The colors of anti-racism (in Améfrica Ladina)

Abstract

In this article, I refer to the particularities that anti-racist struggles have adopted in Latin America, a region in which until recently it was thought that racism was an irrelevant issue due to its mixed demographic composition in ethnic-racial terms. In the last thirty years, this perception has been changing due to the recognition of its multiculturalism and, at the same time, of the problems that put in evidence the implementation of the multicultural state project and the neoliberal political and economic development model. At present, we can speak of an anti-racist turn in the region, to designate the greater attention that today is paid to racism in the public sphere, and in that of social movements. I present these reflections from my situated experience, as a Colombian woman and an Afro-Latin American feminist; that is to say, from a place of enunciation and a particular positionality vis-à-vis the issues of racism and anti-racism. In addition, I do it in conversation with the french sociologist Eric Fassin to examine in parallel the challenges that anti-racist academic work faces today in terms of the place of enunciation that is assumed in it.