Journal de la Société des américanistes
95-1 | 2009
tome 95, n° 1
Defining Blackness in Colombia
Peter Wade
Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/jsa/10783
DOI: 10.4000/jsa.10783
ISSN: 1957-7842
Publisher
Société des américanistes
Printed version
Date of publication: 23 July 2009
Number of pages: 165-184
ISSN: 0037-9174
Electronic reference
Peter Wade, “Defining Blackness in Colombia”, Journal de la Société des américanistes [Online], 95-1 |
2009, Online since 10 June 2014, connection on 22 April 2022. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/
jsa/10783 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/jsa.10783
© Société des Américanistes
DEFINING BLACKNESS IN COLOMBIA
Peter WADE*
This papcr looks at the complcx rclationship bctwecn concepts employed by social
scientists and those used in everyday practice and discourse, arguing lhal the standard
idcas about how ideas travel from one domain (state, acadcme, social movcments,
everyday usage) Io another, and become essentialised or dcstabilised in the proccss, arc
oftcn too simple. Changing definitions of blackness in Colombia, through the process
of multiculturalisl refonn and after, are examined with a vicw to cxploring wbich
categories of actors were influential in shaping these definitions and which were
involved in essentialisations and dc-csscntialisations. [Key words: Afro-Colombians,
race, ethnicity, Latin America.]
Définitions des populations noires en Colombie. Cet article explore les relations complexes qui existent entre les concepts utilisés par les chercheurs en sciences sociales et
ceux qui sont mobilisés dans la vie et les énoncés quotidiens. li met en lumière que les
idées standards sur les façons dont ces concepts circulent d'une sphère à l'autre (État,
universités, mouvements sociaux, rue) et, par là même, s'csscntialiscnt ou se déconstruisent, sont bien trop simples. Les définitions des populations noires en Colombie ont
changé avec la réforme qui a institué le multiculturalisme et après. Elles sont ici
analysées en tenant compte des catégories d'acteurs qui ont pesé sur leur élaboration et
celles qui ont joué un rôle dans les processus d'essentialisation ou l'inverse. [Mots-clés:
Afro-colombiens, race, ethnie, Amérique latine.]
La definicion de la poblacion negra en Colombia. Esc trabajo examina las rclacioncs
complejas que existen entre los conceptos que utilizan los investigadorcs de ciencias
sociales y los que se usan en la vida cotidiana y en los enunciados de todos los <lias;
insiste en el hecho de que las ideas comunes acerca de las maneras en que estos
conceptos pasan de una esfera a la otra (Estado, universidades, movimientos sociales,
uso cotidiano) y en que a través de esos movimientos se vuclven esencializados o
descontruidos, son demasiado simples. Las definiciones de las poblaciones negras en
Colombia han cambiado a raiz de la Reforma que instauré> el multiculturalismo y
después: aqui se analizan <lichas definiciones con especial atencion sobre las categorias
de actores que influyeron en su elaboracion asi como las que tuvieron un pape! eu los
procesos de esencializacion o de des-esencializacion. [Palabras claves: Afro-colombianos, raza, etnia, América latina.]
* University of Manchester, Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences, Arthur Lewis Building, Manchester Ml3 9PL, U.K. [
[email protected]].
Journal de la Société des A111érica11istes, 2009, 95-1 , pp. 165-184. © Société des Américanistes.
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Vol. 95-1, 2009
l NTRODUCl'ION
The relationship betwcen concepts employed by social scient ists a nd those
used in cvcryday practice and disco urse is a complex o ne. One conunon na rrative
is tha t everyday usage of concepts is initia lly flexible, but these become uni vocal
and fixed when they enter into academic discourse as a nalytic concepts. An
a lternative na rrative is that academic usage is flexible and (de-)constructivist and
that, when academic concepts enter into the domain of « official »administrative
practices and discourses, they bccome reified and essentia lised. A further common sto ry tells of how academic concepts (re-)entcr the wo rld of cveryday socia l
acto rs as tools in the struggles of ident ity politics: socia l m ovements m ay ta ke
concepts such as race, ethnicity, culture, gender and use them in « essentialist »
ways that are at odds with the social (de-)constructio nist approach of the social
sciences, whose practitio ners tend to sec such concepts as flexible, contextdependcnt constructs (Rcstrepo 2004).
l am not convinced that these na rrat ives work . G iddens (1990, p. 311) identified the increasing reflexivit y of socia l knowledge as a consequence of modernit y.
Knowledge about the social produced by those recognised as «experts » filters
into and o ut of the everyday do ma in: wc a re ail socia l theorists at so me levcl and
sha re a commo n interest in thinking abo ut people's behaviour. People absorb
social science's ideas about sociality - and then a lter thcir behaviour in light of
those ideas, ma king the domain of the social a permanently shifting ta rget. With
mass communicatio ns and literacy, the circle of reflex ivity gets tighter and fas ter.
G idclens is right, l thin k, a nd it is important that his argument makes no
assumptio ns about who will do what with the concepts in circulatio n - whether
expert o r evcryday practice has a tendency to cssentialise o r to be a nti-essentialist.
What exists is the circulation, and consta nt mutation, of ideas and concepts in
clifferent social fields in which diverse social acto rs, with different goals and
resources, appropriate and adapt concepts in ways that suit their out look on the
world . Tt is clifficult to tell a simple story abo ut how concepts and categories
circulate amo ng the state agents, academics, cultural activists, NGO workers and
« o rdin ary people» who are ail involved in the productio n and circulatio n of
knowledge (Ng'weno 2007; Rappapo rt 2005; Restrepo 2004). Cert a in categories
m ay achicve a do mina nt, indeed hegemonic, status, but they do so throug h a
complex in teraction between ail these knowledge prod ucers (as one might expect
fo r a process that leads to hegemo ny, which implies somc collective agreement).
In what follows, 1 will trace changing categories a nd concepts of blackness in
Colombia , showing how the definitions of terms such as black, negro, black
comm unity, Afro-Colo mbian and Afro-descenda nt have been influenced by
everyday usage, acadcmic practicc, cultura l activism, transnatio na l NGO
work, and state pract ice. T will trace a move fro m a pre- l 990s ambig uity abo ut
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DEFIN!NG BLACKNESS IN COLOMB!A
blackness, through the post-1991 domination of the co1111111idad negra (black
community), towards an emerging consensus on definitions of blackness that are
inclusive and focus on African heritage and diaspora. l end by arguing that,
despite this, the power of mestizaje as a lens to view and think about blackness
still remains powerful in Colombian society.
THE AMBIGUITY OF BLACKNESS
As in many other Latin American countries, in post-independence Colombia
prior to the tale twentieth century, the category negro had no institutional space
in state practices governed by liberal ideologies of citizenship, which gave little
room to ethnie diflèrence among citizens. Indigenous people were, however,
recognised as a specific category. Academics also did not pay attention to black as
a category: anthropology focused on indigenous peoplcs; sociology attended to
peasants and social classes; history, while it looked at « slaves », did not encompass « Blacks » (Friedemann 1984).
Yet the category negro existed in everyday practice to refer to categories of
people. The geographer Agustin Codazzi referred in the 1850s to la raza 11egra
that lived in the Pacifie coastal region of the country, populated mainly by
descendants of African slaves. The novelisl Tomas Carrasquilla (1858-1940)
included references to negros in his works (Wade 1993). In the mid-twentieth
century, there was extensive press commentary about the music and dance
associated with los negros, which were becoming popular (Wade 2000). The tenn
was not well defined , however. On the one band, it could be very encompassing,
as a term used by the elites to refer lo the lower classes in general; on the other
hand, it could be quite restrictive, as an insult directed against a particular persan.
Euphemisms such as 111ore110 (brown) were common and in areas identified by
observers as very black, such as the Pacifie coastal region, locals referred to
themselves as libres (free people) rather than negros (Losonczy 1997).
This fundamental ambiguity in the meaning of the tenu negro - and by
extension other racial or colour terms such as 111ore110, pardo, 111estizo, and
blanco - underwrote official images of the nation as a mixed nation in which race
was not an important issue. In Brazil, the idea of the country as a racial
democracy, which became an official ideology from about the 1930s, was also
underwritten by the notion that, although lerms such as pardo (brown), preto
(black) and negro existed, collective social categories designated by such terms
did not.
Academic and state knowledge production concurred in this. The l 950s'
UNESCO-sponsored studies of race in Brazil inflicted damage on the image of a
Brazilian racial democracy, but they sustained the idea that racial categorisations
did not command collective agreement (Harris 1970). The contras! was made
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JOUR NAL DE LA SOCIÉTÉ DES AMÉRICANISTES
Vol. 95-I, 2009
with the USA, where basic racial categories (black, white, native American)
were mostly agreed on . For Colombia , Solaùn and Kro nus ( 1973) argued that
miscegenation had blurred racia l categories, even tho ugh discriminatio n against
ind ividual blacks did exist. N evertheless, such academic studies simultaneously
underwrote the existence of the category black by constructing it as a viable
o bject of study.
In state census practice, racial or colour categories disappeared fro m Colombia in the ea rly twentieth century (Smith 1966). Yet the state in Colombia also
reproduced the category « black » by continuously referring toit in, for example,
school text books (Wade 2000). In Brazil, the state co nt inucd Io collect census
data using such categories as preto, pardo, blanco and amare/o (yello w, t hat is, of
Asian o rigin) until 1970, when a colo ur questio n was d ropped , to be included
again in 1980 (Nobles 2000, p. 104). However, Nobles argues, the data were used
to ma ke arg uments abo ut the progressive m ixing a nd wh itening of Brazil.
In short, there was a fondamental a mbiguity involved in the consta nt denial
and simultaneously the constant reiteratio n of blackness as a category, both in
everyday a nd state praetices. One might wa nt to a rgue that the state was imposing
visio ns of homogeneou s mestizo nati onal identit ies. White there is a strong
element of truth in this, the state a lso reproduced blackness (a nd indigeno usness).
Academics, white cha llenging the no tion of racia l democracy (in Brazil), also
reproduced the cent ral no tio n of the vagueness of the category « black ».
THE EMERGENCE OF BLACK IOENTITY AN D B UEL LAS DE A FRICANfA
In Colombia, in the l 970s, vario us black student cultura l activist groups
began to form, mainly inspired by US black activism and the a nti-apartheid
movement (Wade 1995). At abo ut the same time, academic perspectives on black
studies a lso began to cha nge, led by Nina de Friedemann whose a nth ropological
studies on black groups appeared fro m 1969 (Friedemann 1966-1969). T he black
activist groups were concerned with m any aspects of racism a nd sha red a concern
with Friedemann over the« invisibility »of Blacks in Colo mbia: o ne of their key
concerns was with black identity, its weakness a nd the failure of people they saw
as black to identify as such . T hey tended to use an inclusive definitio n of
blackness, which interpellated as« black» (negro) people who mig ht not have
identified as such.
Friedem ann was concerned with invisibil ity, primarily in academic a pproaches that wrote black people o ut of the histo ry and ethnography of the country,
a nd o ne of her key concerns was with African roots (hue/las de africa11ia - traces
or imprints of Africanness), a theme that she developed with Jaime Arocha
(Arocha 1998b; Friedemann and Arocha 1986). H er intention was to uncover
hiclclen creolised Africanisms (Mintz and Price 1976) in o rdcr to challenge
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DilFlNING IlLACKNESS IN COLOl\IIllA
do minant versions of Colombian culture as mainly European and indigenous in
o rigin. She rejected the erasure of blackness in a society governed by a dominant
ideology of mestizo nat ional identity, an ideology that, while it made room for
indigeneity as an institutionalised form of otherness, ig nored or vilified blacks. ln
terms of social classifications, the implicatio ns of this approach were that people
could identify with a hidden African pasl. She and Arocha, like the black
activists, were setting the context for an inclusive definition of blackness as
som ething that was already there, denied, but open to re-discovery, in this case
rooted in African-derived culture, rather than rncialised appearance.
This said, there was a difference between the academic and act ivist perspectives. The academics were mainly concerned with « black culture» in rural
communities in the Pacifie coastal regio n (Arocha 1999; Friedemann 1974) and
some other regio ns (Friedemann 1976; 1980). The activists were urban dwellers
who faeed discriminat io n in education, work and housing markets. In that sense,
white they were also concerned with « invisibility », they were more open to the
kind of« race relations» and« racial identities » analysis that was suggested to
them by their reading of US sources - and which was also the approach that
T broadly adopted (Wade 1993). This point is impo rtant in terms of how ideas
about black ness developed in the l 990s, when black ethnicity a nd cultural
diffe rence became the dominant tropes, displacing frameworks th at loo ked al
(urban) race relatio ns and the operation of racism in a class society (which was
the dominant approach in Brazil, for example).
It is not clear exactly what were the connections between Friedemann and the
black students who set up the l 970s groups, but at least some of these students
became acquainted with the work of Friedemann and were influenced by it. Juan
de Dios Mosquera, a fo unding member of the 1976 student group Soweto, which
in 1982 became Cimarr6 n (or T he National Movemen t for the Human Rights of
Black Communities in Colombia), before he started university studies had
a lreacly met with the Span ish anthropologist G utiérrez Azopardo who later wrote
a pioneering history of black people in Colo mbia (Gutiérrez Azopardo 1980;
M osquera 1985). Members of the Soweto group reacl Malcolm X, Martin Luther
King, Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, but they also attencled the F irst
Congress of Black C ulture of the Americas, held in Cali, in August 1977 1• T his
congress was organised by the Fund aci6n Colombiana de Investigaciones
Folcl6ricas, directed by the black writer and folklorist Manuel Zapata Olivella,
who was an impo rta nt figure in early studies of black culture in Colo mbia and
linked artistic, academic and activist circles.
T he Centre for the Investigation and Development of Black Culture, founded
in 1975 by Amir Smith-C6rdoba, included amo ng its founders the a nthropologist
Jaime Atencio Babilonia who had written on black culture (Atencio Babilonia
1973) 2 • Friedemann was on the editorial committee of the gro up's newspaper,
Prese11cia Negra.
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Vol. 95-1, 2009
F rom these few deta ils, it is clear that the circulation of ideas between activists
a nd academics was a complex malter: it is no t easy to pin down who was
influencing who m. So me of the academics were a lso activists, while activists
participated in academic conferences and also produced books that formed part
of the growing bibliography about Blacks in Colo mbia (Mosquera 1985; SmithC6rdo ba 1980). The question of who was creating (or no t) essentia list definitio ns
of blackness is a lso a complex one. Smith-C6rbocla was perhaps o perat ing with
an essentialist clefinitio n of blackness when he accosted o n the street people he
identificd as black with the salutatio n, « Ho/a, negro! » - certa inly a strategic
essent ialism a imed at provoking a reactio n. But the no tion of l111ellas de aj/"icanfa
implied a form of cssentialism by privileging African o rigins as the basis of black
culture, when Colombia n black culture was arguably fo rmcd as much fro m
E uropean a nd indigeno us inputs as Africa n o nes. On the o ther ha nd, bo th
Smith-C6rdoba and Masquera o perated in practice with qui te open ideas abo ut
who could form a uscful part of their o rganisatio ns, ad mitting mesti zo and white
people. And o ther academics, in Colombia and beyo nd , also criticiscd the
Friedemann/A rocha perspective fo r its focus on Africanism (Rcstrepo 1998;
Wade 1997).
CoNSTITUTION AL REFORi\I AND LA COMUNIDll D NEGRA
Dy 1990, the Friedemann/Arocha perspective was do minant in academic
circles and was represented by the 1990 launch of the jo urn al edited by Friedema nn, América Negra. The kind of perspective represented by my o wn wo rk,
which took a more political econo my approach and looked at dyna mic frontier
and urban contexts, and by the urba n black activists, was a n undcrcurrent: thcse
black urba n g ro ups were small and ma rgina l; the translatio n of my main book
dicl no t appear in Colo mbia until 1997.
This is the context in which the constitutio nal refonns of 199 1 took place,
officially recasting Colo mbia as a pluriethnic a nd multicultural natio n (Arocha
l 998a; Ng'weno 2007; Va n Cott 2000; Wade 1995). Sig nificant concessions were
made to las co1111111idades negras (black conun unities) located in the Pacifie coasta l
regio n o f Colo mbia. Arocha a nd F riedemann were bo th involved in the Constituent Assembly that eventually approved the inclusion of Transitory Article 55
relating to black communities. In 1993 Law 70 was approvcd which developed the
TA55's brief o utline. Acadcmics such as A rocha were part of negotiatio ns
lcading to this law, alo ngside black activists.
The meaning of blackncss was recast by these changes, but in ways that had
strong continuity with the previo us situatio n. lu Law 70, blackncss was seen as
something that ran through Colombian society as a whole - Blacks werc rccognised as« a n ethnie group » - but the foc us of the legislatio n was the rural black
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Wade
DEFINING llLACKNESS IN COLOMlllA
communities of the Pacifie coastal region, which were allowed to establish
collective titles to land. The influence of the dominant academic perspective is
evident here, with the emphasis on the ethnie and cultural diftèrence of a black
ethnie group centred in a marginal rural a rea, but the situation was actua lly mnch
more complex (Ng'weno 2007; Restrepo 1997, 2002; Wade, ed., 2002).
First, there had been no black representative elected to the Constituent
Assembly; instead an Ember{1 indigenous leader based in the Pacifie coastal
region spoke on behalf of indigenous and black communities in the regio n,
which, he saie!, shared common problems. This meant that the way blackn ess was
presented as an issue could be elided with the way indigeneity was presented - in
terms of rooted, rural and ethnically distinct « communities », whose main
concern was with land rights. Already in the Pacifie coastal region, black and
indigeno us communities had been cooperating and forming joint peasant associations and this process was often m ediated by the Church. Some black rural
leaders were already aligning their interests with indigenous agendas. Also, the
state was pre-disposed to « hear » an expressio n of blackness that assimilated it
to indigeno us models, with which the state had been familiar for many decades. In
the process, then, blackness became indigenised (Hooker 2005; Ng'weno 2007;
Wade 2002).
Second, black organisations played a significant lobbying role in the process,
despite the absence of a representative in the Constituent Assembly. This
lobbying was dominated by Pacifie coasta l o rganisations: older groups such as
Cimarr6n were marginal to, indeed overtaken by, these events. Thus agendas
related to the interests of Pacifie coastal groups, which tended to revolve arouncl
land and rural communities, look priority. In additio n, the theme of cultural
difference a nd ethnicity was strong. A key post-1991 black o rganization, Proceso
de Comunidades Negras (PC N), is based mainly in the southern Pacifie region
and has argued in interview that « presenting the situation of Afro-Colom bian
comrnunities in tenns of racia l discrimination has litt le audience » (Pedrosa el al.
1996, p. 25 1; my translation); instead, a n emphasis o n cultural diflèrence was seen
as more effective. The PCN's websi te reflects its regional and cultural bias. One of
its stated « lines of action » is the recognition of the ri ghts of « la co1111111idad
negra co/0111bia11a como grupo étnico » (the Colombian black community as an
ethnie gro up) 3 . On the o ne hand, this reinforces the idea of a single black
conununity, which has the status of a cultu ra lly distinct unit; o n the other hand,
in practice the PCN's focus on the southem Pacifie coast tends to conftate that
ethnie group with the black communities of that region.
The concept of the co1111111idad negra has been very powerful in the Pacifie
coastal region and has implied « the abandon ment of the socio-political spccificities »(Hoffmann 2004, p. 218) of actual black communities thcre, which are
very diverse, in the name of a more sing ular and homogcneous black ethnie
identity. The state discourse of black community, allicd to real resources (land
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JOURNAL DE LA socrÉTÉ DES AMÉRICANISTES
Vol. 95-1 , 2009
tilles) attached to that catcgory, and to the social movement discourse of black
community ethnicity have ail worked together to make co1111111idad negra into
dominant concept - even in zones outside the Pacifie coastal region (Cunin 2000;
Ng'weno 2007).
In sum, the recasting of the mcaning of blackness - a recasting that has
constrained the compass of that flexible tenn - emerged out of a complcx
interaction between academics, activists, the state and, indeed, the Church. As in
previous limes, there were notable links between academics and activists. Restrepo (1 997, p. 311) notes:« certain important activists in the movement of black
communities that emerged out of the National Constituent Assembly, and who
have subsequently participated directly or as "aco111pafia11tes" [associatcs] to the
ncw organisations, had a university background in anthropology and were
acquainted with the academic discussions that had becn taking place since the
l 980s ». Key figures in PCN, such as Carlos Rosero and Libia Grueso still have
close links with anthropologists such as Arturo Escobar and Eduardo Restrepo
(Grueso et al. 1998), white Grueso has an MA in Political Studies (Grueso 2000).
If the end result of Law 70 was a definition of blackness that is constraining,
as it ruralises and indigenises blackness and prioritises ethnie diITerence over
racism, this is not a simple process of cssentialisation and reification that can be
laid at the door of a particular set of actors. I would argue that the state's
priorities had a decisive influence, because it suited the state's neo-liberal agendas
to limit the compass of the law and to focus on the Pacifie coastal region where
massive development plans were under way (Escobar 1997, 2003; Ng'weno 2007;
Wade 2002) - a conjuncture of neo-liberalism and multiculturalism that has been
analysed by Hale (2002; 2005). But existing academic frameworks, allied with
social movement agendas and conjunctures, laid the basis for such a move and
facilitated the dominance of this notion of blackness.
Howcver, this clefinition of blackness is also contestecl. Black movements
outside the Pacifie coastal region and in urban areas have becn active in pursuing
their own claims and developing the parts of Law 70 that apply to ail « black
communities » in Colombia. One example is the successful attempt by a loca l
Cimarr6n leader in the Caribbean coastal city of Santa Marta to gct ofticia l
recognition for the existence of a « black conununity » there, which, under Law
70, would allow a representative from the community to sit on the city council's
education committee. The attempt was turned clown by a succession of courts,
but allowed by the Constitutional Court in 1996, legimitising a« black community » in a way apparently outsidc the compass of Law 70 (Cunin 2003). Other
exarnples from the Cauca valley are dcscribed by Ng'weno (2007).
The PCN 's website has also recently seen postings of documents that refer to
the Magdalena Medio (the micldle rcaches of the Magdalena river valley that
transects the country) - even if these are still marginal to the vast wcight of
material on the website 4 . And the PCN also has as one of its « lines of action»
172
DEFINTNG BLACKNESS IN COLOMBIA
Wade
the struggle against racism 5 . Anecdotally, it is interesting that Carlos Rosero, a
PCN leader, mentioned tome in 2001 that the theme of racism, which had been
seen by the PCN as having « little audience», was being reconsidered by the
organisation. Hoffmann also notes« a rcorientation of the ethnie debate towards
the ant i-discrimination struggle »(Hoffmann 2004, p. 221).
THE HEGEMONY OF
« AFRO »
If the particular constructions of Law 70 have been subject to criticism - and
this is not to mention the fact that land titles that have been established are often
rendered worthless by the low-intensity warfare that is being waged in the Pacifie
coastal region by guerrillas, paramilitaries and the army - , then an emcrging and
pcrhaps more durable hegcmony is being established around the notions of
Afro-Colombian and Afro-descendant. The tenu co1111111idades negras, white still
current and still potentially problematic in relation to, say, urban contexts, has
beenjoined and to some extent displaced by the terms qf/·ocolo111bia110 and more
recently afrodescendiente. The basis for these was already set with the notion of
/111el/as de q//·icania and this was strengthened by the emphasis on black cultural
distinctiveness in the constitutional reform process. This was reinforced by the
fact that, in the mid 1990s, major development agencies began to take an interest
in what they called Afro-Lati ns and/or Afro-descendants: the Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB), the World Bank, the UN and the Inter-American
Foundation a il became involved in researching and funding Afro-Latin comnmnities 6 . This is arguably a North Amcrican way of defining blackness, but, as we
have seen, the emphasis on africanfa was nota simple North American import
into Colombian academic discourse - which is not to say North American
concepts were not influential, just that they were not simple imported determinants. The Portuguese term aji-odesce11de11te was coined in Brazil in 1996, by the
black feminist activist Sueli Carneiro, and became common usage especially after
the 2001 Durban conference on racism, appearing in Colombia around the same
time (Masquera et al. 2002).
One sign of the dominance of these terms has bcen their appearance in the
Colombian census. The 1993 census broke new ground in Colombia by including
the question « Do you belong to any ethnie [group], indigenous group or black
community? », followed by the subsidiary question, for those who answered in
the affirmative, « To which one? ». People self-ideutifying as indigenous had been
counted before, but this was the first attempt to include any other « ethnie group »
or« black communities ».The result was absurd: only 1.5 % of people identified
as belonging to « a black community », a category that had only just been
legitimised by the state (Fl6rez et al. 2001 ). La ter, the state came up with different
estimates for the black population as a percentage of the national total, ranging
from 16 % to 25 % (Wade 2002, p. 6).
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Vol. 95- 1, 2009
Meanwhile, the National Department of Statistics (DANE) was engaged in a
debate about how to change the census question, and pilot studies were carried
out, some of them funded by the Wo rtel Bank 7 • Government agcneies, nmltilateral institutions a nd transnational academic networks worked in complex relatio nships Io construct new ways of thinking abo ut blackness. Influcntial in this
was the work of a project, funded by the French and Colombian states and
invo lvi ng academics from both countries; key figures included the Colombian
socio logist Fernand o Urrea Giraldo and the French sociologist Olivier Barbary 8 .
The resea rchers on the project were critica l of the category comunidad 11egra,
wh ich they argued o nly had meaning - and then only limited - in relati on to the
Pacifie eoastal region and they look a much more inclusive approach to defining
blackness, based o n phenotype and self-identification (Barbary a nd Urrea
G iraldo 2004a; Fl6rcz et al. 2001). Urrea Gi raldo and Barbary we re involved in
the extensive consultations and debates with DANE abo ut how to construct a
new ccnsus q uestio n about elhnicity. ln the end, the 2005 census included
questi o n 33:
Acco rdi ng to your culture, pueblo or physical feat ures, a re yo u o r are you
recognised as being:
1. Indigcnous? (To which pueblo i11dige11a do you belong?)
2. Rom?
3. a mizaf? [a neologism meaning a rooted person, a nat ive] of San Andrés
and Providencia [Colombia n islands in the Caribbean]
4. a pale11q11ero of San Basilio? [someone from the village of San Basilio, an
o ld pale11q11e, o r runaway slave settlement of colonia l o rigin]
5. black, mulatto, Afro-Colo mbian or Afro-descendant?
6. none of the above? 9
It is clear that the conccptua l category of blackncss behind the q uestio n is a
broad one, attem pting to construct a single category of black people which Jeans
in the d irectio n of a North American definition a nd does not wo1Ty abo ut
whethcr blackness is construed through culture, physical appearance or pueblo, a
vague term meaning village, town, nat io n or people. T he figure of 10.5 % given by
DA NE fo r the Afro-Colombian populati o n was calculated to includc categories
3, 4 and 5 in the quest io n above JO.
T he census question has reinforced a vicw in whieh blackness has become a n
inclusive and expansive category, based in part o n some identification wit h
«afro ». Alt hough ma ny conunentato rs see afrocolombia11os a nd co1111111idad
11egm as being mo re or less sy nonymous terms, bo th based o n a n ethnie identity
- and indeed the two terms are often used interchangeable by cultu ra l activists
and state oflicials - thcre is clearly a departure hcre from the more limited idea of
the co1111111idad negra, implicitly located in the ru ra l Pacifie reg ion , a departure
174
Wade
DEFINING l.lLACKNESS IN COLOl\lllIA
that responds better to the nature of the census as a national enterprise. This
notion of blackness reinforces the hegemony of an inclusive definition of blackness which is a lso a relatively simple definition of blackness (despite the complexity of the question): that is, either you are black (and pale11q11ero and raizal are
sub-categories of black) or you are indigeno us or you are« none of the above ».
I think the «afro » element of these designations is becoming increasingly
distant from Africa itself and from ideas about « real » Africanisms. lnstead,
«afro» now invites people to identify with a globaliscd, mass-mediated culture
of blackness, associated with certain images and styles - of music, bodily comportment, dress - and realised to a grcat degree through practices of consumption (Sansone 2003; Wade 1999).
Ali these census terms fit into the new official multiculturalism of Colombia
which creates and depends on a clear set of ethnie categories. It is clear that
mestizos and whites (those who would classify as « none of the abovc »)are the
unmarked catcgory: one has to positively identify as « different », as ethnically
distinct. This is a multiculturalism in which the « multicultural »are those who
are ethnically different from the national norm. In the construction of the
hegemony of this view of blackness, the state, academics, cultural activists and
transnational agencies such as the World Dank have worked together - which is
not to say they have been in cahoots, but rather that thei r disparate and at times
conflicting projects converge around this notion of blackness.
Whcn one asks who is reifying and cssentialising categories, the answers are
complex. The state did a lot of work to legitimate a restrictive concept of
co1111111idad 11egra, only to undermine that with the 2005 census q uestion . Sorne
activists were building political projects aro und the idea of the Pacifie coastal
black community and ils land rights; others (typically more urban) were tapping
into notions of a global, diasporic blackness. Sorne academics were pushing the
notion of lwellas de africa11ia, others werc constructing more inclusive concepts
of ctjl·o and, as I shall show, also restating the indetenninacy of that very category,
linking this to the importance of 111estizaje.
BLACKNESS AND MHSTIZAJE
The Franco-Colombian project included studies in Cali, which had received
large currents of black in-migration from the Pacifie coastal region. A key 1998
survey gathered demographic, social and econo mic data in order to measure
racial segregation and discrimination in the housing and labour markets
(Barbary and Urrea Giraldo 2004a). l think this work is having a paradoxical
effect. On the one hand, the statistical work effected the construction of a
relatively simple black category of« Afro-Colombian » which allowed comparison with non-Afro-Colombians on various different measures. In addition, the
175
JOURNAL DE LA SOCIÉTÉ DES AM ÉRICANISTES
Vol. 95-1, 2009
survey work on how people identified themselves and others indicated that, in the
urban environment, a conceptual classification separated los 11egros from the rest.
This was agreed on by significant sectors of the black and non-black population
of the city. A common image was that of the ghetto. This racial identification
contrasted with the ethnie-territorial identification based on the idea of the
co1111111idad 11egm, located in rural areas of the Pacifie coastal region (Barbary
200 1; Ba rbary et al. 2004). The explicit theoretical orientation of this work was
away from « culturalist » rnodels, which saw Afro-Colombians as constituting
ethnie co1111111idades 11egras in the Pacifie coastal region, towards a « materialist
perspective » on « etlmic-racial processes » which focused on phenotype, selfand other-identification, and on experiences of racism (Barbary and U rrea
Giraldo 2004b, p. 30). Of course, it is significa nt that Barbary and Urrea Giraldo
were closely involved in the consultations a round defining a new ethnie question
for the 2005 census.
On the other hand, the survey differentiated between 11egro, 11111lato, bla11co
a nd mestizo and showed how both interviewers (instructed to assign people to one
of the four categories) and respondents (asked to classify themselves by skin
colour in an open-ended way) distinguished between a number of categories. Il
also showed that the idea of the ghetto did not correspond to a US g hetto-style
reality in terms of residential segregation, despite the appearance of small areas
that were very predominantly black (Barbary 2004). In addition, the data showed
that the classifications of interviewers and respondents did not match: interviewers tended to classify people as black and mulatto (and indeed white) more
than respondents classified themselves with these o r similar terms, although
women were 20 % more likely to identify as 11egra than men (Barbary et al. 2004,
p. 262); respondents used mestizo-like categories (e.g., the term trig11e1/a, wheatcoloured) more than the interviewers (Barbary et al. 2004; Fl6rez et al. 2001,
p. 46). These results para llel similar results from Brazil (Sansone 2003;
Telles 2004) a nd confirm ideas about the ambiguity of racial classifications in
Latin America that have been around for decades (Harris 1970; Solaùn and
Kronus 1973).
Cunin's work in Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, also
demonstrates that blackness can be a highly ambiguous category that exists in
relation to ideas about mixture (Cunin 2004b). On the one hand , the idea of
blackness revolves strongly a round the image of the pale11q11ero from San Basilio,
the « real »site and embodiment of blackness, and which fils into both images of
co1111111idad 11egra and afrocolombia110 (especially since pale11q11ero culture is sa id
to retain strong traces of africa11ia). In this sense, blackness has a stable, if narrow,
referent. On the other hand, blackness is a much more ambiguous category: 11egro
is often seen as a term connoting margi nality and is one people avoid, especially
when talking to a white anthropologist (Cunin 2004a); « Afro-Colombian » has
little leverage among young, black, working-class people. People in the city avoid
176
Wade
DEFINING llLACKNESS IN COLOMBIA
talking about race, colour, black ness, etc., except when it comes to stigmatising
other people as black or namingpale11q11eros as the « rcal Blacks ». C unin uses the
concept of « mestizo competence » to describe how people deploy flexible and
ambiguous categorisations in strategies of social placement.
Ali this shows that the categories that connote blackness can be both stable
a nd unstable depending on context. Inclusive, clcar categories (AfroColombia ns, los negros, the ghetto) can co-exist with much vaguer a nd more
contextually shifting classifications. This is the co-existence that l tried to capt ure
in my work on blackness a nd race mixture and which 1 th ink is still a key part of
the picture, despite the evident changes that have occurred in the construction of
a more inclusive and apparently clearly defined Afro-Colombian, Afrodescendant or black category. ln sum, white a significant trend in academic work was
towards the construction of a n inclusive - and potcntia lly esscntia list - category
of <{fro, the same body of work was also demonstrating the ambiguity of that
category.
CONCLUSION
I have tracecl how an increasingly inclusive and clear concept of blackness has
emergecl in Colombia, spurred strongly by the post- 1991 reforms and social
movcments, but with important roots in the academic and activist work of
previous decades. In the wake of Law 70, a strong element of black identity was
the co1111111idad negra, based on ethnie diftèrence and territorial claims a nd, white
this is still very strong, supported by Law 70, it is being complemented by a more
encompassing category of« afro», also supported by state multiculturalism and
the census, which goes beyond the Pacifie coastal region and is especially importa nt in urban settings. A counter vailing but subordinate tendency is the recognition of the practical ambiguity of that category - something that has greatly
exercised the Brazilians in the implementation of aftirmative action progra mmes
and racial quotas (Maio and Santos 2005), but that has been ignored in Colombia , despite the presencc of some incipient afti rmative action progranunes in, for
example, university admissions (Cunin 2000; Wade 2006, p. 114). This recognition is evident in some academic circles a nd in everyday life; it is less evident in
state circles, activist organisations and transnational N GO and funding circles.
The story traced herc indicates that concepts circulate in complex ways
aro und a nd between academics, state ofticials and policy-makers, cultural act ivists, transnational NGO workers a nd« everyday peo ple» (mcaning people who
- white everyone is a social theorist of a sort - don'! make it their business to
think in a spccialised , theoretical and systematic way about categories such as
«black»). 1 don'! think there is a simple story to tell about who reifies and
essentialises the categories in circulation. The emcrgence of the concept of
177
JOURNAL OE LA SOClÉTÉ DES AMflRICANISTES
Vol. 95-1 , 2009
co1111111idad negra and the« afro» category has been the result of a consensus, al
some level, among lots of different people for whom these catcgories had useful
effects and could be made to work in productive ways, often for rather <liftèrent
purposes. T hey are both concepts that can be reified and essentialised by academics, cultural activists and the state, but they are a lso dcstabiliscd by people in
those same categories.
Even certain instances of the state - which arguably encompasses the agents
and agencies most likely to producc simple, constraining concepts of blackness to
fit into official multiculturalist and developmentalist agendas - work to destabilise concepts. The decision to include an ethnie question in the census undermines
the co1111111idad negra category that has arguably becn a useful one for the state in
its dcalings in the Pacifie coastal region. The question, however, constructs
another essentialisation of blackness as including ail those who are linked to
blackness and who are Afro-Colombian or Afrodescendant, even if they may a lso
be Indo-Colo mbian or Euro-Colombian (or Indodescendant and Eurodescenda nt) at the very samc time. The Constitutio na l Court decision that 1 rcferred to
above also undermined the category of co1111111idad negra cven as it reiteratcd it:
the category could now be found as an emergent, fragmented, « imagined communit y » in the city of Santa Marta . If nothing else, this indicates that « the
state »opera tes in multiple and possibly cont radictory ways: what happens in the
Department of Statistics o r the Constitutional Court may be very diftè rent fro m
what happens in the Department of Planning o r the Ministry of the Interior.
Perhaps the most problematic category of actor, especia lly fo r the anthropologist, are the cultural activists, in part beca use they seem to be the people most
closely related to academics, oftcn moving in academic circles, most disposed to
use academic knowledge as a source of legitimatio n, most likely to reify and
instrumentalise concepts of race, culture, ethnicity, history, etc., most likely to
question the anthropologist's ethical stance and interrogate his/her political
commitment. Restrepo (2004; 2005, pp. 175-2 11) argues that popular ways of
conceptualising the relatio nships between academics and social movements are
too simple: academics cither support o r undermine activists with their knowledgc
(or an a lternative cthical position is that thcy do neither and simply present « the
truth »). He argues that neither dominant no r subo rdinate groups nccessarily
appropriate acadcmic knowledge in a direct and simple fashion: both « g roups »
a re heterogeneous entities made up of subjects who arc themselves constituted by
the articulatio n of multiple forces.
Rappaport's reccnt work on indigenous iutellectuals and their associatcd
colaboradores and solidarios is revealing here (Rappaport 2005). She argues
aga inst a simple view of indigeno us intellectuals as essentialising and reifying.
She argues they are open to seeing culture as emergent and o riented to future
political projects, ra ther than rooted in the past. Indigcnous socia l movements are
highly heterogeneous and there may be ail kinds of essentialisat ion going o n there
178
DEFINI NG BLACKNESS IN COLm.IBIA
Wade
- as there is iu the practice o f some state officiais and NGO actors - but this is not
the whole picturc by any mea ns. Anthropo logists often agonise over thcir relationship to socia l movements and worry that their agendas of deconstruction
conftict with the agendas of cultural vindicatio n and political mobilisation of
social movement activists. This is undoubtedly a po tential problem , given the real
differences in politica l a nd social positioning that may cxist between academics
and activists, but 1 think both academics and social movement activists are a more
heterogeneous bunch tha n implied by this particular narrative of the production
of acaclcmic knowledge. *
• Ma nuscrit reçu en août 2007, accepté pour publication en février 2008.
NOTES
1 am grateful to Sara Le Mcncstrel and Véronique Boyer for inviting me to participatc in thcir
colloquium and to Odile Hoffmann and Paul Schor for their commcnts on the o riginal papcr.
1. Interview with Juan de Dios Mosquera (Pereira, Colo mbia, 10 August 1992).
2. Interview with Amir Srnith-Cordoba (Bogota, Colombia , 27 July 1992).
3. http://www.renacientes.org/indcx.php?oplion=co m_contcnt&task=view&id= l 7&Ttemid=47,
acccssed 22 August 2007.
4. See the Afrocolombianos pages of the Libros Libres section of the PCN websitc, www.renacientcs.org.
5. hl lp://www.renacicntcs.org/index. php?opt io n=com_conten t&task =view&id= 17& l temid=47,
accessed 31 August 2006.
6. The IDB did a series of country reports on Afro-Latinos in 1995-1996 (S:\nchez 1996). T he
World Ba nk orga niscd in June 2000 a nd 200 1 Iwo inter-agcncy consultations o n Afro-Latins, which
includcd the IDB and the lnter-Amcrican D ialogue think-tan k a nd the Intcr-Amcrican Fo undation.
The WB also provided fund ing for land titling proccsses in the Pacifie cosatal region (Ng'wcno 2007).
See also the UN report o n Afro-descendants (Santos Roland 2002).
7. Sec http://www.iadialog.org/iac/eng/events/Sociallnclusio nandColombianCensusDane.htm and
the link there to the relevant Wo rkl Bank pages.
8. T his projcct was titled « Organizaci6n social, d imimicas culturales e idcntidades de las poblacio ncs afrocolombianas del pacifi co y suroccidentc en un contexto de movilidad y urbanizaci6n »a nd
was run 1996-2000 by Ccntro de Investigacioncs y Documentaci6n Socioecon6mica, Univcrsidad del
Valle, Cali, a nd IR D (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Pa ris). lt has rcsulted in numcrous
publications (e.g., Agier et 11/. 1999; Barbary and Urrea Giraldo 2004a; Hoffm ann 2004).
9. See http://www.da ne.gov.co/liles/ccnso2005/cuestio nario.pd f, accessed 22 August 2007.
1O. Sec http://www.danc.gov.co/filcs/censo2005/ctnia/sys/colombia_nacion .pd f, accessed 22 August
2007.
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