Sambo, Mulato, Mestizo.

This morning started very early, it was just five and I turned on the TV. Channel surfing, I came across a movie in HBO. It was one of these films made for the U.S. black community where 99% of the characters are of that race and those who are not, are police or some authority. I remember this kind of film I came to discover out there in the late 80s when the criminal journeys of an aunt took her to settle in a town in the southern United States and we were flooded with films of this kind in which even Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs color changed as the brothers Grimm, very white they certainly, describe them. The film is called "This Christmas" and despite not being a piece to mark the history of cinema, with one of his stories made me think about my condition.

With the mix of my parents that led to my ethnicity, I have moved between the world of what we call in Colombia "Mestizos", which is nothing other than "white", and African world, from one side to the other the first being that really influenced my childhood and youth. I never knew what was going to a church where the choir was made up of black midwives Big Ones or see my mother shaking her hips back and forth to the rhythm of some African rhythm. On the contrary, my masses were marked by revolutionary songs with guitar and lyrics that invited the guerrilla struggle and the family dances are not characterized by movements, often scarce, women of my mother's family. My closeness to the people than I can call "my people" came by and sometimes semi-annual trips to visit my dad's family. I've never had a stable relationship with a woman "black" and I've never been offended when people call me black.

However, this union of the two worlds is what has made me who I am today, a tolerant man, an adjective that increasingly seems to fade over humanity; the same seems to want to return to the tree that some time went down.

Reading the daily news that invade our world we see countries that call themselves civilized starting campaigns from their governments undertake to discrimination against minority ethnic groups ranging from banning the use of attire in their culture to blame the economic disaster of the model modern capitalist. Listening to people like Berlusconi and Sarkozy reminded me that this world is being led by characters who blindly elected by the people who see in them the image of authoritarian parents and be able to command respect, and that for post-modern, promising economic prosperity , which is so ambiguous and weak as demonstrated by the economic crisis of recent years.

In societies like the twist of fate that I move now, the Colombian Caribbean coast, it is unthinkable to find an Afro-Colombian occupying a position of social, political or economic, but such is not the case if they are still looking at the surnames and family lineages to determine if your daughter or son is "good" committed or engaged and in black people these surnames are scarce.

I call for a good sense. The world in which we are now has been marked by differences and it is these differences that enrich us, not only the differences, are also those meeting places where we can see Elvis's hips moving like a "black" or to the Rev. King with the political leadership of a "white." I want to live in a world in which blacks who come to enjoy the songs of Frank Sinatra and Johnny Cash without being accused of false or treacherous race and that whites can use braids and sing R & B without being accused of blacks Wanna Be, because we are one humanity, and just as excited me under the Eiffel Tower listening to Edith Piaf or Pacific music festival in Cali with currulao’s sounds, I hope that everyone can do. It is not about homogeneity or likes, of what is good or what is bad, what is white or who is black, is about respect for difference and to see on the other to myself, that  the other feels, says or thinks is so important, or perhaps more than what I am feeling, saying or thinking.