Historic Racial Exclusion and Subnational Socio-economic Outcomes in Colombia

This chapter presents an overview of the book. It starts by describing the singular racial relations in a Latin American context like Colombia. The chapter then explains how patterns of racial distribution throughout the Colombian regions and the nation’s racialized republican project determined a geo-racialized public provision of goods, services, and rights, with adverse consequences for the country’s Afro-descendant territories. Finally, this chapter presents the book’s arguments and describes the relevant concepts, alternative explanations, and the mixed-methods approach used in the research to determine the consequences of implicit forms of racial exclusion.

This chapter elucidates the quantitative consequences of exclusion for disparities in the social and economic outcomes of territorial units. Specifically, by using different statistical and econometric techniques and exploiting a historical database for municipalities, this chapter focuses on demonstrating that Colombian territorial units with greater Afro-descendant populations had a lower provision of collective goods, such as the provision of mass schooling during the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter also shows quantitatively that the lower provision of collective goods had negative consequences in measures of subnational modern economic progress, i.e., in lower literacy rates, levels of industrial development, employment, or industrial capital.

The aim of this chapter is to begin developing the theme of how the consequences of exclusion were brought about. The chapter advances this objective by analyzing the case study of Chocó, the Colombian region with a historically greater component of Afro-descendant people and lower social and economic performance. Then, a general description of the case study is presented together with a range of qualitative and quantitative evidence on how the implicit institution of racial exclusion was maintained in Chocó. Analysis of the data shows that, despite there being no explicit rules for excluding Afro-descendant territories, the region of Chocó received implicit racialized treatments. More importantly for the purposes of the book, these racialized implicit practices limited the provision of goods, services, and rights such as limitations to political participation, self-determination, public services, or the imposition of projects of internal colonization over the territory and its people. The chapter also shows how, as a critical fact, these restrictions were related to both the national geo-racialized project and more critically, the subnational alignment of local elites with the discriminatory project.

This chapter shows how the implicit institution of racial exclusion generated variations in subnational public goods by focusing on the actions of different aggrieved actors locally. That is, the chapter provides empirical evidence of the existence of a causal mechanism between the informal institution of racial exclusion and the developmental outcomes of access to public goods in the Colombian region of Chocó. The analysis illustrates that, while some actors reproduce exclusion with negative effects on local access to public goods for the majoritarian Afro-descendant population, other actors resist exclusion. Moreover, such resistance propagates gradual institutional changes with positive effects on subnational developmental outcomes. These findings offer empirical evidence concretely linking the role of actors, their micro-actions of institutional reproduction and change, and the effects of institutions on developmental outcomes.

This chapter presents the conclusions and a discussion on the debates developed in the book. In this regard, the chapter discusses the importance of a better understanding of how the effects of informal institutions are brought about, how the book engages in the analysis of racial exclusion in Latin America with new historical information and approximations, and how it becomes involved in the debate over subnational disparities in Latin America, especially Colombia. Finally, the chapter makes suggestions for further work.