The fight for racial justice through data and litigation

By: Carolina Rodríguez Mayo (*)

Being an Afro-descendant person in Colombia is the sum of many systemic and chronic challenges and obstacles. Facing racism is a battle that never ends, especially when there are no statistical data to support that racism in our country is tied to the structure in which our society is built. Imagine the grave omission committed by DANE in 2018 when it failed to correctly count the Afro-descendant population in its Census. However, this oversight did not go unnoticed by movements or organizations that work to guarantee the rights of Black communities.

In this struggle, one organization, through its diligent and persistent work, managed to get the Constitutional Court to declare that there was, in fact, statistical invisibility of the Afro-descendant population in the 2018 Census. Thanks to the support of ILEX Acción Jurídica, the significance of the Census count among marginalized communities was understood last year.

ILEX is an organization led by Afro-Colombian lawyers who aim to create and execute different action mechanisms to protect and strengthen the country’s Afro-descendant communities. This organization is influencing law from an exceptional place, as its work seeks to provide educational management on racism and repair the social fabric within Black, Afro-descendant, Raizal, and Palenquera communities; in other words, to use law as an instrument of change.

Audrey Mena, Deputy General Director of Ilex

Those of us who are part of the African diaspora and experience racialization firsthand know that it is essential to have public policies with an ethnic/racial focus. The ILEX organization itself explains on its networks that racial justice must also be linked to policies with an ethnic/racial focus: “Fiscal policy is an instrument for the distribution of income and wealth, the way of collection and, in general, the capacity for investment in public policies and development plans which have as their purpose the guarantee of the rights of all people.” Now imagine that this fiscal policy is devoid of complete information and that, because of this, thousands of Afro-descendant people will be left out of opportunities related to their academic, social, or economic growth.

The recognition of Blackness as part of a broader and more urgent conversation keeps ILEX on the cutting edge. Without a doubt, this organization fights against the racism so present in different social spheres. Statistical invisibility, moreover, contributes to a mistaken idea of miscegenation, an idea of miscegenation that ignores that there are indeed differences in our country that originate from the idea of race and the way racialization processes have occurred in Colombia. To begin with, the instrument that measures who is Afro-descendant in the CENSUS already has many gaps that prevented proper self-recognition and mobility for the counting of the Afro-descendant population. Dayana Blanco, founding lawyer of ILEX, assures: “in Colombia, the narratives of miscegenation and the narratives that deny the existence of racial discrimination and racism are very widespread. This significantly permeates judicial institutions.”

Dayana Blanco Acendra, General Director of Ilex

Statistical invisibility is an erasure of national memory, especially an erasure of the magnitude of the contributions, needs, and richness of Afro-Colombian communities. ILEX, through educational actions, insists on the importance of accurate and reliable statistical information: “if there are no reliable data on the size, location, and living conditions of the Afro-descendant population, the State will not have sufficient information to address the situations of systematic exclusion that affect this population.” ILEX seeks to show Colombia the realities of Black people using the recognition of their different intersections as a bridge. While their contribution was very significant in what the Constitutional Court ended up accepting regarding the statistical invisibility of 2018, this is not the only contribution they have made to the statistical accounting of Black populations.

Among its different thematic lines, ILEX has one specifically dedicated to data justice and representation, coordinated by Daniel Gómez, who told us: “many people do not consider that there are significant social gaps or patterns of discrimination that affect historically excluded populations like the Afro-Colombian one. The figures in this sense are the proof that allows us to accredit the existence of discrimination. If we don’t have figures, we not only cannot diagnose the problem, but there probably won’t be enough legal support for any type of public policy we create to remedy those gaps.” If there are no figures, there is no access to rights; Afro-descendant people must be clearly and emphatically included in the country’s population statistics, otherwise, as ILEX underlines, we do not exist for the State. This organization seeks to make visible the various challenges that the lives of Afro-Colombian people face in the fight for the guarantee of their rights, as happens, for example, with the inclusion of midwives into the health system which is made effective through ruling T-128 of 2022 “with which the Constitutional Court ordered the Ministry of Health to integrate midwives into the General System of Social Security in Health and urges Congress to legislate on the matter.”

The organization has published 14 texts, including reports, recommendations, and studies that strengthen the study of law through the lens of race, a line of research that has been in Colombia for a very short time, especially from a legal perspective. A racial justice perspective is an opportunity to change public policy, as ILEX’s example with fiscal policy shows, which with an ethnic/racial focus could be understood as an instrument to adopt decisions related to spending, taxation, and debt.

Fifth anniversary of Ilex Acción Jurídica.

It is a victory for Black people, given that the Constitutional Court required DANE to conduct a study that “systematically and comprehensively evaluates” the reasons behind the invisibility and decrease of the Afro-descendant population in the last three censuses. ILEX committed to following up on the ruling. We know that ILEX will continue to work to guarantee the rights of the Afro-descendant population in our country.

(*) Writer and collaborator of Dejusticia (adcaroma@gmail.com ). Writer and professor. She has published her work in magazines such as Southwest Review, Sombralarga, and ExLibris. Columnist for El País (Spain), Volcánicas, and Manifiesta (Colombia). Poet, producer of the podcast Manifiesto Cimarrón where she converses with other Black people about Blackness, diversity, and resistance.

(**) This article is part of the special #TejidoVivo, a product of a journalistic alliance between the Dejusticia study center and El Espectador.