Racial Discrimination Sparks Revolutions

This unit has been about revolutions all around the world during the 1800s.  For this lesson, we learned about Latin America Revolutions in Mexico, Brazil, and Gran Columbia.  The essential question for this lesson is, “Why is it essential to acknowledge human value regardless of race?  How are the events in the Latin America Revolutions evidence of this social imperative?”  This essential question is particularly important to talk about because race was an important factor in how our world made decisions over the past hundreds of years.  We should consider this question and strive to answer it because someone’s race effects all of what happens in their life, and if race can effect a revolution, then it needs to be discussed on a higher level.  People should be valued equally no matter what their race.  We studied the impact of race on the Latin American revolutions for independence in class by first learning about the different races that made up the population in Latin America.  We read a document discussing the percentages of different races in Latin America.  We found that less than 1% was made up of Peninsulares, or people born Europe, who were the wealthiest and attained the highest ranking jobs, while more than half of the population was made up Indian people.  People living in Latin America during this time were very concerned about their race and status.  In fact they were so obsessed that they made a Casta, which described almost every combination of races and what their offspring would be labeled as.  The overall social ladder in Latin America was, in the following order, the Peninsulares, Creoles, Mestizos, Mulattoes, Indians, and African Slaves.  After understanding how much race intertwined with the Latin American culture, we then split into groups and were each assigned a different Latin American revolution.  My group was assigned the revolution in Mexico.  In our groups we created a timeline of events.  When our timelines were complete we were then mixed into new groups that contained students from other groups so we could help teach each other about each other’s revolution.  Thoroughly discussing these revolutions in groups made us see how race was involved in each revolution. 

This is a diagram showing how much of each race made up the population in Latin America.

This is a picture of the Casta System showing several names of offspring when two types of races have children.

This is a picture of my group’s timeline of the Mexican Revolution.

My group selected the Mexican Revolution for independence to study.  The picture below is the timeline that we created.  After we shared our revolutions in our second groups, we then discussed commonalities and differences that we observed among the revolutions.  Some commonalities that we determined were, all of the revolutions were revolts against European countries, all became independent and split ties with Europe, the first rulers to take office after each country was declared independent did not stay in power for too long, and all of the revolutions took pace in the early 1800s.  We were only able to come up with two differences which were, the Brazilian revolution was the least violent, while the other two were very brutal and the revolution in Gran Columbia resulted in several new, separate countries.  However, later on there were smaller countries that branched off from Mexico, like Panama.  Each revolution took different routes to gaining their independence, but race was an issue in all three.  The Mexican revolution was launched by a priest, Miguel Hidalgo, who stated in the “Cry of Delores” that one of the goals of the revolution was racial equality in Mexico.  The revolution in Gran Columbia was started by Simon Bolivar, who was unhappy with discrimination in the country.  He, a crealoes was able to get a wide variety of different racial groups (Indians, Mestizos, and Mulattoes) to unite and fight against the Spanish together.  Unlike the Mexican and Gran Columbian revolutions, race came into in the Brazilian revolution after it had ended.  This was because Padro did not include enough rights in the Constitution, he only allowed Peninsulares to become members in his cabinet.  Because of this, there were rumors of another revolution for racial equality, and Padro flees.  The goals for each revolution were equally about gaining freedom from Europe and about freedom from racial discrimination.

                Today, racial discrimination has lessened, but it is still quite prevalent in society.   People still make judgments based on race in society today.   If someone is dark skinned, people sometimes judge them too quickly and assume they come from a poor background.  In an article about Ruby Bridges, who went to an all-white school back in the 1960s, it is stated that racial discrimination is still around today.  Ruby says, “You almost feel like you’re back in the ‘60s” because schools are segregated again.  Racial discrimination is still found in schools today which means that a person’s, even a child’s, race determines so much about them and their social status, when really it should only be a person’s character that should define them.  I think that is still extremely important to consider the issue of race in our lives today.  Race consumes too many people’s minds and creates a predetermined perspective that blocks them from seeing who someone is beyond their race.  If schools, a place where young students are supposed to learn academics, as well as, ethics, are truly starting to segregate again, then our society needs to seriously reengage our focus on the issue of race once again to stop this from happening.