For a Diverse and Plural Millenium
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Contemporary Expressions of Racism and Racial Discrimination ^*

Myrna Cunningham

Though racism and racial discrimination are issues long discussed within the United Nations System, we face a persistent phenomenon that continues injuring human dignity and that far from disappearing or diminishing, grows and becomes more complex.

They made us - young, adolescent, adult and elder women and men from indigenous peoples and Afro American communities - believe that our situation of poverty, marginalization and discrimination are legacies of the Colonial past time that would disappear in time.

The problem derived from this view is that the majority of current generations do not feel themselves responsible for the situation of racism. For example, there are very few human rights organizations involved in this process.

The argument of the conquest and colonization is being used as an easy excuse to maintain inequalities. Governments have also used the same argument as a pretext when they say that if economy grows, social problems will also be resolved; or that they only have five years and therefore, they cannot change a problem that has existed for 500 years.

The true fact is that we, indigenous peoples and African descendant communities as well as other nationalities and discriminated sectors, are in the middle of an “accumulative circle of disadvantages” regarding the access to opportunities.

We start from a negative point of departure in all senses. Clearly, we talk about a situation that throughout the colonization processes and the formation of national states seized each of our rights as peoples. We were integrated by force to new forms of social organization, they took and continue taking our territories and natural resources, our political and administrative systems. They steal our knowledge, beliefs, values. They do not acknowledge our languages. Dominant development models were erected on those ruins, which gained legitimacy based on the non-recognition and abuse of our individual and collective rights.

National States and their constitutional order were conceived and organized on the basis of the “legal equality” principle that has not recognized the differences, promoting on the contrary, the ideal of homogeneity.

Since 1940, the governments of America adopted the first International Convention on Indigenous Peoples, the Patzcuaro Convention, which would determine indigenous policies of integration and assimilation that governments in the region have put and continue putting into practice since then. This view is based on the concept that identifies ethnic diversity as a problem that could be solved only by homogenization.

For indigenous people, the nearly 30 years of international and national visibilization process have left us with a bitter taste. In some countries, we have conquered constitutional rights for our collective identity, the ILO Covenant 169 has been approved, in which it is recognized that although we are peoples, we do not have the right to self determination, violating Art.1 of the International Convenants of Human Rights.

Some international institutions discuss and approve norms and methodologies basically to “consult” us. However, the principle of “prior informed consent” of “good faith” approved by themselves is rarely respected in such consultations. As a comrade stated recently, it seems that we were better off before the Conventions because at least there were more spaces to place demands or claims. Nowadays they just have to invent a pseudo consultation for enterprises to invade our territories or take away our resources without leaving any benefits.

Our contribution to development and the environment has been widely acknowledged. Pharmaceutical enterprises seek for curanderos (healers) to reduce their bioprospection costs. However, environmental racism has worsened, expressing itself through the irresponsible use of our territories and natural resources, transforming them into toxic waste disposal areas, colonization zones, agricultural frontier outposts and deforestation with the subsequent gradual and permanent destruction of material and spiritual conditions that are necessary to maintain our way of living.

In spite of the discourse about the broadening of democracy we - both men and women - remain among the excluded. This is being reinforced by attitudes, public behavior and policies that not only promote social and cultural disintegration of our people but also reduce or stop our participation in national and international spheres. All this is worsened by vertical development policies which are blind to our demands and proposals.

The result of these policies is clear. Some data is useful in this respect:

Though in our countries, the majority of people is poor, over two thirds of bilingual indigenous individuals and almost three quarters of monolingual indigenous individuals are poor.

In Guatemala, 66% of the population is poor; however, 87% of indigenous peoples is poor and 61% of these are in situation of extreme poverty.

In Mexico, municipalities with over 40% of indigenous population reach 80% of poverty, compared with municipalities where there are 10-40% of indigenous population where poverty reaches 46%.

Data are similar for the case of African descendant communities and in all the cases, the women’s situation is still worse.

These differences are reproduced in different fields: education, helth , land property, labor market, among others.

Among contemporary problems regarding racism and racial discrimination we can list the following:

• The limitations, restrictions and misunderstandings of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples, people of African descent and ethnic communities, including our right to life and to a continuous existence as peoples.

• The extinction of aboriginal rights over our lands, territories and resources, including our livelihoods as well as rights ratified by treaties and agreements signed with States. It must mentioned that the concept of extinction is applied only to indigenous people and their rights.

• The practices of dispossession, expropriation, confiscation, encroachment and domination of our lands, territories and resources.

• The lack of tolerance and the attacks to cultural and spiritual practices, traditional economies and ways of life, to our cultural and intellectual heritage as well as to our sacred places with historical meaning. All these are part of our health practices and pharmacological knowledge, combined with continuous attempts to take possession of them, including human, animal and vegetable genetic codes.

• The actions of discrimination as well as the lack of action from the State to attack the expressions of discrimination and racism when they occur, as this tends to encourage and legitimize racist attitudes and behavior.

• The assimilation processes based on ideas of superiority of a certain group or a culture over others aiming at the disappearance of differentiated indigenous and African American identities, considering them inferior, including processes of transmigration that transform black and indigenous majorities into minorities in our own territories. The creation of ethnolinguistic hierarchies and interethnic conflicts.

• The displacement from, and forced renunciation of indigenous peoples and people of African descent to our territory due to armed conflicts or to implement development projects alien to our peoples.

• The lack of respect to norms and principles of equity in health services provision, the access to housing, to education and training at all levels as well as to employment which result in the frustration of our integral life plans and in our greater exclusion and impoverishment.

• The imposition of the hegemony of colonial legal systems that attempt to disavow and eliminate the legal systems of our peoples, aggravated by the lack of adequate access to courts and the negation of the principle of due process. As effects of this situation we face the denial of justice, highly disproportionate percentages of imprisonment and frequently, the death of indigenous individuals while they are under custody.

• Globalization, with the internationalization of the labor force, the reduction of the role of States, the increase of economic power of non public private actors with the subsequent absence of international laws that promote behavior codes, the right to association and free opinion; all these have placed the institutionalization of racism at an international level with greater margination and racial discrimination against women, indigenous, black and migrant people. The persistence of old power relations of exploitation within the context of economic globalization is increasing the seizing, persecution, physical and cultural destruction of indigenous peoples and African descendant communities.

• The confusion between racial discrimination with discrimination due to poverty. Gaps among different sectors of the population are gradually deepening because of discrimination.

The nature of racial discrimination in our countries worsens all that has been mentioned above. Expressions of racism, both in the regional sphere and in the particular countries, occur according to the historic context, the origin and the models of nation, the characteristics, history of struggles and relations against the dominant national classes of the involved nations. The prevailing forms of rejection, segregation, the level of psychophysical violence and the physical-cultural extermination carried out throughout history also influence the current situation.

However, many times we deal with a diluted racism, based on physical attributions, aesthetic and behavioral values, geographical and regional location. This is translated into laws, public policies, norms of state institutions and private enterprises. It is reproduced in daily life relations and in the organizations that we build and in which we work.

Sales woman wanted, good appearance.

Requirements to be a Nicaraguan citizen: speak Spanish.

If you are a black woman from the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, how is it that you don’t know how to sing and dance?

In that context, the gender aspect is even more serious. Indigenous and black women face wider gaps in every field. If they are young the situation is worse.

In other cases, the model imposed an ethnolinguistic hierarchy that has kept us apart not only as indigenous peoples but among indigenous and African descendant communities. This situation has been an obstacle for the articulation of struggles and has increased our “vulnerabilities” and equity gaps.

Such institutional or structural racism explains the whole absence of feelings of responsibility of other sectors towards the phenomenon of racism and racial discrimination. Privileges are well established and structured among racial and gender groups as well as in age groups. These privileges aim at the reproduction and spreading of racism.

As we can see, poverty and exclusion are not our main problems but the fact that others continue declaring how those problems can be alleviated in our communities. The worst is not social exclusion in itself but the fact that we do not have our own systems and spaces of real participation and we are not being respected and accepted with our collective identities in other spaces.

All this is a consequence of the negation of the right to free determination of indigenous peoples, considering that the two International Covenants on Human Rights declare in their Article 1 that all nations have the right to self determination.

In the case of African American communities their lack of visibility has worsened racial discrimination, prejudices and lack of opportunities.

An adequate response to the situation of discrimination should start from an intercultural vision based on the exercise of the rights of autonomy, self government, self management, territory and effective participation through transparent procedures concerted at the various levels, from the local to the international.

In order for policies and strategies to be oriented not only towards the prevention and eradication of poverty , multiple diversity should be recognized in restricted and specific ways (indigenous peoples, African descendants of the Americas must be clearly specified in the Plan of Action of the World Conference) in such a way that specific services and public policies can be defined in a way that they help in the maintenance of our peoples and cultures. The acknowledgement of the multiethnic and multiculural diversity requires not only legal changes but also deep transformations that contribute to the generation of collective trust, to the access to opportunities, to the reconstruction of community, territorial and ethnic alliance networks. Cosmologies, times, procedures for decision-making rather than constitute barriers, must be the appropriate spaces to resolve contradictions.

The structural racism we face can only be eradicated through pressure from different sectors of society, together with demonstrations, public sensitization activities as well as the establishment of adequate participation processes that allow us to have an impact in the decisions beginning with our communities, going through municipalities, regions up to the national and international levels.

Global changes to eradicate racism cannot be sustained on the basis of particular wills. In the case of the UN, political will to commit themselves to a process with material, financial resources, specific but flexible laws and a change of attitude at all levels is required.

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