The Changing Place of Afro-descendant Youth in Public Discourses through Digital Anti-Racism Activism in Colombia and Brazil

• In Event: Engaging Children and Youth in Research and Activism

Abstract

Despite a decade of socio-economic advances in Latin America, young Latin Americans are living in the world’s most insecure conditions, and that insecurity is hindering more meaningful growth in the region. Both Colombia and Brazil rate among the most violent regions of the world, and have been suffering from increasing conflict over the last decades. Young Afro-descendants have been deeply confronted with and affected by a number of structural issues manifested in the unequal distribution of the region’s assets as well as subject to continuous racial discrimination. And yet, in these environments of state neglect and violence, Brazilian and Colombian youth develop their own initiatives to counter racial discrimination, shape their communities and affect public policy through collective digital agency.

While media coverage often portrays youth of African descent as politically disruptive or apathetic in the Americas, this research attempts to provide an antidote to such views through digital efforts and interventions that young Afro-descendants have employed to counter racial stigma faced by Afro-descendant communities in Brazil and Colombia. Drawing from the notion of digital anti-racism activism, this study delivers nuanced accounts of the cyber engagements of young Afro-descendants to counter racial discrimination and exclusion, occupy roles historically denied to them, deconstruct their negative image, and re-claim representations of their identities and realities. Moreover, it seeks to understand how racist discourses about these communities are being replaced by the positive approach of young people highlighted in this research and facilitated more recent collective action and agency.

Author

• Niousha Roshani, Harvard University