Racism Towards The Indigenous Community In Ecuador

Racism towards the indigenous community in Ecuador

This work will deal with racism towards indigenous people, which is a taboo subject in Ecuador. Given the undeniable force of racial discrimination in Ecuador, various works and academic discussions have been carried out on the subject. At work, the three key concepts to be treated will be defined: power, identity and racism, concepts that will help develop the theme “racism towards the indigenous”, and for this we will help ourselves with information that several authors have proposed through the years through the years.

The analysis of racism arouses deep passions and emotions;confronts and questions perceptions. The study of this social problem challenges the epistemology and positivist methodology of the objective and distant researcher from its object of study and forces to take sides. For this reason in this work, racism is analyzed from the perspective of those who are the target of racial discrimination. It is based on the premise that ‘any system of domination can be seen more clearly from the positions of the subjects oppressed by these systems.’Following Bakhtin, se:

recognizes a privileged epistemological position to those who are (ethnically) oppressed and, therefore, bi-cultural. Because the oppressed are obliged by the circumstances and the imperatives of survival to know both the dominant and marginalized culture, they are ideally located to deconstruct the mystifications of the dominant group.

This investigation departs from the visions and interpretations that reduce the subaltern sectors to the role of victims of oppression, since, when studying the Indians as victims, their agency is denied: their ability to resist, question or collaborate in theirdomination. The temptation to reduce them to heroic subjects who constantly rebel against power is also resist. The image of the ‘heroic Indian’ as well as that of the ‘passive Indian’ does not account for the diversity of experiences of social actors. When analyzing the experiences of everyday life: education, public spaces, and to a lesser extent, love relationships. It seeks to understand what a middle -class indigenous means in current Ecuador.

Before defining the three key concepts that help understand racism towards indigenous people, we will begin by mentioning statistics, since there are too many evidence of racism practices in Ecuador. The magazine Vistazo in its May 858, 2003, surveyed about the degree of racial acceptance in Quito and Guayaquil, throwing data that is not surprising: the whites – just the 10.46% of all Ecuadorians according to census of 2001- enjoy 93.3% social acceptance and ‘are the minority that many would like to belong”, while the mestizos- who in the country are 77%- are only accepted on 3.75%, compared to 1.67% of Afros and 1.25% of the natives. In the same way, the views survey reveals that whites in Ecuador have 85% of more possibilities to get a job above the mestizos that only have the 8.75% of obtaining it, while Afro -Ecuadorians reach 3.33% and the indigenous people of 2.92%.

This phenomenon of racial preference and acceptance, where whites come out victorious. He explains not only the reality of discrimination and racial domination in a country that refuses itself, but is also the redoubt of an old power strategy based on racial exclusion and caste differentiation which, fromThe colony was established by a hegemonic and minority class that has concentrated the privileges and guarantees of racial supremacy. And to understand the phenomenon of racism we must know what power is, to which Humberto García (2009) tells us that:

"Power is understood (…) as the action that is exerted on humans by human beings …"

The racism that is practiced against the natives should not be explained only from the scenario of racial prejudices and the lack of personal education. This is a phenomenon that operates as a structural and ideological system that regulates and rationallybetween the exploited and the exploiters, between the settlers and the colonized.

In Ecuador the elites tried to forge a mestizo national identity that excludes the ethnicity of the Indian and black ‘another.’The ideology of miscegenation denied the existence of social classes and the possibility of incorporating the Indians with their own identity into national society. The ethnic/racial dictatorship was also expressed in the force of ethnicity as a mechanism for social stratification and domination, which created a caste society in which the Indians were relegated to manual work. As a second key concept at work is identity, where Laing (1961) defines identity as:

"That for what one feels that it is" himself "in this place and this time, as at that time and in that past or future place;It is that for which he is identified "

In Ecuador, the national identity construction project has had to be erroneously structured based on physical appearance and skin color, where the white advertising image is imposed emblematic, does not show reality but whatAs a whole, you would like to be. The racial privileges that feed the identity imaginary of Ecuadorians and that end up being a prerequisite for social acceptance are stimulated by the media, who present ‘white’ images such as the ideal biotype and whose fundamental feature is the one that ends up guiding anconsumer mass. On the other hand, when it makes allusions to indigenous presence, television resorts to ambiguous situations.

The study of racism is complicated by the lack of a consensus on its definition. On the one hand, the term racism is used in everyday speeches. This can be an insult or a description of attitudes, thoughts, feelings and practices of one group before another. The indiscriminate use of racism notion and confusion about its meanings is also manifested in social sciences. In general terms, there are two approaches to the study of racism. For some authors, the term racism refers to ideologies on superiority and racial inferiority. The contents of these ideologies can vary from theological and religious arguments, to the use of science (biology and genetics), to cultural reasoning. All these elaborations about racism share essentialist, reductionist and deterministic arguments about the superiority and inferiority of human groups. According to these visions there are real human essences that exist outside or without the influence of historical and social contexts.

The authors who analyze racism as an ideology argue that both whites and non -white can be racist, just subscribe to essentialist ideas about the superiority and inferiority of racial groups. For other authors, racism is not just an ideology. Racism is understood as a series of social practices, attitudes and ideologies that in societies in which whites dominate the people of color the dignity, opportunities and freedoms that are given to whites. Racism includes speeches and representations, feelings and practices that are articulated around stigmas of otherness. For many authors it is important to differentiate racial prejudices from racism. Prejudices are the negative and hostile attitudes that can be felt towards a racial group, an ethnic group or a sexual group. They have cognitive components based on false generalizations and a strong negative emotional dose. Although, according to this group of authors, both whites and non -white can have prejudices, in post -colonial societies only whites have the power to impose a system based on domination and racial subjugation. In conclusion, unlike those who reduce racism to an ideology and those who see it as a personal aberration, we understand racism as a key component of the social structure and the identities of social actors. Racism is a total social phenomenon that manifests itself in ideologies, feelings and social practices of domination. In addition, racism is not a deviation of modernity. Racism is a constitutive part of the processes of capitalist modernization. Although xenophobia existed prior to the creation of the world capitalist market, the first racist theological debates.’Over time the theological arguments were losing strength. With illuminism reason became the only source to explain social and natural phenomena. Natural sciences were used to define different races in biological and genetic terms. After Nazism the scientific concepts of race lost strength and validity. It was concluded that there are no causal relationships between physical or genetic characteristics and cultural characteristics. At present, cultural arguments are increasingly used. In the words of Etienne Balibar, a:

‘Racism without races … A racism whose dominant issue is not biological inheritance, but the irreducibility of cultural differences.’

In this case, culture can function as a nature, especially as a way to enclose individuals and groups in a genealogy, a determination of immutable and intangible origin. In the words of Paul Gilroy, culture is conceived under absolute ethnic lines, not as something intrinsically fluid, changing, unstable and dynamic;as a fixed property of social groups instead of a relational field in which social and historical relations are lived and lived. When culture is put in touch with the race it is transformed into a pseudobiological property of communal life. Therefore, racism is a protein phenomenon that has many manifestations, not only between societies, but also within them. There is no general racism and therefore a general theory of racial relations cannot be developed. Analysis about racisms are always specific to historical situation and particular societies.

Therefore, we can conclude by saying that in Ecuador since the time of the colony a class power has been implemented, which has led to discrimination against the "conquered", that is, the indigenous people. Those who have had and continue to have power, in addition to subjugating the weakest, have created racial discrimination towards the same subjugates who in this case are the indigenous people. From the hand of subjugation power is the attempt to implement a national identity, an identity that takes a wrong path in Ecuador, where white, that is, that person of good physical appearance and light skin color is the individual who personifies theIdentity of the Ecuadorian people, nothing further from reality. This oppressive power and that erroneous identity are the chain that led to the ideology of racism that have suffered and continue to suffer indigenous people in the country, an ideology that today not only promote whites, but also the mestizos, Afro -Ecuadorians andMontubios, against the natives, and not only against the natives but also among themselves.