IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 79

I

want to tell you that we are victims
of and also participants in our own
problems. Only through the
knowledge of facts, education, and unity
will we manage to break each barrier
that blocks egalitarian development, and
have the Constitution support that. Racism and racial and gender discrimination
are commonplace; they are practiced
unscrupulously and for only one reason.
What is sad, absurd, and harmful is that
it is practiced against certain groups, like
Afro-descendants or the LGBTQ community, who are up being the most
scarred by it. Historical reality does not
allow itself to be nuanced or camouflaged; neither is it easy to fight prejudice from within prejudice. Getting beyond the ghetto with a ghetto mentality
will not take us much farther than nonsense. Let us review this proposal by
Professor Lebret: “The greatest evil in
the word is not the dispossessed, but
rather the innocence of the assured.”
This has a great deal to do with the subject because recent studies in Cuba and

other countries should that 82% of the
white or Caucasian population has good
resources and an excellent quality of life,
while 95% of the Afro-descendant population lives in terrible conditions and are
subjected to inhuman treatment. It would
do us well to review Martin Luther King,
Jr. and his claim “we are not satisfied
and will never be satisfied till justice
flows like water and righteousness like a
powerful current.” Homophobia is another form of discrimination that requires not only a call to governments,
but also to the general population. In
many countries, homosexuality is punished legally, with imprisonment; in others, by death, and that’s not counting the
many killings on account of homophobia. Last year, there were 122 in Brazil,
35 in Mexico, and 25 in the United
States, for example, and the problem is
that they are increasing in number. Is it
comprehensible that an everyday human
being be discriminated to this degree just
because he or she has a sexual preference some consider different?

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