A group of protesters for the murder of American George Floyd is in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2020. Sebastian Barros (Getty Images)
The wonderful coincidence of having five black vice-presidential candidates has made a painful racism even clearer in the country where we sang
If God were black my compay, everything would change
, by Roberto Anglero.
That song is nothing more than that, a hymn full of wisdom that white people dance, but definitely do not sing.
The reality has been for decades a systematic, daily discrimination, in the streets where a black person walks and the others change the sidewalk, in schools, in all work and social spheres.
Colombia has been a country ruled by white elites.
The spaces in public and political life for Afros had been given in one or two ministers in the cabinets, to fill a regional quota and propose a discourse of diversity and recognition.
I mean, it was just hypocrisy.
In Colombia there is a huge black population, more than 3 million Afro-descendants, almost 10 percent of the population, but racism is latent.
And it is precisely the territories of the black communities that are the most marginalized, those with the greatest conflicts and violence, and those with the highest rates of poverty.
From these territories emerged the now candidates for the vice presidency.
The lawyer and environmental activist, feminist, Francia Márquez del Cauca (Gustavo Petro);
the mining engineer and environmentalist Luis Gilberto Murillo del Choco (Sergio Fajardo), the teacher and engineer, Marlen Castillo de Buenaventura (Rodolfo Hernández);
Sandra de las Lajas from Tumaco in Nariño (John Milton Rodríguez), and high-performance athlete and university professor Ceferino Mosquera (Luis Pérez).
I dare to say that they are even better than the presidential candidates whom they accompany in their formulas.
Including Rodrigo Lara (Federico Gutierrez).
These vice presidential formulas have fought their entire lives to get here with pain in every pore of their skin.
And they have formed, and have filled the country with glory with their flags.
And who still wonders why so much anger in some of his speeches.
The answer is clear: because discrimination hurts.
Murillo has said that he wears a tie because if he goes out without it, the police will arrest him.
France is not attacked for the extreme of her positions or her hyper-inclusive language, they attack her for being black.
And she knows it and provokes wearing white to highlight the beautiful ebony of her skin.
There is no place to defend what has happened in the last week.
Colombian singer Marbelle called her King Kong, which would well deserve a criminal punishment.
And it's not a detail.
It is what she thinks and feels about who she should pay respect to.
She got almost 800 thousand votes for her bravery, for getting up from the turf war swamp where she has raised her voice.
That is why what Marbelle has done only speaks of the misery of those who compare her to a primate.
Segregation in social gatherings, in networks, is now in the day to day, to tell us that all this discourse of diversity, of inclusion, is nothing more than an appearance.
We have not been able as a society to recognize ourselves as equals, and it is not only in Colombia, in France 35 percent consider themselves racist, the cases are daily in labor discrimination against Algerians, in identity checks on the streets, racial profiling that They call you, and they're being sued.
It happens every day like the case in England where Justin Lee Price was convicted of racist messages against a Manchester player.
In the United States, where almost always a black man who only changes his name is beaten to death, yesterday George Floyd and tomorrow another.
Every day the political decision to discriminate that Jean Federeric Shaub speaks of is increasing in the world.
Why, what is it that we cannot accept when viruses kill us all equally, when privileges have proven to increase the gaps in which we all end up immersed in the same violence, when the history of the world has shown that racism makes them inferior and not honorable.
But there they are, as the philosopher Norma Jimeno has stated: five candidates.
It can no longer be ignored that there is a black Colombia, with a discourse and a power as strong as the Olympic jump of the now-retired Catherine Ibarguen or the voice of the Goyo singer from Chob Quib town.
Now they are there to tell white people that we can all "live tasty".
Music, culture, has that ability to enter the soul, even in the most faded: “If God were black, my compay…Black the president and the governor…black the lily and the black chalk, black Snow White, black Mona Lisa… Outside our race -my compay- the one that would rule”.
There she left them.
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