Opinion – Pablo Acosta: Education as a tool to fight racism

Every March 21, we commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, created in memory of the victims of the massacre of dozens of people protesting against apartheid in South Africa, in 1960. Since then, despite the many advances in the fight for the elimination regardless of any form of racism, this structural problem continues to affect thousands of Afro-descendants. Therefore, we need to remember and discuss this issue every day, frankly, not only in spaces where public policies are defined, but in our homes, at work, at the bar table and, especially, in classrooms.

Schools are a great reflection of the structural racism that affects our societies. In a World Bank study published in 2018 on the situation of Afro-descendants in Latin America, education appeared as one of the areas where the gaps between blacks and whites are most visible. In the region, children and youth of African descent face unequal opportunities in school, have access to poorer quality education, have worse learning outcomes and are more likely to leave the education system earlier.

But at the same time that education highlights the many gaps between whites and blacks, it is also in schools that we find one of the main tools to transform this reality and fight against racism. In classrooms, we can not only influence the minds of children and young people and deconstruct prejudices, but also give future generations the tools they need to break racial barriers and the cycles of chronic poverty that disproportionately affect Afro-descendants in the region.

To better understand the inequalities that affect the 34 million Afro-descendant children and adolescents of school age in Latin America and identify policies and programs to combat them, the World Bank prepared a new study dedicated exclusively to the inclusion of Afro-descendants in education systems. The report, which will be released soon, shows that the main problem is not access, but permanence in the school system. About 20% of Afro-descendant children do not complete primary education and less than 66% complete secondary education in the region.

In Brazil, 63% of the black population has completed high school, an improvement when compared to the rate of 55.8% in 2015, even more significantly lower than the 78.6% of whites. In higher education, 10% of the black population now has a college degree — less than half the rate of the rest of the country’s population. The unequal insertion in the labor market is another disincentive to drop out of school. In Brazil, black workers with a college degree earn on average 40% less than white workers for the same types of work, even after controlling for other factors such as place of residence, informality and gender; in addition to suffering racial discrimination in selection processes and in the work environment and being under-represented in leadership positions and in well-paid jobs.

All these gaps were intensified by the Covid pandemic. The report shows that more than half of Afro-descendant students in primary and secondary education in Latin America did not have the basic tools to continue their education remotely during the quarantine. This is evident in the case of Brazil, where about 29% of black students in elementary school have access to computers at home, versus 52% of white students at the same level.

More than analyzing the available data that expose these inequalities, the study tries to understand their causes. It examines, for example, images and references in textbooks from ten countries, identifying implicit and explicit representations of race and race relations in teaching. In general, the analyzed textbooks do not promote the recognition of Afro-descendant identities and, on the contrary, often disseminate stereotyped representations. The fight against racism and slavery is almost ignored or mentioned in passing, with notable exceptions in Brazilian books, while the general tendency in the region is to represent racism as something that happened or occurs elsewhere, as if race and racial inequality do not exist. were a fundamental part of Latin America’s history and present.
The study also provides an analysis of the advances and challenges of successful policies implemented to combat these disparities, from anti-discrimination laws and quotas in higher education to adjustments in school curricula.

The good news is that the lessons learned from these policies, the analysis of the causes of exclusion, as well as the experience of many activists and experts —whose voices were instrumental in the construction of this report— show that there are many ways to break down racial barriers. . Among them is the school first, as a key actor in the fight against discrimination. Classrooms must be spaces free of any expression of racism, proactively inclusive and deliberately anti-racist. We also need to eliminate the socioeconomic barriers that prevent students from staying in the education system, investing more in schools that are most frequented by black children, offering subsidy programs such as scholarships and incentives to schools. And it is crucial to close the digital divide that still exists between blacks and whites.

There is still much we can and must do. Education is one of the main gateways to fair and sustainable development, inclusive and free from any form of racism and discrimination. It is time to take advantage of this potential and invest in anti-racist education systems, and it is this dialogue that we intend to foster at the report’s launch event that will take place soon.

This column was written in collaboration with my colleagues at the World Bank, German Freire, Senior Specialist in Social Development, and Flávia Carbonari, Consultant, Specialist in Social Development and Gender.