Racism in the Academy: Global Perspectives on Multiple Forms of Racism and Struggles for Equity

DANIEL MATO

Seminario; Racism in the Academy: Global Perspectives on Multiple Forms of Racism and Struggles for Equity; 2021

Instituto Internacional de la UNESCO para la Educación Superior en América Latina y el Caribe (UNESCO-IESALC), la University of Bath y la Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero

In Latin America, racial discrimination does not only affect indigenous peoples and persons of African descent. Romani, Jews, Muslims, and other population groups are also targets of racial discrimination. However, indigenous peoples have not only been affected through racial discrimination. They have also endured every form of racism since the very beginning of the European invasion, as just a few years later it has begun to affect enslaved African persons. We need to differentiate between racism and racial discrimination. Racism is both an ideology and a regime of power that is constitutive of the Modern world, and of every American society, involving its political and economic organization. Racial discrimination is one of the manifestations of racism, the more evident. The expression structural racism is usually employed to highlight the historically foundational character of racism and its economic and political relevance. It is in this sense that we affirm that racism is a regime of power. This regime of power pervasively affects persons and communities of African descent and indigenous peoples, which happens in specific ways in each country. Histories and situations vary from country to country, between diverse regional contexts within each country, and concerning the cases of particular communities and peoples. Nevertheless, beyond those differences, some commonalities are meaningful. In Latin American societies, racism has been so naturalized that most of the population often limits the usage of the concept of "racism" to explicit facts of "racial discrimination." This reductionist operation, combined with the generalized ignorance of the role of racism in the origin of social inequalities, often keeps hidden both how it permeates specific institutions and is reproduced through them.