrit@” and they won’t be offended, because from people’s general perspective that is what is really wrong with the world. A couple of years ago my aunt got married to a black Puerto Rican man, we were in their house discussing the U.S capitol breach, and how the guy who sat on the podium and the people who stormed in and stole government property were only able to do it because they were white, one of his daughters expressed how messed up this reality felt for her and how she had experienced racism since she was little, the things we see on tv, of stores racially profiling customers and checking their bags to check if they stole something, were all true. I remember reading a story of a Muslim single mother moving to a new house in a predominantly white neighborhood and how she got death threats and people with KKK robes standing outside her house, and I remember thinking, “this is crazy”, “they are crazy”. Since I was younger, fourteen or fifteen, I’ve liked reading on equality and basic human rights, anything from feminism to LGBTQA+ rights to racism, and I used to pride myself in this, I felt very happy when I finally grasped a bit of the concept of cultural appropriation and why there could be feminist Muslim women wearing their hijabs. But the reality is that I was only reading on the subject, and from an Anglo-American perspective, always thinking about checking my privilege, but I wasn’t thinking about my privilege on my environment, I never thought how it was like for a black person to live in Colombia, what are their chances to get a job, what is the wage gap, what are they going through, and if that was a second thought, Asians, or people from the middle east didn’t even pop up in my train of thought. Here I’m not a Latina girl who, as a guy who screamed at us said, “should go back to Mexico”, here I’m part of the majority and in Medellín, in Eafit specially there aren’t many black people, and in Colombia, the Asian population is minimal. But is there racism then? The answer is yes, when the police standing outside the university didn’t stop anyone but the one black kid, when my colleagues at the beginning of the pandemic said “Chinese people are so gross, I hate them”, or when in my WhatsApp groups my friends started making fun of the Asian girl sitting on the metro while people were trying to keep away from her, those are acts of racism from the people around me and the institutions I belong to, and when I said nothing, even though I knew it was wrong, my own racism showed.

So to start grasping the panorama we have the following figures for the black population in Colombia, 48% of are in poverty, 59% do not have access to a significant form of education and those who do 31% reach primary level, 24,9% mid-level education and only 19% secondary level. As I read more in the matter, I find reasons why we see so many cases in the U.S while not so many here, one argument is the fact that the United States is a land of immigrants, and since there are so many and from so many different cultures, it is more likely for some to get the spotlight. Also, the U.S holds a lot of soft power, and their mainstream media reaches the whole world, their music, movies, tv-shows and celebrities are well known all over the globe and people pay attention, just here in Cartagena in the last months of 2020 a black actor from the U.S visited and the police beat him up for no reason, which brings out the question, how many times has this happened? And would we have known if it was anybody else? Would we care? Another argument that brings up a Colombian reporter is that we do have racism, is just that we camouflage it as hateful and persistent classism.

Even though covid has brought many downsides with it, there are people that claim that it will actually help us fight racism, because Asian hate crimes did not start because of a “Chinese virus”, they have always exited, but people did not care, just this week a white man went to three different salons to shoot Asian women because the Asian women there were not helping with his sex addiction. The people doing this did not start to be racist because of covid, they already were, and this gives them an excuse to act on it, and it also applies in Colombia and other countries. And since we have more time, we are also more aware of what is happening, and we are more empathetic due to the circumstances. 

And so, it is time to stop being in denial and stop making up excuses for our actions, we have to acknowledge our privilege, we have to get off our high horses, preaching how cultured and woke we are, and we need to start speaking up when we see racist behaviors even if it comes from those close to us, we need to read and accept that there is a problem and the solution starts with each of us 

Sources 

https://caracol.com.co/radio/2020/07/09/nacional/1594259571_753258.html 

https://abcnews.go.com/US/atlanta-shooting-legacy-misogyny-racism-asian-women/story?id=76533776

https://www.larepublica.co/analisis/luis-guillermo-velez-cabrera-402232/no-neguemos-el-racismo-3016494