THE INSTITUTE FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH

Black Culture and

Social Inequality in
Colombia

Peter Wade

1989

Monograph Series No. 28

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2
THE AUTHOR
Peter Wade did a PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University,
focusing on the black population of Colombia. He was a Research Fellow at
Queens’ College Cambridge (1985–1988), before becoming a Lecturer in
Geography and Latin American Studies at the University of Liverpool
(1988–1995). He is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the
University of Manchester. His publications include Blackness and Race
Mixture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), Race and Ethnicity in
Latin America (Pluto Press, 1997), Music, Race and Nation: Música
Tropical in Colombia (Chicago University Press, 2000), and Race, Nature
and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Pluto Press, 2002).

NOTE
This monograph is based on a lecture delivered to the Institute for Cultural
Research in London on 15th May, 1987.

Map drawn by Virginia Smith.

3
4
 Black Culture and Social
Inequality in Colombia

My interest in the subject of blacks in Colombia began in 1981 when I was

living as a tourist, English teacher and part-time barman in the city of
Cartagena on the Caribbean – or as the Colombians often say, the Atlantic –
coast. I had arrived there after extensive travels along the Caribbean coast
of Central America, and everywhere along that littoral the presence of the
New World African diaspora was unmistakeable and vibrant: perhaps also a
surprise for many Europeans who are ignorant of the important black
populations of many Central and South American countries. As a white, one
was often automatically cast into a series of roles which had clear roots in
the colonial past: whatever freedoms had been gained and economic
progress made, the blacks still mostly performed manual and service tasks
and a white person was regarded in the first instance as a wealthy individual.
Cartagena was no exception. Under Spanish rule it had been a principal
slave port for the empire and still in 1912, when the last racially classified
census for that region was performed, its population was 40% black.
Although black heritage was obvious in much of the city’s population, it
was equally clear that the working class neighbourhoods and the slums were
inhabited principally by black people. In the elite neighbourhoods and on
the tourist beaches, blacks were almost always performing some kind of
service: domestic chores, mending cars, selling fruit and beer to thirsty
sunseekers, cleaning windows, preparing food and so forth.
When I returned to England and gained a more bookish perspective, I
found that official attitudes to race in Colombia, or at least towards the
black population, were complacent. The taken-for-granted social divisions
between blacks and whites I had encountered, the easy stereotypes of blacks
as culturally inferior did not, it seemed, constitute a “problem”. The socio-
logical literature had, in the past, and even sometimes in the present,
supported this view by painting optimistic pictures of the position of the
black population.1
A year later, I flew back to Colombia with the aim of investigating the
nature of racial discrimination and racism in Colombia. On the plane to
Bogotá, I met up with a voluble Colombian medic who enquired after my
business there. “Race relations”, he exclaimed with a good-natured laugh,
“Why, there aren’t any: we’re all brothers in Colombia.” Todos somos mes-
tizos, he said, a well-worn Colombian adage which translates roughly as

5
“We’ve all got a touch of the tar-brush.”2 Some, however, have more of the
tar-brush than others ....
To grasp the question of race in Colombia, one needs to understand
some- thing of the geographical structure of the country and the distribution
of its people (see map on p.4). From the south of Colombia, the Andes splits
into three mountain ranges which run north, separated by the two giant
valleys of the River Cauca and the River Magdalena. To the west of this
central Andean interior lies the Pacific coastal littoral, a densely-forested,
humid and selvatic region. To the east lie the Amazon and Orinoco basins –
vast, flat extensions of plains and jungles: this region will scarcely concern
us here. To the north, where the Cauca and Magdalena join and debouch
into the Caribbean Sea lies the Atlantic coastal region, stretching from the
Panamanian border to the tip of the peninsular beyond Santa Marta and
backed by an extensive hinterland of savannahs, low-lying plains and
swampy backwoods. The Spanish landed first on the Atlantic coast and with
its ports of entry this region continued to play a fundamental role. But the
real centre of colonial settlement, wealth, culture and power became, and
still is, the Andean highlands of the interior, especially around Bogotá, but
also centring on the other highland cities as well. The Atlantic coast
remained sparsely populated and under-developed, while the Pacific coastal
region was hardly settled at all and exploited only for its gold deposits,
using large, well-regimented slave gangs.
This regional distribution of wealth and power had corresponding racial
configurations. Indian labour was relatively plentiful in the highlands,
whereas in the coastal regions, black slaves were more common. They were
especially used in the gold-mining areas, since indians proved to be less
resistant to the rigours of mine labour. Together, these factors concentrated
blacks in the coastal areas – also the least wealthy areas – although they also
congregated in some lowland mining areas in the Cauca valley. In the
Atlantic coastal region, race mixture with both whites and indians was
extensive and blacks are a small minority there; in the Pacific coastal region,
however, blacks are still almost 90% of the population.3 My fieldwork
concentrated on black people from a region called the Chocó, on the Pacific
coast: these people are known as Chocoanos. My first study was in Unguía,
a rural village near the Panamanian border in a zone of agricultural and
cattle-raising colonization, where Chocoanos, Antioqueños from the
highland region of Antioquia (a wealthy white/mestizo area) and Costeños
from the Atlantic coast region all participated differently in the local
economy. My second study was in the highland city of Medellín, the capital
of Antioquia, where blacks from the Chocó migrated to seek work.4 In both
these places, I found that racial discrimination and black disadvantage were

6
tangible aspects of everyday life, recognized by blacks and non-blacks alike,
although predictably they had different attitudes to these realities. In Unguía,
blacks held hardly any land or cattle, and participated only marginally in
commerce – the three mainstays of the local economy. In Medellín, they
were mainly domestic servants, construction workers and sellers of cooked
food on the streets – all badly paid, unstable occupations. How, then could
the idea exist that Colombia was an example of Latin American “racial
democracy”? Essentially, five claims are made in support of such an idea.
First, the majority of Colombians are of mixed blood. Thus, apparently,
there can be no specific group of blacks: there is only an infinitely
variegated continuum from white to black with no definite breaks. Then, as
Marvin Harris says, since the “sine qua non of any thorough-going minority
system is a fool-proof method for separating a population into superordinate
and subordinate groups” (1974:54), there can be no such system in
Colombia, because there are no “sharply defined racial groups” (1974:54).
Second, and as a corollary of the first, intermarriage between people of
different coloured skin exists and is relatively frequent compared to places
like the USA or South Africa: this, surely, is a sign of racial democracy?
Third, some coloured individuals have succeeded economically and made it
into the middle classes: here they are accepted socially as, so to speak,
honorary whites. Fourth, and again as a corollary to the third, the position of
blacks is said to be due to class inequality, not race: blacks are simply poor
and suffer as such, but not specifically as blacks. If a black person can
succeed economically and be accepted, surely economics is more important
than race? Fifth, there is very little overt violence directed against non-
blacks by black people in protest at their position: therefore, perhaps, their
position is not a bad one.
Let us look more closely at these points. To begin with, however, there
are two ground-rules which have to be borne in mind. Firstly, there is no
avoiding the fact that the situation is complex. We are not dealing with
simple, straightforward black/white oppositions; we are not in South Africa,
the USA or even Great Britain, where, whatever the complications of inter-
marriage, group boundaries and particular modes of racial classification,5
such oppositions do exist. Race mixture in Colombia has created a situation
in which, at the last national census to include racial classifications (1918),
54% of the population was mixed. After 1918, many departments stopped
making racial classifications on the grounds that they were too difficult and
arbitrary. The result of this is that there is no real group of blacks on a
national level. One can talk of “the blacks” as a general category, but as a
coherent social group it is more or less impossible to locate them in any
specific way.

7
 The second ground-rule, and one which it is important to bear in mind
against the idea that a black Colombian is the same as any other Colombian,
is that in certain regional and local contexts blacks do form groups that are
relatively unambiguously bounded and that have specific cultural and struc-
tural attributes. The Chocó itself is one example, and the specific contexts
of Unguía and Medellín are others. In addition, at an individual level, black
people may find themselves discriminated against in a way not designed to
repress black people as a clearly defined minority, but which pressures
individual blacks to redefine their own identity in the eyes of others against
a background of pervasive and prejudicial images of blacks, a redefinition
which ultimately involves the taking-on of a culture which is typically non-
black and a disavowal of black culture and blackness itself, even if in the
short term a certain amount of judicious role-switching will do the trick.
Bearing in mind these two basic rules is essential in appreciating the
complex operation of racial discrimination in Colombia.

1. Race mixture and whitening

As previously stated, the majority of Colombians are mixed. Everyone has
“a touch of the tar brush.” There are many cracks in this veneer: the obvious
predominance of darker people in the lower classes, the aversion of light-
skinned middle and upper class people to having blacks or indians as
spouses – although not necessarily as unofficial mates (Banton 1967; Bas-
tide 1961). My own reaction is to invoke the second ground-rule set out
above. Look at the elite neighbourhoods of Cartagena on the Atlantic coast
where the blacks clearly form a servant class for middle and upper class
people who are white or light-skinned. Look at the rural stretches along the
Atlantic coast where black fishing households line the beaches and the non-
blacks are immigrant entrepreneurs or tourists. Look at the Pacific coastal
region where the direct descendants of black slave mining-gangs predomi-
nate over a small intrusive nucleus of white and mestizo merchants and
capitalists. Or look at Unguía where the Chocoanos are juxtaposed to an
immigrant white/mestizo group of Antioqueño colonists and entrepreneurs
and another group of mixed-blood Costeño immigrant farmers and landless
labourers from the Atlantic coast region. As Norman Whitten found in his
study of Ecuador and Colombia, “Blackness is the opposite of whiteness
and national concepts of ‘mixed’ in Colombia and Ecuador stand opposed
to ‘black’ just as white is the opposite of black” (1974:199).
In all these contexts, there are elements of an opposition between a
group identified by themselves and by others as clearly black and another
identified as non-black. There may be complex interactions between these

8
groups, but even though some blurring of their boundaries results, in
Unguía I found that statistically they maintain a distinct endogamy which is
not based on class differences alone (see Wade 1984). Because of this and
other patterns of intra-ethnic relationships, and the quite definite folk
concepts of ethnic and racial identities that people hold, it is generally easy
to delimit distinct groups.
This kind of data not only belies the image of the Latin American
melting-pot which issues forth an undifferentiated light-brown population, it
also undermines more scholarly accounts of the “maximization of
ambiguity” (Harris 1970) in Latin American racial classification, caused by
race mixture, which supposedly makes it impossible to delineate a black
group. Harris shows that a multiplicity of racial terms exists for classifying
people racially and he concludes that this creates an ambiguity which
irremediably blurs the boundaries of racial groups. However, in certain
contexts, it is clear that negro is a relatively unambiguous category.6
So, black groups exist; but here it is necessary to remember the first
ground-rule. They are not rigorously defined minorities. For example in my
fieldwork in the Colombian town of Unguía, I found that intermarriage rates
for blacks were of the same order of magnitude as Detroit Protestant-
Catholic or Israeli European-Oriental Jew intermarriage rates, and much
higher than USA or South African black-white rates. The situation in Un-
guía is complicated by the presence of the Costeños, a third, intermediate
group of mostly mixed people who diluted the opposition between the
entirely black group and the entirely non-black group: a great deal of
intermarriage observed occurred between the Costeños and the Chocoanos.
Whatever the particularities of this case, however, the point is that across
the boundaries of the black groups – even in these regional and local
contexts where they form social units – there exists a process of osmosis by
race mixture.
The irony here lies in the fact that it is precisely this process that acts as
a mechanism in the perpetuation of racial inequality. Race mixture is not a
morally neutral ratio of expected over observed frequencies of intermar-
riage, it is a social process heavily loaded with cultural meanings: it is
conceived of as blanqueamiento, i.e. “whitening”. It is seen as a distancing
of oneself, via one’s offspring, from blackness – negatively valued –
towards whiteness – positively valued. As a motive it may be stated openly
by the parties concerned, or inferred in gossip by others. As a process it may
consist of dark-skinned women giving sexual favours to lighter-skinned
men in the hope of lighter-colour offspring, of vertically mobile darker-
skinned men exchanging their economic success for the kudos of a lighter-
skinned wife, or of a straightforward “love matches” between people of

9
distinct racial types. Whatever the process, the meanings attributed to these
actions always acknowledge the superior value of whiteness and the explicit
or implicit slur cast on blackness. I came across black women in Unguía and
Medellín who said openly that they preferred a non-black husband or
boyfriend. Other black women saw this admission as “grinding your own
face in the dirt”. Even if such a motive is not admitted, others may well
attribute it to the parties concerned. One Chocoano mother in Medellín
whose daughters had married or had children by white men told me that she
had been accused of being a “racist” by other blacks, because, to them,
condoning her daughters’ behaviour indicated that she scorned blackness. In
short, then, the very chance of escaping blackness publicizes the low value
placed on it by society and by the blacks themselves.7
There are certain objective consequences too. If black people who
achieve some measure of success “marry up” racially, then blackness is
gradually bleached out of the middle strata into which these people ascend.
Hence the maintenance of an overall correlation between race and class. Not
only images of black and white, but the structural position of blackness are
perpetuated.
Of course, blanqueamiento is predicated on the fact that only a few
people can do it: if everyone could do it the system would collapse. Its
nature is individualistic.

2. Individual mobility
It has always been the case in Colombia and Latin America generally that
just as a handful of blacks whiten their offspring, another handful (not
surprisingly, two overlapping samples) succeed in advancing their
economic fortunes. Concrete examples appeared in my fieldwork. When I
first copied out the records of the local government anti-foot-and-mouth
disease agency which censused the cattle on all the farms in the region, I
found that, although the blacks as a group had been largely pushed out of
landholding and hardly participated in cattle-farming, there was a handful of
blacks (10% of the farmers) who owned about 880 cattle between them (6%
of the total).8 When I copied out the records in July 1985, three years later,
that handful had almost doubled their holdings registering a rise to 9% of
the total cattle stock, an increase much greater than that achieved by the two
other groups.9
Now the cattle that farmers have on their ranches are usually not all
their own property. They may rent out excess pasture and, more particularly,
they may enter into profit-sharing arrangements with others. Here another
person, with or without land, buys young cattle and puts them in the care of

10
the farmer who raises them on his/her farm, bearing the costs of several
years of fattening. These costs include maintenance of pastures by weeding
and fumigating, vaccinating the cattle and purging them of parasites,
branding, castrating, milking, providing salt-licks etc. When the cattle are
sold, the profits (less transportation costs) are split. Thus, for example, one
black farmer had 150 cattle on his farm in July 1985 of which 60 were a
utilidades (“at profits”) with 4 different partners. Almost by definition since
the blacks here, as elsewhere, have the least access to capital, these partners
are not fellow blacks. In this case, one partner was another black who had a
small number of cattle a utilidades. Thus the lack of capital among the
blacks means that economic success depends on forming links with non-
blacks. The black farmer of this example employed blacks on his farm and
associated mostly with them in his social life; to get capital investment
however he had to look outside his own group.
This is the essence of the structure of black upward mobility. Only a
handful make it (for reasons I will discuss later, but which centre on a
combination of inexperience plus cumulative and direct racial discrimina-
tion), and those who do almost inevitably become involved in various
economic relationships with non-blacks. Another example is the case of
Chocoanos in Medellín. Although they often occupy the lowest social strata
in the city, they are also often better off than they were in the Chocó.
Leaving their poor and under-developed homeland and entering the non-
black world of the highland interior where, although poverty abounds, there
are the greater opportunities attendant upon a centre of power and wealth,
gives the Chocoanos a chance of upward mobility, albeit minor. For those
with higher aspirations exit from the Chocó is almost inevitable, since
education opportunities are so limited there. Again, then, the chance of a
good education or better work is predicated on forming links with
non-blacks.
Now this process in itself, in principle, presents no real problem; like
race mixture, it may present, in abstract form, a benign facade. In reality, as
before, this form of mobility itself becomes a subtle means by which racial
inequality remains uncorrected. To begin with, it is too easily forgotten that
black mobility is a minority process – the majority remain poor. There are
also more hidden processes at work. While some of these economic links
with non-blacks may remain at a purely business level, as in the case of the
black farmer, very often they involve much more extensive social links, as
is often the case with Chocoanos in Medellín. Two different, but related
processes operate here. In the first place, the individuals themselves may
begin to take on the cultural mores and values of their new territory and
social environment – a well-known phenomenon in social mobility. This

11
may involve accepting, at some level, current images of black culture and
thus depreciating their own cultural origins: the culmination of this is often
finding a lighter-coloured spouse. Clearly the ground is laid here for com-
plex personal conflicts about identity, particularly because of the indelibility
of race as a social marker. The actual rejection of one’s own origins, and
thus implicitly of self, is not inevitable: some blacks in Medellín, for
example, form ethnic enclaves in which to protect their identity to some
extent. But many others, and especially their children, adapt their ways to
those of the Antioqueños.
The second process is that other, non-mobile blacks resent the
association of mobile blacks with non-blacks and feel they have been
betrayed. This resentment and accusations of betrayal can occur even when
links are almost solely economic. One successful black farmer in Unguía
was thus accused for certain commercial links he maintained with whites,
despite the fact that he had a black wife, employed a black farm
administrator and associated mainly with other blacks. Blacks living in
Medellín often experience accusations of behaving as if they felt superior to
other blacks because they have lost some of their Chocoano ways. In short,
resentment arises and it may fuel itself from any evidence, however partial.
I found that blacks constantly complained that “we blacks discriminate
against each other”, that is, that some blacks, especially when they begin to
rise socially, feel themselves superior to, and begin to look down on, other
blacks. As one woman said, “It’s something we blacks have: you could
almost say it was instinctive”.
The net result of these processes is a chronic lack of solidarity among
the blacks which has two sources: one, the structural nature of black
mobility which, especially when allied with race mixture, allows certain
individuals to advance and transmute their identity; and two, the feeling,
born of this and subject to stereotypic overgeneralization, that blacks are
constantly being betrayed by their own kind. The black category as a whole
cannot be solidary; this is the obvious corollary of centuries of race mixture
which have created a colour continuum. But even where black groups do
form in local or regional contexts, the same types of mechanism operate
which have undermined the creation of a national black group. That is,
individualistic mobility, often combined with blanqueamiento, destroys the
solidarity of the black group, both structurally (since certain people
make the group’s boundaries ambiguous in the act of penetrating them) and
in terms of blacks’ perceptions (since they accuse of betrayal both blacks
who are trying to escape the black group and those who are still basically
within it).

12
 Now, it may be maintained that lack of racial solidarity is, at bottom,
not a bad thing: individual competition is to be promoted precisely because
it permeates group boundaries and, ultimately, destroys their significance,
leaving everyone competing as individuals. This is clearly a notion which,
while it may represent a viable strategy to be pursued for some groups in
some situations – what Banton calls a “low-profile strategy” (1983:406) – is
unrealistic for a group suffering from subtle and deeply-embedded forms of
exclusion. The possibility of the democratization of individual competition
is, for them, a distant one. Here some kind of “high-profile strategy” (ibid)
is better which draws attention to group membership, group disadvantage
and needs group solidarity.
For example, in Brazil racial discrimination was only made illegal in
1950 when the black North American dancer, Katherine Dunham, was
refused entry to the Hotel Esplanada in São Paulo. Her protests sparked a
row and Gilberto Freyre (a member of the Chamber of Deputies and author
of Masters and Slaves which portrayed a benevolent picture of Brazilian
race relations) together with Afonso Arinos had a bill passed outlawing
racial discrimination (Fernandes 1969:406–8; Degler 1971:138). Prior to
this, Brazilian blacks had either not bothered to attempt entry to these hotels
and other places implicitly reserved for non-blacks, or had not protested
effectively at being refused, i.e. they had adopted a low-profile strategy
when a high-profile one was much more effective in getting results.
In Colombia a handful of blacks achieve some kind of advancement.
The majority remain below, with few opportunities for advancement. They
form black communities which elaborate their own cultural forms and
identity in symbolic and concrete resistance to the dominance of the non-
black world. However, alongside positive feelings about Chocoano identity
and pride in being black, I also found some blacks accepting in a piecemeal
and ambivalent fashion negative images of black people (Wade 1984:124).
As a group it was also clear that their solidarity and corresponding
possibilities of political mobilization were undermined by the escape of
some of their more successful members (and potential leaders). The blacks
were riven by internal jealousies and lacking in the necessary confidence,
solidarity and leadership to adopt a high-profile strategy.

3. Race and class

The question that has arisen more than once is: why do the majority
of blacks not make it? What are the mechanisms that keep them in the
lower strata?

13
 Here we come upon a knotty set of problems. A typical answer is: “class
rather than race”, i.e. it is because the blacks are poor, not because they are
black. One has to remember here that “the very idea of a ‘racial problem’ ....
is an obstacle to clear thinking .... problems which have loosely been called
racial are economic, social, psychological and political problems” (Banton
1983:405). At the same time, one has to remember that certain economic
and other problems may affect blacks more than others, or be specific to
them as a group. The rather slippery formula “class rather than race” thus
becomes the more precise statement that blacks are in the same position as
other Colombians, given the overall class structure of the country; or at least
that the differences are insignificant.
Attempts to sustain this idea have used different kinds of evidence. One
oft-quoted tit-bit is the idea that “money whitens”, i.e. economic success
leads to a racial reclassification in the eyes of others. People use a different
colour term to describe a person who looks well-off from that used for the
same person looking poor. This needs to be seen in perspective: in my
experience, a person classed unequivocally as black – i.e. who has all the
phenotypical attributes of a black – will never be classed as anything else,
no matter how rich he or she is. This possibility is only open to those whose
racial identity is already ambiguous. An interesting contrary case emerged
when I showed people a picture of a friend of my family sitting in my
parents’ drawing room in London. His dress and surroundings were unmis-
takably not poor, even to the foreign, inexperienced eye. His father is West
Indian and his mother white. His skin is white, but his hair, although light
brown, is observably negroid and his facial features show some traces of the
same ancestry. When black Colombians saw this they unfailingly remarked
upon it. Far from according him the status of an honorary white or “not
noticing” his racial heritage because he looked well-off, black Colombians
were very acute in their perception of racial ancestry. Money may turn some
blacks into social non-blacks, but their origins are never forgotten.
More systematic evidence than this has been brought to bear. Harris
(1952) and Solaún and Kronus (1973) show that status groups are more
homogeneous with respect to economic indices than they are with respect to
racial types. In other words, the groups one sees “on the ground” have a
variety of racial types who are all more or less economically equal. A major
problem here is that since race and class largely coincide the difference in
degrees of homogeneity is rather small and not very meaningful. That is, the
groups on the ground are de facto made up of people who are racially
similar: a status group made up of poor people is also made up mostly of
blacks with just a sprinkling of non-blacks. Another problem is that “status
group”, if not defined in an obviously tautological fashion by the economic

14
indices themselves, is defined by some rather vague and implicit notion of
“the groups on the ground” and often these are defined by an equally vague
criterion of “best friends”, i.e. who socializes intimately with whom. In
effect the idea is that blacks are in the same position as everyone else
because they have the same kind of best friends as others, at the same class
level; and this is presumably meant to synthesize their life-chances in a
socially stratified society. No real indication is given of whether the blacks
have an equal chance of vertical mobility, for example.
My own research indicated that the idea that blacks are undifferentiated
from others is manifestly untrue; and the differences are substantial. I did
find, as did Harris, that intimate friendships and marriages occurred more
frequently across racial and ethnic boundaries than across class ones, but I
also found that, on average, poor blacks had less economic opportunity than
poor non-blacks due to patterns of patronage between the latter and richer
non-blacks, patronage that is not extended to the blacks and was not as
available to them from the small nucleus of richer blacks. Both in Unguía
and Medellín, a poor Antioqueño had a better chance of upward mobility
than a black because he or she was able to benefit materially from connec-
tions with richer Antioqueños who tended to distrust the blacks and dis-
criminate against them outside certain occupation spheres like domestic
service and manual labour. In my case, race and class did not largely
coincide, making an assessment of the differential patterns of mobility
possible. I also found in Unguía that blacks as a group had been largely
expelled from landholding, stock-raising and commerce, the three big
money-earners of the region. They had experienced an absolute
improvement, but a relative decline in their economic situation. In short,
they occupied a very different economic niche from the other two groups in
which their opportunities were also different. In Medellín, too, statistical
analysis showed that while Chocoano immigrants shared many features
with other poor immigrants, they had certain characteristics which militated
against equal oppor- tunites for upward mobility. For example, they were
much more heavily concentrated in domestic service (40% of their workers,
compared to only 9% of immigrant Antioqueño workers) which is a
notoriously underpaid occupation.10 These differences are clearly due in
part to ground-rule two, i.e. that blacks formed a distinguishable group with
a distinct culture and history.
It is also worth bearing in mind more general considerations. While at
some abstract level class and race have to be separated as factors, it is also
true that “race is the modality in which class relations are experienced ....
The two are inseparable” (Hall et a1 1978:394). One has to be careful of
theoretically, analysing the “opus operatum” – i.e. the objective structures

15
of racial and class stratification- to the detriment of the “modus operandi” –
i.e. how people are created by and themselves recreate those structures
through their actions and experience (Bourdieu 1977). Thus it is regrettably
theoreticist and ahistorical to ignore that a poor black cannot, in Colombia,
be seen by another Colombian simply as a poor person, but is inevitably
perceived as a poor black, the bearer of a specific, negatively-valued sub-
culture and phenotype.
Again it is necessary to restate something quite obvious: “class systems
no longer function in the same way once class has phenotypical
associations .... processes of selection come into operation that cannot exist
in a [racially] homogeneous population” (Pitt-Rivers 1967). This is to do
with the special role race has as an indelible marker which creates a fixity of
ascribed, and also subjective, identity (see Wade 1985a for a detailed
discussion). It is also connected to the fact that racial, like gender,
ideologies “discover what other ideologies have to construct”, i.e.
differences (Gilroy 1982).
We can return then to the original question: why do the majority of
blacks not make it?

4. Discrimination and adaption

There is no question that blacks who form groups in the kinds of contexts I
have briefly described suffer from direct racial discrimination at the hands
of non-blacks who control substantial amounts of wealth and resources. A
series of images and stereotypes exist which characterize blacks as irrespon-
sible, lazy, spendthrift, good for only physical labour, disorganised in
family and general life-style and so forth. While few people treat the blacks
as if they firmly held these images to be the literal truth about every black,
there is a gradual and usually covert exclusion of blacks from certain
opportunities of employment and certain types of cooperative relations. In
Unguía, some Antioqueños said frankly that they discriminated against
blacks, affirming that it made logical sense to do so, in view of what they
saw as their previous unfavourable experiences with them as, say,
employees. In Medellín, to cite just one example, an experiment involving a
black and a non-black group trying to rent rooms advertised in the local
press showed that blacks were more frequently refused than non-blacks.
More significant in my view are the much more deeply-embedded struc-
tures of inequality. In Medellín, blacks take lowly occupations mostly be-
cause they are in the majority poor and badly educated migrants. In the
region around Unguía, the blacks now hardly hold any land and one reason
for their selling up lies in their particular attitude to land, agriculture and

16
stock-raising; a further cause is that a handful of the Antioqueño white/
mestizo colonists had ready capital to offer in return for land. Or again,
commerce is dominated by the Antioqueños: the principal reason is a
history of dynamic, adaptable entrepreneurship in their region of origin. In
another example, blacks find it hard to get a position of trusted employment
with these immigrants who discriminate against them; but then many
immigrants have been robbed by their black employees.
So, why are most Chocoanos poor and badly educated? Why do the
blacks have this attitude to land? Why do the Antioqueños have
entrepreneurial talents (or vice versa, why are the entrepreneurs white and
mestizo)? And why have they had bad experiences with black employees?
The answers to these questions are historical in form and also quite
complex (see Wade 1984: chs. 2 and 6). Here I shall be brief. The blacks are
descendents of slaves used by the Spanish to mine gold on the Pacific coast.
Settlement never got beyond the stage of impermanent and rudimentary
frontier colonization. The blacks that were freed (mostly through self-
purchase) were not integrated into colonial society but were rejected and
retreated into the jungle. Later, wars of independence impoverished the
mine-owners and in 1851 the slaves were freed. The whole area was then
more or less abandoned, despite the continued presence of great wealth in
gold deposits: there was very little infrastructure and the isolated and inac-
cessible life-style of the blacks, who maintained a fairly independent exis-
tence gold-panning in the jungle, posed great problems for the availability
of labour.
The region was thus deemed a poor prospect by the whites who main-
tained only a small dominant nucleus in the main town there, while the rest
was relegated to the blacks. The blacks remained there because the
possibilities of integration into colonial and post-colonial society had been
and remained very restricted. A de facto racial segregation set in, stemming
from processes of racial discrimination and based on economic and
ecological specializations. The blacks became adapted to a specific niche in
which agricultural land was limited and very poor; they depended on
shifting cultivation, gold-panning, fishing and hunting. Thus attitudes which
valued land highly, and entrepreneurial or commercial experience and
aspirations were developed to a restricted degree. In short, their present
disadvantage in the competition with the Antioqueño immigrants to
Unguía or Medellín is due to a history shaped by cumulative forces of
racial discrimination.
The opposite applies to the white/mestizo highlanders: they were not
discriminated against in the same way and could participate in the currents
of development that centred on the highlands. In reality, the facts are much

17
more subtle and complex than this, but this is not the place to enter into the
history of Antioquia, their region of origin (see Wade 1984: chs. 2 and 6;
and 1985b). Suffice it to say that in this area, although slaves and mining
were an important part of the economy, neither occupied a dominant role.
Slave-gangs were not an economic form of labour and slaves were
distributed singly and in small groups: they integrated both socially and
racially and, in the highlands, a group of blacks did not really exist,
although many people had black ancestry. At the same time, the indian
population declined drastically and rapidly. The elite was forced to diversify
and adapt and this formed a basis for their later entrepreneurial success.
They relied neither on a stable subservient indian labour force, nor solely on
large slave mining- gangs. Thus the eclectic investment portfolio of the elite
and the absence of a large mass of blacks (and indians) are two sides of the
same coin.
What this adds up to is that the relative non-blackness (and non-indian-
ness) of these highlanders cannot be separated from their overall socio-
economic position, just as the blackness of the blacks and the discrimination
it entailed is intimately linked to their socio-economic position. Each group
has adaptations that entail differential advantage in a competitive
confrontation; and it is not by chance that the disadvantages have accrued to
the blacks.
Thus the fact that some white merchants have had bad experiences with
black employees stealing from them is due to a rather large income gap
between them and the different opportunities that face each group, and these
facts are in turn deeply embedded in a complex of social and economic
structures rooted in the past. It is ironic that the blacks also often attribute
the highlanders’ success to unscrupulousness and sharp dealing, such that
both groups have mutual images of suspicion and distrust that underlie
everyday friendliness.

5. Violence and conflict

Solaún and Kronus (1973) call their study of Cartagena Discrimination
without Violence and the task they set themselves is to explain how there
can be racial discrimination of which blacks and whites are both aware,
without there being a violent black reaction. The answer they come up with
is that there are significant channels of mobility for blacks to move into the
middle classes where they will probably mix racially and have lighter-
coloured children who will join the ranks of the mixed-blood population
which they find to be relatively complacent about racial discrimination,
compared to the poorest black groups and the richest white groups. These

18
channels of mobility represent a “principle of integration” which outweighs
the “principle of discrimination” and effectively defuses conflict. They also
argue that as economic development creates more opportunities, black
integration will increase even further, creating even more racial equality. I
have already commented on the drawbacks of individualistic upward
mobility and its effects on group solidarity; it is also very pertinent to
observe that a host of studies of economic development have shown that
when change opens up a series of new opportunities, those who are better
placed to take advantage of them usually do so to the detriment of the worse
off, thus increasing overall inequality. Several studies of blacks in Latin
America, including my own, show that in situations where blacks compete
with non-blacks in a situation of expanding opportunities, they often lose
out, relatively speaking, even if there is some absolute improvement in their
position. Part of the reason for this is their inadequate preparation for
competition with other groups, given their respective histories. But part of
the reason is also that the more advantaged groups tend to discriminate
against them in order to keep potential benefits for themselves, and the
evidence shows that the more the blacks try and compete, the more
discrimination they encounter: their mobility is allowed on condition that it
takes place on a small scale.11 The optimistic view of Solaún and Kronus is
therefore not well supported by the evidence. The future may be one of
increasing conflict as blacks demand fuller rights and benefits in society as
blacks and on a group scale rather than as individuals and honorary whites.
In any case, Solaún and Kronus’s description of the situation as being
without violence may itself be rather blinkered. True, Colombia has not
witnessed systematic lynching nor urban race riots like those of the USA,
nor the violence of South Africa, but neither has it been without conflict in
which race played a significant role. In colonial times, many was the time
whites in Cartagena quaked in their beds as rumours abounded of
murderous uprisings by the blacks, slave and free (Borrego Pla 1973). The
backwoods sheltered many palenques or maroon communities where
runaway slaves had formed their own settlements from which they made
excursions to harass local farms and even towns (Arrázola 1970). One
author even goes so far as to state that in Colombia conflicts with the black
population “often took on the aspect of a civil war” (Jaramillo Uribe
1968:59). Even after emancipation in 1851, political configurations
sometimes had racial undertones. Delpar (1981:22–24) describes how in the
Cauca region of Colombia in the late nineteenth century violent conflict
developed between a white Conservative elite and the negroid Liberal
masses in which the latter attacked haciendas and individuals on the streets:
in this case, race, class and political alignments coincided. Sharp (1969:177)

19
also notes that “it is very probable that among the many reasons that
separated the Liberals from the Conservatives there has been the problem
of race”.
On a contemporary level, I came across individual incidents of violent
conflict that clearly had racial antagonism as a principal motive. In Unguía
in the fifities and sixties, when the Antioqueños first arrived and began to
impose themselves on the local area and its habitants, there were apparently
some fights and even though these appeared under the guise of drunken
outbursts, it is clear that they were part of an overall confrontation between
the Chocoanos and the Antioqueños. In Medellín as well, in two neighbour-
hoods where the blacks formed a significant percentage and where they had
established their own dance halls which attracted more blacks from other
areas of the city, the local Antioqueños reacted violently, throwing stones at
the dance halls and harassing the blacks. In both Unguía and Medellín,
violence has decreased, but in both cases this is because the Chocoanos
have submitted to the Antioqueños’ dominion: in Unguía, the latter clearly
now control the whole area; in Medellín, in those neighbourhoods where
conflict had occurred, the Chocoanos have closed down their dance halls, or
moved them away to peripheral areas where the Antioqueños let them be.
A more overtly violent case was recounted to me by a black friend in
Buenaventura, a large port town on the Pacific coast, just south of the
Chocó. Here the local black population participates unequally in the main
sectors of the local economy which are run by white and mestizo outsiders.
One small scale business that some of the locals used to operate was that of
buying a case or two of whisky and other such goods direct from the ships
in port and selling them in town. The customs agents, mostly whites and
mestizos from the interior, would allow themselves to be bribed or turn a
blind eye. Then, for reasons which are unclear, there was a change in policy
and resistance to petty contrabanding increased. One manifestation of this
was a spate of killings in which customs agents shot down local blacks who
were infringing the law. Finally in May 1971, they killed a young student
and this proved too much for the local populace. There was a demonstration
outside the local customs office which quickly turned into an attack on the
building. Following this, the crowd rampaged through the town, locating the
places where the agents lived and burning their possessions.
Isolated incidents they may be, but discrimination without violence is
undoubtedly an over-optimistic interpretation. From early colonial times,
blacks have experienced violent repression and have reacted in ways that
have also included violent resistance.

20
6. Conclusion
When I was in Unguía, a black friend of mine said to me, “I sometimes
think the system they have in the United States is better: where the blacks
and the whites have their separate things. That way everyone knows where
they are.” My own impression, as a white, was that in Colombia it is a good
deal easier to get to know and befriend blacks of any class than it would be
in the USA. At that level, at least, the Colombian system, with its relative
absence of conflict and outright hostility, is a good one. Perhaps as a
corollary, the blacks’ chances of changing their position in society and of
redefining their culture without destroying its integrity are, at present, rather
less than in the USA.

REFERENCES
Ashton, Guido. 1970. Barrio Piloto: Variables económicos y culturales de
una erradicación de tugurios en Cali, Colombia. In Revista Colombiana
de Antropología l5:216–248.
Arrázola, Roberto. 1970. Palenque, primer pueblo libre de America.
Cartagena: Ediciones Hernández.
Banton, Michael. 1983. Racial and ethnic competition. Cambridge:
University Press.
Bastide, Roger. 1961. Dusky Venus, black Apollo. In Race 3:10–19.
Benson, Sue. 1981. Ambiguous ethnicity: interracial families in London.
Cambridge: University Press.
Borrego Pla, María del Carmen. 1973. Palenques de negros en Cartagena
de Indias a fines del siglo I7. Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios
Hispanaoamericanos.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge:
University Press.
Degler, Carl. 1971. Neither black nor white. New York: MacMillan.
Dudgard, John. 1978. Human rights and the South African legal order.
Princeton, N.J.: University Press.
Fernandes, Florestan. 1969. The negro in Brazilian society. New York:
Columbia University Press.

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Freyre, Gilberto. 1946. The masters and the slaves. New York: Knopf.
Gilroy, Paul. 1982. Steppin’ out of Babylon: race, class and autonomy. In
The empire strikes back. Edited by the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies. London: Hutchinson and CCCS (Birmingham
University).
Hall, Stuart, et al. 1978. Policing the crisis. New York: MacMillan.
Harris, Marvin. 19S2. Race and class in Minas Velhas. In Race and class in
rural Brazil. Edited by Charles Wagley. Paris: UNESCO.
________. 1970. Referential ambiguity in the calculus of Brazilian racial
terms. In Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 27:1–14.
________. 1974. Patterns of race in the Americas. New York: Norton
Library.
Jackson, Richard. 1976. The black image in Latin American literature.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Jaramino Uribe, Jaime. 1968. Ensayos sobre la historia social colombiana.
Bogotá: Universidad Nacional.
Myrdal, Gunner. 1944. The American dilemma. New York: Harper Row.
Pierson, Donald. 1942. Negroes in Brazil: A study of race contact in Bahia.
Chicago: University Press.
Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 1967. Race, class and colour in Central America and the
Andes. Daedalus 96.
Sanjek, R. 1971. Brazilian racial terms: Some aspects of meaning and
learning. In American Anthropologist 73:1126–1144.
Solaún, Mauricio and Kronus, Stanley. 1973. Discrimination without
violence. New York: John Wiley.
Van den Berghe. 1967. Race and racism. New York: John Wiley.
Wade, Peter. 1984. Blacks in Colombia: identity and racial discrimination.
Unpublished PhD thesis. Cambridge University.
________. 1985a. Race and class: the South American blacks. In Ethnic
and Racial Studies 8(2).
________. 1985b. Patterns of race in Colombia. In Bulletin of Latin
American Research 5(2):1–19.

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Wade, Peter. 1987. Raza y ciudad: Los chocoanos en Medellín. In Revista
Antioqueña de Economía y Desarrollo 27:35–46.
Watson, Graham. 1970. Passing for white. A study of racial assimilation in
a South African school. London: Tavistock.
Whitten, Norman. 1974. Blackfrontiersmen: A South American case. New
York: John Wiley.

NOTES
1. Gilberto Freyre’s works on Brazil have been criticized as creating too
rosy a vision of black-white relations (see, for example, Freyre 1946).
Donald Pierson’s Negroes in Brazil (1942) has also met with such
objections. For Colombia, Solaún and Kronus’s more recent study of
Cartagena (1973), while it admits the existence of racial discrimination,
is generally optimistic about the amelioration of racism and sees
integration as a more powerful force.
2. Mestizo literally means mixed-blood of any kind, but is generally used
to refer to mixtures between indians and whites, the word mulatto being
used for black-white mixtures,
3. See Wade (1986) for a discussion of these patterns.
4. My first trip was financed by a grant from the Social Science Research
Council of Great Britain. The second trip was made possible by grants
from the Social Science Research Council of the United States of
America, and the British Academy, and by a Research Fellowship from
Queens’ College, Cambridge.
5. See Watson (1970) for anomalies in the South African system (see also
Dudgard 1978:59–63). See Myrdal (1944) for variations in USA
classifications, and Benson (1981) for ambiguity in Britain.
6. See also Sanjek (1971) who shows that the multiplicity of racial terms
in fact concentrates around certain core images.
7. Jackson (1976) gives a good account of the real meaning behind
blanqueamiento or, as he calls it, “ethnic lynching”.
8. The agency’s censuses did not include the racial type of the farmers, nor
their regional origin (in this case, the latter was an accurate guide to the

23
 former). However, the enumerators were able to identify all the farmers
according to their colour and origin.
9. This return visit was made possible by grants from several bodies,
including the British Academy, the Durham Fund of King’s College,
Cambridge and Queens’ College, Cambridge.
10. The material on Medellín is contained partly in Wade (1987) and in
more detail in a forthcoming book.
11. See Whitten (1974:198), Ashton (1970), Harris (1952:80), Van den
Berghe (1967:74). All these authors describe situations in which blacks
lose out in economic competition, or in which discrimination increases
in the face of competition.

24