Protests during the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, from 31 August to 7 September 2001. Credit: NCDHR

By Paul Divakar Namala
LONDON, Sep 8 2026 (IPS)

My name is Paul Divakar Namala. I am the Executive Director of The Inclusivity Project and Convenor of the Global Forum of Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent. My work focuses on communities whose social status, occupations and exclusion are inherited across generations through caste, analogous hierarchies and systems rooted in traditional slavery.

Durban also taught us that affected communities must speak for themselves. They must not be treated merely as victims or sources of testimony, but as human rights defenders and leaders who define the problem and shape the solution

I am a Dalit. Dalits were historically treated as “untouchable” and placed at the bottom of, or outside, the caste hierarchy. This can shape every part of life: access to a common water source, where a child sits at school, where a family may live, what work a person is expected to perform and whether others will eat with or even be seen with them.

Poverty is widespread in South Asia, but its burden falls disproportionately on Dalits because caste restricts access to land, education, dignified employment, public services and political power.

Inherited hierarchies remain deeply entrenched

Across South Asia, constitutional guarantees and democratic institutions coexist with caste discrimination and practices of untouchability.

These persist in villages and cities, and in public institutions, private workplaces and corporations. Dalits may face threats or violence for asserting land rights, entering places of worship, marrying across caste, accessing common resources, seeking education or standing for elected office.

Dalits in South Asia are not alone. Roma communities in Europe and beyond, Burakumin in Japan, Haratine and other communities affected by traditional slavery in the Sahel, Osu communities in Nigeria, Quilombola communities in Brazil and other communities in Latin America experience distinct histories and realities.

They should not be collapsed into a single category. Yet many face structurally connected patterns: inherited stigma and social status, endogamy, segregation in housing and education, exclusion from land and decent work, confinement to dangerous or degrading occupations, trafficking and forced labour, and backlash violence when they resist. We describe these peoples, in all their diversity, as Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent, or CDWD.

Reconnecting with my identity

Where I grew up in India, my family faced repeated attacks as we asserted our rights, including rights over public land. When I was 21, a petrol-bomb attack took the life of my mother.

Only as I grew older did I understand how much of what happened to my family was connected to caste. My father taught me that our purpose should not be limited to seeking justice for ourselves; we had to dismantle the structures that allow such abuses to continue. That teaching guided me away from vengeance and towards challenging the social norms and caste structures that treat some human beings as inferior, exploit their vulnerability and assign them a life of servitude.

Together with my spouse, who came from a different caste, I helped build a community of human rights defenders. For too long, Dalits were portrayed only as victims or survivors. We are also organisers, advocates and defenders of human rights. This work began more than four decades ago, when I was in my twenties.

In 1998, together with leaders from across India, we formed the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights. We wanted caste-based discrimination and violence to be documented and discussed nationally and internationally. Looking back, I realise how groundbreaking that effort was, especially with so few resources.

Bringing caste to Durban

When we learned that the United Nations was organising a World Conference Against Racism, our immediate response was: “We have to be there.” We were new to these international processes. We contacted people working on caste discrimination and were invited to a preparatory meeting in Bellagio that helped shape the agenda for Durban.

At Bellagio, many participants supported putting caste on the agenda, including Pierre Sané, then Secretary General of Amnesty International. Civil society succeeded in making caste a major issue in the Durban process, but several Asian governments resisted its explicit inclusion in the final Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, arguing that it would target their countries or interfere in internal matters.

Although the final Declaration did not contain the explicit recognition we sought, what the movement achieved was extraordinary. Durban gave unprecedented international visibility to caste discrimination and helped move Dalit rights from the margins towards the centre of international human rights debate.

Dalit activists were present in large numbers, carrying documentation, testimonies, drums and protest across the conference grounds. People approached us and said, sometimes awkwardly but with genuine solidarity, “You are untouchable? Let me hug you.” Those encounters showed both how unfamiliar the issue was internationally and how quickly human connection could challenge the stigma imposed upon us.

Activists protest caste and descent-based discrimination during the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, held from 31 August to 7 September 2001. Placards call attention to caste, racism and the struggle for Dalit rights. Credit: NCDHR

Solidarity, resistance and the unfinished agenda

Over the years, we have connected with communities and advocates in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger, Mauritania and Nigeria, with Roma movements across Europe and beyond, and with Quilombola and other communities in Latin America.

Their histories are different, but their struggles reveal how inherited status, stigmatised work and exclusion can reinforce one another across generations. Working together makes these structures visible and prevents governments and institutions from excusing them in the name of culture or tradition.

Durban also taught us that affected communities must speak for themselves. They must not be treated merely as victims or sources of testimony, but as human rights defenders and leaders who define the problem and shape the solution. Solidarity does not require us to claim that every oppression is identical. It requires us to respect distinct histories while recognising common structures of dehumanisation and standing together against them.

The fight is far from over. We are working for stronger international recognition, including comprehensive CERD guidance and, ultimately, a Declaration on the Rights of Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent.

Yet the real test is always on the ground. International declarations have meaning only when they change the life of a woman confronting untouchability, a sanitation worker demanding safe and dignified work, a Roma child resisting school segregation, or a Haratine family seeking freedom, land and equality.

Learn more about racial justice with Amnesty International’s online course.

Excerpt:

Members of La Muñeca Negra, a group that makes papier-mâché figures inspired by Afro-Cuban deities. Credit: Ernesto Pérez Zambrano/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Nov 25 2013 (IPS)

From a very young age, Irma Castañeda has braided her curly hair and cared for it with natural recipes inherited from her mother, ignoring the widespread conception that black women’s hair is “ugly” or “bad”.

Gently, with skilful hands, she aims to chip away at something much more complex: the silence surrounding the issue of race, a subject that was taboo for decades in official rhetoric, according to which racism was eradicated by the Cuban revolution in 1959.

In the Balcón Arimao barrio in the largely black municipality of La Lisa, on the west side of Havana, Castañeda and nine other women have launched an effort to improve self-esteem, teaching hairdressing techniques and traditional cosmetics recipes for black skin, because they are not available in stores.

“Whether it is straightened or worn in an Afro or dreadlocks, hair can look beautiful on a black woman, who has the right to have resources for taking care of her image,” Castañeda told IPS.

“We want to break the stereotype that we black women are less beautiful, without trying to look like white models,” added Castañeda, an educator by profession and promoter of the project Rizos (Spanish for “Curls”).

For these hairdressers, facial masks and tweezers are tools for raising awareness around problems faced by people of African descent, who officially account for 36 percent of Cuba’s population of nearly 11.2 million, although researchers such as Esteban Morales estimate the non-white population at around 60 percent.

Rizos is one of a number of initiatives of the Afrodescendent Neighbourhood Network (Red Barrial Afrodescendiente, RBA), which is reviving anti-racist activism in Havana.

About a year ago, activists from various urban communities founded the RBA to take research and debate about the race question into the neighbourhoods. Every month, in a community centre in La Lisa, lectures are given to train 35 local leaders.

All of these people, who work in different jobs and have different educational levels, assume the responsibility of taking what they learn to their families, neighbourhoods, and workplaces.

Marlene Bayeux, a 63-year-old former veterinarian, says she knows what it feels like to be underestimated. “To be respected as a professional, I had to overcome a racist boss, but if I had been equipped with the arguments that I learned in the network’s workshops, I would have saved myself a lot of grief,” she told IPS.

Bayeux feels that she contributes to the cause as part of La Muñeca Negra (The Black Doll) – a group of artisans who create papier-mâché figures inspired by female Afro-Cuban deities.

Another group sews black rag dolls, but they are dressed as flight attendants, doctors, nurses, and soldiers, instead of the typical religious or slave woman rag dolls.

While small, these efforts are important because of the direction they are moving in, historian Daisy Rubiera told IPS. She is part of the Cuban chapter of the regional network of African Descendants from Latin America and the Caribbean (ARAC), created in September of last year.

Rubiera described the work being carried out by academia and intellectuals as insufficient; for years, they have been talking, carrying out research and even making money on the issue, but they have not managed to really reach the wider public, she said.

“The historic causes of racial discrimination do not appear in the official texts, so they go unnoticed by the majority,” said Rubiera, who is an advisor to the RBA.

Maritza López, who is the RBA’s coordinator and has extensive experience in social work in poor neighbourhoods, said discussions need to happen with the people most affected, who are in the streets and not in bookstores, theatres or academic seminars.

“Academic activism opened up the road, but the intellectuals need to come down to our neighbourhoods to transmit their knowledge and wisdom in terms that people can understand,” López told IPS.

In Cuba, racial discrimination is manifest above all in subtle personal, social, and cultural prejudice and attitudes. It is low-key because public displays of racism are not socially acceptable.

“Sometimes black people do not perceive that they are being discriminated against because socially, the problem is accepted as natural,” said retired high school teacher Hildelisa Leal.

Segregation and discrimination are also reflected by the fact that blacks or people of mixed-race are a majority among the poor and a minority in decision-making posts and emerging economic sectors such as tourism and self-employment, according to researcher María del Carmen Zabala.

According to her studies, less than 20 percent of Cubans who leave the country in search of a better future are non-whites. For that reason, most of the remittances sent home by immigrants – an essential source of income for much of the population – go to white families.

According to the 2002 census, while unemployment stood at 2.9 percent among whites, it rose to 6.3 percent among the black and mixed-race workforce. And with respect to higher education, 4.4 percent more whites than non-whites held a degree.

These figures have not been updated with information from the 2012 census.

President Raul Castro has referred to increasing the presence of blacks in political office.

In the legislative National Assembly elected this year, 37 percent of seats are held by non-whites.

In January 2012, the ruling Communist Party declared its intention of “confronting prejudice and discriminatory conduct based on skin colour that runs counter to the Constitution and law and hurts national unity.”

However, activists are demanding more resounding actions in this nation, which has the second-highest proportion of blacks in Latin America after Brazil.

Tato Quiñones, a leading member of the citizens’ project Cofradía de la Negritud (roughly, Brotherhood of Blackness), is proposing a specific legal structure for prosecuting acts of racial discrimination.

In an award-winning essay, researcher Zuleica Romay suggested a general law against discrimination.

Learning about the cultural and historic roots of racism has helped Damayanti Matos, a member of the RBA, feel more empowered.

“I became aware of my rights – it used to seem normal for people to address me as ‘negra’ (black woman),” she told IPS. “Now I know that behind that innocent gesture, there is a history of discrimination.”