This article analyzes the speeches and social practices of government social practitioners – social workers and psychologists – who work in programs that provide psychosocial care for displaced black women who come to Bogota from the Pacifi c region as result of the country’s internal armed confl ict. The article focuses on the assumptions underlying two types of workshops that these programs offer: sexual and reproductive health, and cultural strengthening. It then shows how the speeches and practices used in these workshops illustrate two contradictory ways of valuing the black ethnic-racial presence in the country. Instead of being spaces of equity and justice, these workshops reproduce images and social representations of this “otherness” and create social distances that promote asymmetries in ethnic-racial relations with black people.