Caribbean Racism

racism n 2: discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of another race.

I've only been in Colombia for three days, and I've already realized something: As a rule, the more European-looking you are, the better off. The more indigenous or African ("Afrocolombian"), the less well-off.

Perhaps it's the servility -- I am not used to being waited on virtually hand and foot. My in-laws have a full-time (six days a week) housekeeper/cook (who helped raise my wife -- they're very close) and a guard in the parking area under the building 24 hours a day. (The guard on duty, when we arrived carried our luggage up two flights of stairs, without even being asked.) And they´re all darker than any of my family and I are.

That is only one data point. Here's another: in the June 7-14, 2004 issue of of Semana, a well-respected Colombian national newsmagazine, there is an article "Sin Cedula," about Colombians in the area the article discusses -- "an Afrocolombian population," the article says -- 85% of whom are without identification documents, either the cedula, the Colombian national I.D. card, or even birth certificates. As the article says, "They are people of whose existence the State never has knowledge. They do not exist in the statistics, nor are they considered for development projects. Partly for that reason they are so abandoned."

There are three pictures with that article. In those pictures are
18 people. OF those 18, four are European in appearance -- and they are all wearing UN High Commission on Refugees (in Spanish, "Acnur") T-shirts. The UNHCR is helping the Colombian government register these citizens.

My wife thinks that I have a slanted view of all this, that I haven't met many non-Jewish European Colombians.

Nonetheless, my rule of thumb (not a politically-incorrect term, really!) is retrodictive, and predictive as well. But I'm not wedded to it -- I am prepared to admit I'm full of it (and delete this post? Nah).

Time will tell.