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(CNN Spanish) - A citizen enters a busy public office in Colombia. He takes his turn and sits in the waiting room. After a while, he is finally called to be served by a public servant. Days later, he is contacted by pollsters: “Have you been in a public office in the last week? Could you answer some questions? The exercise is repeated with another 6,825 people in six Colombian municipalities. The findings are surprising ... and disturbing. People were treated differently according to their skin tone.
At the beginning of 2019, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Colombian NGO Corpovisionarios conducted an investigation into access to justice and the relationship with public servants in Colombia, and discrimination racial in those areas.
Under the USAID Justice for a Sustainable Peace program, both organizations studied the cultural representations of justice, trust in institutions and citizen culture.
Part of the investigation had a strong finding: in Colombia there is tacit racism.
"Tacit racism is one that occurs in society in a structural way, which occurs without people noticing," Henry Murrain, executive director of Corpovisionarios, told CNN in Spanish.
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Perception of good treatment in relation to skin pigment
When the interviewers approached the citizens who had finished their procedures in the public office they asked them a fundamental question: what was the quality of the treatment they received from the public servant?
At the end of the survey, the interviewer did not ask the person who was interviewing what race he considered himself, nor what color he thinks his skin is, but rather that the researcher marked the pigment of the interviewee's skin on a color palette . In other words, to achieve greater objectivity, the skin color was reported by the interviewer, not by the respondent's self-perception.
The researchers crossed the data with the observation and discovered that the people who reported a better treatment were those with the lightest skin color. As the color palette progressed, that is, as the darker skin colors were reached, fewer people reported a pleasant treatment by the public servant.
The 'pantone' had 11 pigments, which were segmented into four ranges: 1 to 3, the lightest; 4 to 6, clear to medium; 7 to 9, from medium to dark; and 10 to 11; The darkest
The USAID and Corpovisionarios research found that 35.7% of people with lighter skin "felt very well treated the last time they went to a state institution," while only 17.3% of those with the most skins Dark ones reported feeling this way.
That is to say that a person with fair skin is twice as likely to receive better treatment from public officials.
"Public servants are not aware that they are displaying racist attitudes towards citizens," Murrain explained.
He added that “racism in Colombia - and in Latin America - is a tacit problem because it was not a concern in the founding account; because it is not in the public debate, neither political, nor economic, nor intellectual, nor journalistic ”.
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Why were respondents not asked to report their race?
"Once we did a study in which we asked people what color they considered their skin: 40% of Colombians surveyed considered themselves white, when demographically the white race represents only 3% of the country," said Murrain.
And it is that researchers have found that when people are asked about their skin color, "they overreport their whiteness and subport the black skin color." For the executive director of Corpovisionarios, "there is a valuation left, and that is also tacit racism."
Racial discrimination