Race still matters in Latin American countries

Race still matters in Latin American countries. What I found ridiculous was that Latin American Politicians held up mixed-race citizens as a national ideal. These leaders were promoting racial mixing as a means to “whiten” the population. I believe that this is the worst possible thing to promote. These politicians were basically telling Africans and other brown indigenous groups to throw away their nationality and color so they can focus on being whiter and that being whiter will help you go further in our system. How could this be considered anything along the lines of democratic? The problem was no one taught these Africans and indigenous groups how to fight for their freedoms and demand the change they wanted to see. America still had codified racial inequality in its constitutions but some African Americans were still able to figure out how to fight against slavery and work toward abolishing it. Latin America may have abolished slavery way earlier than the United States but I believe the fact that Latin American leaders considered people of mixed race a sign of progress toward greater “whiteness” in society was just as bad. It was if these Latin American countries were trying to wash away color in their countries and it still seems that way today. Indigenous populations and Latin America’s blacks are still systematically disadvantaged to this day. According to the Development Program’s of 2014 Human Development Report, “Latin American indigenous workers make half as much, on average, as their nonindigenous counterparts.” They found that the proportion of black and indigenous groups “living on less than $1 a day at the turn of this century had reached as high as 61 percent in Ecuador, 41 in Mexico, and 37 percent in Bolivia.” It is 2016 and Latin America still has yet to do much for the citizens of indigenous and African descent but these two groups have become more politically active each year. Although there hasn’t been any riots or ethnic civil wars I believe the voices of Africans and indigenous peoples will be heard because the government won’t want any problems.