“¡Mira, un negro!” Elementos para pensar el racismo y la resistencia

Abstract

Colombian educational institutions are marked by differences: gender, ethnic, racial, social class, learning styles, physical condition, etc. Recent diversity policies celebrate these differences and highlight that we learn from and in diversity. In fact, today schools bring us closer to that other “stranger” in the educational system who appears strange, dangerous and even threatening: he occupies our space, sits next to us, looks at us and speaks to us in a different way. But the issue is not a matter of celebrations, as public policies intend; Differences alone do not create solidarities; historical exclusions, even less so. The “white” is and has been educated to see and interpret the world through the eyes of privilege. The educational institution, since its establishment by Santander and its delivery to the Church, as well as since the establishment of Lancasterism, has repeatedly failed to provide an equitable education, in which everyone fits; not just male, white, Christian, heterosexual citizens of a certain social class. The school carries a historical debt with women, people of African descent and indigenous people, and with people with different physical and mental conditions: deaf people, blind people and a long list of those excluded. New educational policies focused on celebrating diversity, as an abstract good, fail to promote “naive” and superficial changes. Behind the mask of diversity are hidden additive approaches, which add and do not integrate, and which do not critically examine the school as a politically mediated institution in which there is an implication of social, historical, cultural and economic factors, which have historically generated a deeply unequal and oppressive system.