Ethnicity/Race, Language and Inequality in Higher Education

Abstract

Racism, as both the founding ideology and regime of power constitutive of the Modern World, is a crucial cause of pervasive inequalities in all ‘Latin American’ societies. As an ideology, it rests on the assumption that human beings would be classifiable into ‘races’ and that some of them would be ‘superior’ to others. In Latin America, this ideology and regime of power date back to the colonial period. They are constitutive of the establishment of postcolonial republican States, continue in force, and their consequences primarily affect persons and communities of African descent and indigenous peoples. Higher Education systems and institutions have not been alien to the reproduction and naturalization of racism in Latin American societies and, in fact, worldwide. They have historically played several significant roles in this regard. Historically, they excluded the Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples' world visions, histories, languages, and knowledge and learning systems from the curricula, or even presented them as backward or openly invalid. In practice, most of them have jeopardized these peoples´ access to Higher Education and the quality and success of the trajectories of those who managed to gain access. This chapter seeks to contribute to the debate on eradicating racism in Higher Education systems and institutions in Latin America by contextualizing and disaggregating the idea of ‘structural racism’, to study the specific ways it operates in this particular social field. Thus, it hopes to facilitate the construction of concrete ways of intervention to eradicate it.