Whether they are fat, thin, tall, short, yellow, tanned, white or black, the “other” in society is often killed for thinking, behaving or acting differently. Justifications are always found for their elimination, domination or enslavement.
Armando Orozco Tovar
When it is done without justification it is insanity, and will only have a psychological excuse.
But any differentiation of the “other” is an attempt to exercise control over individuals, achieved through death, since it prevents them from getting in the way as they act to protect their interests.
And if the person being eradicated is alone, he or she will reap all of the rewards. They will not have to share it with other thirsty and hungry people, like dogs or cats around his table.
Early in human history, groups who triumphed over weaker opponents did not do so for the reasons given above. Instead they did so to force the vanquished into slavery, since the labour of the “other” could be used for free.
This is how pyramids and walls were built, the ones that people want to attribute to extra-terrestrial intervention.
The domination of the other was utilitarian, pragmatic, very different from that which Spain exercised first with the aborigines, and then with the African peoples.
Jorge Luis Borges puts it this way in ‘The dreadful redeemer Lazarus Morell. Relato perteneciente a: Historia Universal de la Infamia: ‘In 1517, Father Bartolomé de las Casas had great pity for the Indians who were exterminating themselves in the laborious hells of the West Indian gold mines, and he proposed to Emperor Charles V the importation of blacks who were exterminating themselves in the laborious hells of the West Indian gold mines…’.
With the Papal argument that the aborigines lacked a soul, it was restored with evangelisation, so that they were not very useful as productive ‘objects’. Only the Africans, who were considered work animals for all kinds of productive work, were left without this ‘divine breath’.
There was a marked contrast between slavery at this time and earlier forms. Differentiating between Africans and Europeans on the basis of their skin colour was designed to facilitate the production of goods and the concentration of material riches in the hands of a small number of dominant individuals: gold was the ‘magic wand’ that could transform something into its opposite just as a magician might do.
In Timon of Athens, Shakespeare highlights this property of gold, which is presented as a mysterious magical entity: “Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods / I am no idle votarist: roots, you clear heavens! / Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, / Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant…”
In modern society, gold was and continues to be the catalyst for justifications based on race. It is a pretext for killing or enslaving the “other”, in a way that skin colour never was.
Black people faced discrimination, whether they were from the Chocó in Colombia, the Pacific, or elsewhere.
And the discrimination continues to this day, although now it is based less on their skin colour and more on their abundance of natural resources.
They are discriminated against because of the vast hidden wealth under the ground they stand on.
If the territory they inhabited offered protection from the forces of capitalism, being black would not be so important. They would neither be treated with indifference nor marginalised as a people destined for eternal misery, given charity hand-outs and left to die like the people of Haiti today. This is undoubtedly the reason why black people are emphasising their African origins, as if they were saying: “We have been erased because of our skin colour. Bt we’re not from here; instead, we were brought here by force from our distant African homeland… that’s why we see ourselves as ‘Africa-descendants’…” It is an ethnic description that is brandished like a defensive shield.
The “demon” of racism is embedded deep within the Colombian psyche, to the extent that a black person may well shout “Get out of my way, negro!” at one of their fellow countrymen. Similarly, it is not uncommon for someone to say “I’m not going to that area because there are lots of black people there.”
Everyday examples include the middle-class woman from the capital, Bogota, who noticed that the men who took care of maintaining her block hadn’t arrived and said: “The natives haven’t come to clean the street…”
We will need a momentous exorcism, like those performed by the church, to expunge the devil of racism from our sick national soul. RIP
(Translated by Roz Harvey) – Photos: Pixabay
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