Inequality in Brazil - Essay Example

The country has a very diverse social setting with the population consisting of white people who arrived during the era of migration and discovery, black people who arrived during the slavery period and various diverse indigenous communities. The black population has been the one mainly discriminated by the white dominating population. The country has the second most populous black population in the world after Nigeria. The inequality in the country date back to the slave period of which the country had been under Portuguese colonization for hundred of years making the injustices deep rooted and to be accepted as a norm.

Unlike in the US or South Africa where inequalities had legal backing, inequality in Brazil takes a cultural twist with the white people exercising cultural domination. Black population together with other non-white indigenous population have come to accept some of the practices regarded as social injustices, as a norm and civilized way of behavior (Smith 76). The non-white population has been discriminated in almost all sectors, especially in socio-economic and political spheres. With discrimination in education, all other areas are affected.

Afro-Brazilians have been greatly sidelined in education system making the acquisition of jobs very hard. Public schools do not have the capacity of providing quality education with the well-established and advanced white schools only affordable by the white elites. Since these Afro-Brazilians cannot secure good schools, they are deprived off the chance of obtaining objective knowledge, many abandoning schooling altogether. The lack of schooling at young age dashes the hopes of ever acquiring higher education in colleges and universities.

This institutionalized form of discrimination affects all other areas of the Afro- Brazilians, leading to poor living conditions. The system of education has thus become an institution structured and systematically regulated to make sure the Afro- Brazilians do not gain enough knowledge to enable them to earn decent wages. With no sustainable wages, the black population has very limited economic influence, the majority barely making the stipulated quarter of the minimum wages. In turn, the Afro-Brazilians are artificially put at a disadvantage and cannot escape absolute poverty no matter what they do.

This economic subjugation leaves the Afro- Brazilians with no other option rather than to take up the roles domestic laborers as an occupation. Many have become homemakers and lowly servants of the elite oppressive society. This has been argued as total humiliation; as they are forced to work in the homes of their oppressors where they continue to be deprived further (Salardi 3). Brazil is among the countries of the world that inequality has continued to thrive unchecked. The majority of black women have no formal employment with about eighty percent working in the manual sector, which is very challenging to these women forcing them to sometimes neglecting their homes.

They are specifically employed as domestic servants or domestic task and are among the lowest paid workers in the country and in the developing emerging economies of the world. With such low unreliable income, poverty becomes inherent, passed from one generation to the other, in the Afro- Brazilia