On a sweltering afternoon in Santo Domingo, a Dominican court last month ordered the deportation of 1,300 Haitian migrants, including children, under a 2013 constitutional amendment that denies citizenship to anyone unable to prove their parents were born in the country. The ruling, upheld despite international condemnation, exposed the brutal intersection of migration policy and systemic racism—a phenomenon Amnesty International’s Cindy Hawkins Rada has spent years dissecting as part of her function on racial justice. “This is not an isolated incident,” she says. “It’s a direct consequence of policies rooted in colonial legacies, where racial discrimination is baked into the very architecture of the state.”
Hawkins Rada, a Raizal woman and Afro-descendant researcher from Colombia, leads Amnesty International’s efforts to document how systemic racism operates through laws, institutions, and daily practices. Her latest project—a new online course on racial justice and human rights—aims to demystify how deep-seated inequalities persist, even in democracies that claim to uphold equality. The course, developed with civil society experts from the Americas, Pacific, South Asia, and North Africa, is the first of its kind to move beyond Western frameworks, offering a global lens on racism’s structural mechanisms.
Systemic racism, as Hawkins Rada defines it, is not the product of individual prejudice but of institutions that normalize racial hierarchies. Take the Dominican Republic’s migration policies: a 2013 law stripped citizenship from tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent, many of whom had lived in the country for generations. The policy, she argues, is a direct descendant of colonial-era practices that treated Haitians as second-class subjects. “It’s not about intent,” she says. “It’s about the cumulative effect of laws, policing, and economic exclusion that ensure certain groups are always on the margins.”
Her work has taken her to the frontlines of racial justice struggles worldwide. In the U.S., she has analyzed how redlining and mass incarceration disproportionately target Black communities. In Europe, she has examined how asylum systems treat racialized minorities with systemic skepticism. But her focus has sharpened on Latin America, where colonial borders and racial caste systems persist in modern governance. “The myth of a post-racial society is dangerous,” she warns. “Racism adapts. It doesn’t disappear when it’s no longer overt.”
The new Amnesty course, available in English, Spanish, and French, is divided into three modules. The first dissects systemic racism, using case studies from the Dominican Republic, Australia’s treatment of Indigenous populations, and India’s caste-based discrimination. The second explores racial discrimination in migration laws, policing, and healthcare, whereas the third provides actionable strategies for activists. Unlike many existing courses, it centers voices from the Global South, where anti-racist movements have often been sidelined in global human rights discourse.
Hawkins Rada’s personal history fuels her urgency. As a Raizal woman—a community descended from enslaved Africans in the San Andrés archipelago—she has experienced firsthand how racial hierarchies shape opportunity. “When you grow up understanding that your skin color determines where you can live, what jobs you can get, or even whether you’re seen as human, you don’t just study racism—you live its consequences,” she says. Her research on the Dominican Republic, for example, revealed that Haitian migrants face routine police harassment, denial of medical care, and exclusion from formal employment, despite contributing billions to the local economy.
The course’s development was not without challenges. Early drafts relied heavily on U.S. And European frameworks, which often framed racism as an exception rather than a systemic force. “We had to unlearn a lot,” Hawkins Rada admits. “Racism in the Dominican Republic looks different than in the U.S., but both are rooted in the same logic: the dehumanization of certain groups to justify their exclusion.” The final product incorporates insights from activists in Haiti, where protests against racial discrimination have been met with state violence, and from Indigenous leaders in the Pacific, who fight for land rights in courts that historically ignored their claims.
Critics argue that racial justice education is unnecessary in an era where diversity initiatives are already widespread. But Hawkins Rada counters that most anti-racism training focuses on individual bias, ignoring how power structures perpetuate inequality. “You can’t fix systemic racism by asking people to be less prejudiced,” she says. “You have to dismantle the systems that reward prejudice.” The course, she hopes, will equip activists with the tools to challenge policies like the Dominican Republic’s citizenship law—not just through protests, but through legal and institutional reform.
One of the most striking takeaways from the course’s development was the realization that racial justice movements are often siloed. “An activist in South Africa fighting apartheid might not realize how similar their struggle is to someone in Colombia resisting racial profiling by police,” Hawkins Rada notes. The course bridges these gaps by highlighting shared tactics, from legal challenges to community organizing. It also addresses the emotional toll of anti-racist work, a topic rarely discussed in mainstream human rights education.
As the course launches, Hawkins Rada remains focused on its immediate impact. “We’re not just teaching theory,” she says. “We’re giving people the language to demand change in their own communities.” The Dominican Republic’s deportation rulings, she adds, prove that the fight for racial justice is far from over. “The question is no longer whether racism exists,” she says. “It’s whether we have the courage to dismantle it.”
The course is available at amnesty.org/racial-justice-course, with additional resources for activists and policymakers.
