For an anti-racist education: the fight against inequality in Latin America – 05/29/2023 – Pablo Acosta

Education is the main tool that Afro-descendant families have to escape poverty. To do this, it is necessary to eliminate the barriers that keep Afro-descendant children and young people away from schools.

According to a new World Bank report, “Afro-descendant Inclusion in Education: An Anti-Racist Agenda for Latin America,” Afro-descendant students in the region, including Brazil, receive lower-quality education, achieve worse learning outcomes, are more likely to drop out of education system early and have limited access to digital technologies. In the labor market, they achieve much smaller returns in relation to the years invested in education.

Educational discrimination is one of the main drivers of exclusion. The problem is not so much access to the educational system, but permanence. In Latin America, there are around 34 million school-aged Afro-descendants. Nearly one in five drop out of the system before completing elementary school, twice the regional average, and only two-thirds of young black men who start high school complete it — by comparison, that proportion is three-quarters among non-Afro-descendants. In addition, although a quarter of the Latin American population is made up of Afro-descendants aged 25 or over, only 12% of people with higher education are black.

Socioeconomic issues, inadequate classroom materials, and lack of support for teachers (also racially stratified) are limiting factors. Racism, explicit or indirect, is another critical element.

Many textbooks do not include the history of the Afro-descendant population or address racism directly. According to the study, they often reproduce stereotyped views about the black population and impact the aspirations and perception of the future of children and young people.

Although Afro-descendants manage to overcome obstacles and complete their studies, when they enter the job market, they continue to receive lower wages than their peers with identical credentials.

Afro-descendants not only tend to be relegated to low-quality jobs and the informal sector. In Brazil, black workers with a university degree receive, on average, a salary 40% lower than whites for the same types of work. Women of African descent earn the lowest wages of all. They even earn less than men of African descent, even though they generally have a better educational level.

Despite these persistent gaps, the study also shows that there have been many advances, in the last two decades, in the promotion of a regulatory agenda against racial discrimination, with positive implications in the educational field. In Brazil, as in the cases of Colombia and Uruguay, governments have launched or strengthened affirmative action programs for higher education, achieving positive results in terms of enrollment, diversity and academic performance.

It is also worth noting that Brazil —the country with the largest Afro-descendant population outside Africa— managed to transform the ethnoracial composition of the public university system through affirmative action policies enshrined in law in 2013.

So a crucial step towards advancing inclusion in education is to recognize and address the factors that cause and perpetuate exclusion. The study recommends creating racially inclusive books and teaching materials that break down stereotypes about people of African descent and adequately represent their history and culture. It is also necessary to expand access to the internet and technological devices.

Diversity and inclusion teacher training and development programs should also be supported to create environments that welcome and value students, applying a policy of zero tolerance to discrimination.

Finally, it is necessary to face structural racism, creating and expanding mechanisms to denounce and repair discrimination. The community and the school must be involved in discussions on the subject, as well as in the creation of more inclusive curricula.

_{This article was written in collaboration with my colleagues Flavia Carbonari (senior consultant in social development and gender) and Germán Freire (senior specialist in social development)}

PRESENT LINK: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release five free hits of any link per day. Just click the blue F below.