By Sarai Coscojuela |
Caracas (EFE) with pride his dark skin through the streets of Venezuela, where -he affirms- racism exists.
Eileyn, also known as “Negra Ugueto”, has had to face racism at school, in her old ballet group, and even in her family environment, which shares the same skin tone.
“In Venezuela, racism does exist, above all, the racism of the same people from the black community. I experience it more personally in my family or in the people with whom I feel an affinity, than with people outside the Afro-descendant community,” he told EFE.
He has had to deal with comments about his skin tone, the aesthetics of his hair because it “does not look professional” or the shape of his nose.
“It is always a visual trait that makes you not fit in, that is not right and always comes from home. Most of the time, my aunts find my way of dressing, my way of being, my hair exaggerated, and it is not because they do not love me, but simply because they have in their mind that the way I see myself is not right and they are my skin tone or even darker than me,” he said.
According to the Survey of Living Conditions (Encovi) of the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), only 4% of the Venezuelan population identifies as black, which for Eileyn is an indication of how the “self-perception” of the citizens.
beauty stereotypes
Merlyn Pirela, a member of the Cumbe Afro-Venezuelan Women’s collective, believes that beauty stereotypes, marked in a country that follows Miss Venezuela every year, show that “blackness” is not pretty.
“We see it in our media, you can turn on the television and see what diversity you find in the media at a phenotypic level, you don’t see it, it’s as if we didn’t exist, because we live in a country where the patterns of beauty are very marked, by Miss Venezuela and that there are experts (…) who say that Venezuelan blackness is not pretty,” she told EFE.
Pirela argued that there is “differentiated care” in Venezuela based on the color of people’s skin.
Also, he said, there are cases of discrimination in nightclubs in eastern Caracas that do not let black people in with the excuse that they are breaking the dress code of the place.
“There is a racism that is the one that crosses us that is structural racism, it is within the structures of a society, of a country that comes from that slave-owning past that Venezuela also has and that from there we drag all that vision and perception of Afro people,” he added.
Progress and things to improve against racism
Both Eileyn Ugueto and Merlyn Pirela consider that progress has been made in the country to reduce racism in Venezuela, such as the approval of the Organic Law against Racial Discrimination.
In Pirela’s opinion, this legislation, approved in 2011 and reformed in 2021, was necessary in the country in order to educate the population on the subject and provide protection to all those who may be victims of racial discrimination.
In addition, there are other initiatives to put the conversation of blacks in the country on the table, such as podcasts or educational projects oriented towards styling that teach and promote Afro hair care.
Pirela considers that, in order to continue advancing, it is necessary to promote initiatives at the audiovisual level to show references that allow the youngest to identify themselves and “grow up happy and free too”.
For her part, Eileyn maintains that you have to work on self-recognition, because the Venezuelan “has too much of an Afro-descendant.”
“I think that very few people in this country can say that they are not Afro-descendant, that I am more brown than other people does not mean that we do not have the same roots,” he said.
If this were achieved, he continued, an empathy would be generated that would make it possible to understand the other and “stop looking at them as different.”
