Presentation by Julio César Guanche, Social Sciences specialist of the UNESCO Regional Office in Quito and representative for Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela at the presentation of the Global Coalition against Systemic Racism and for Reparations and its Decalogue of Commitments, within the framework of the UNESCO Global Forum against Racism and Discrimination 2022.
Racism has been a crucial issue for UNESCO since the very moment of its foundation in 1945. In that context, the Second World War had placed the question of race at the center of global political debate.
Fascist race theory then understood races to be radically separate entities, originating from different stock, with nothing in common. One of the purposes of this idea was to deny the universality of humanity, as the impossibility of considering the existence of a "human race".
Unesco came into being just at the end of this great conflict. In 1950, the Organization was already launching a Declaration on Race. It was the first of several that this entity has elaborated to date on the subject. In that pioneering declaration, it stated: "From the biological point of view, the species Homo sapiens is composed of a certain number of groups, which differ from each other by the frequency of one or more particular genes (...) the similarities between men are much greater than their differences".
This was a radical statement: there are human groups, but not human races.
However, in Latin America, we already had important antecedents of this type of statement.
In 1885, the Haitian anthropologist Antenor Firmin published The Equality of Races. Firmin asserted that "racists and some anthropologists" draw false conclusions, this is not due to their reasoning but to the fact that they put forward as an initial premise the innate and radical inequality of human races".
In 1940, at the beginning of World War II, by request of Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, the Eighth Pan American Scientific Congress reached the following agreement: "anthropology refuses to lend any scientific support to discrimination against any social, linguistic, religious or political group, under the pretext of being a racially inferior group". Following the same logic, another Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice, also drawn up by UNESCO, but this time in 1978, reaffirmed that "All human beings belong to the same species and have the same origin. They are born equal in dignity and rights, and all form an integral part of humanity".
To the present day, the scientific perspective offers no doubt about the non-existence of "human races" and denies any kind of hierarchy between human groups. More recently, in 2019, 500 scientists (biologists, geneticists, zoologists and historians), meeting in Jena, concluded that, on the basis of research on the human genome and genetics, races do not exist.
It was concluded that all humans have 99.99 percent identical genes and DNA. It was stated that the traits that determine the physical appearance of people are due to only 0.01 percent of the genetic material.
UNESCO's position is firmly placed on this thesis. Therefore, we repeat, there is only one race: the human species. Furthermore, we emphasize that the differences in variation of that 0.01 percent are due to climatic, nutritional, social, political, economic, and ideological causes. In no case are they due to biological causes.
In the face of such evidence, why do we need to keep talking about racism?
For a very "simple" reason: races do not exist, but racism does.
Racism is expressed as a catalog of prejudices, but it is, above all, a pattern of power that accumulates differences to systematically organize, distribute and justify advantages and disadvantages. It is deployed in individual and institutional actions and defines the order of opportunities as part of the social structure.
It is a history dependent concept. On the history founded on slavery, race behaved as "a category of difference, as an engine of stratification and inequality and as a key variable in the processes of national formation." It is a structural, social, and cultural inheritance that is at once "reconstructed."
Racism is also a problem that renews itself. One example is the presence of racism in Artificial Intelligence systems, with what has been called algorithmic racism. In this field, new security devices take up elements of disciplinary and penal regimes of slavery and colonial wars.
We must, therefore, talk about racism, and understand that it is a discussion that faces several problems:
The very discussion on racism, when it is silenced, for supposedly affecting, for example, notions such as "national unity".
Since class and race coincide in generating situations of poverty and exclusion, the class dimension often overlaps the racial dimension, when it generates problems specifically based on skin color.
Racism does not depend on the biological idea of race. It can be practiced as "racism without race". This is the case when culture and religion are mobilized, instead of biology, to support racist ideas and practices.
So, again, race does not exist, but racism finds ways to recreate itself. Some discourses that claim to combat racism are also part of the problem.
Mestizaje as an ideology, when it is taken uncritically as an exclusive channel for mixing and integration. Mestizaje has also functioned in Latin America as a process of homogenization and has placed blackness and Indianness in a subordinate position. We need critical understandings of mestizaje and its uses.
The idea of "racial democracy" as the absence of racial inequality and exploitation. As is well known, the example of Brazil was a pioneer in this sense and made it possible to distribute this discourse in Latin America. However, let us recall that an investigation commissioned by UNESCO itself in that country, as early as 1949, concluded that racial democracy was a "myth" and that there was indeed racism.
Certain anti-racist discourses focus on the representation, on the cultural issues of racism, but ignore its structural dimension, and its more general social framework. In doing so, they fail to identify the link between racialized difference and structural disadvantage.
What to do
As a multidimensional problem, multidimensional solutions are needed.
It is necessary to mobilize dimensions such as social and cultural justice, law, distributive policies, and avenues for participation in decision-making on racism and its solutions.
Schools can contribute to revaluing discriminated identities, promoting cultural change, undermining racial stereotypes, and encouraging acceptance of differences. It can include in the curricula subjects on the General History of Africa and its current processes, and the history of people of African descent in this region.
Racial discrimination should be punishable, with effective procedural channels.
Social policy design must pay specific attention to groups disadvantaged by the intersection of class and "race".
It is crucial to recognize the legitimacy of anti-racist activism in civil society.
We need to ask about the economic costs of racial exclusion, but also its emotional and psychic costs, as it denigrates and devalues by assigning, for example, negative values to skin tones, hair textures and facial features associated with blacks and indigenous people.
We need to improve national censuses and ethnographies so that they consider skin color and the lived experiences based on it.
Affirmative action policies need to be established that redistribute opportunities and provide material and training support to sustain economic activities.
What UNESCO is doing
The Global Appeal against Racism invites countries to "undertake initiatives aimed at strengthening local, regional and global cooperation to combat racism and discrimination". UNESCO has a Global Citizenship Education program, which is concerned, among other things, about preventing discrimination and stigmatization.
The "Slave Route: Resistance, Freedom, Heritage" project fights racism and discrimination with the participation of cities, museums, site managers and memory itineraries. Something similar is being done by the International Coalition of Inclusive and Sustainable Cities and the Creative Cities Network. The 2030 Agenda has as its core content "leave no one behind".
In all this, we are committed to the idea that "cultures can mix almost without limit and not only develop but also perpetuate themselves". We need to recover the universalist republican thread of anti-racism, understood as a humanist alternative to multiculturalism and assimilation, which means, as Achille Mbembe asserts: "a restorative universalism, an idea of commonality taken as a "key-word", as a principle defined by the negative: "Race is the negation of the idea of commonality".