Born Unequal: The Silent Power of Descent in Shaping Our Lives

Imagine being told, without words, that your future was decided before you were born. No matter how hard you study, how much you dream, or how many borders you cross, society has already decided a place for you, and it’s somewhere below them. 

This is the lived reality for millions across the world who are discriminated on the basis of work and descent (CDWD). It’s a kind of injustice so deeply-rooted that it becomes invisible, normalized, and at some point even justified by culture, religion, or silence.

The Hierarchies We Don’t Talk About

In villages, cities, and even digital spaces, descent decides opportunity. From Dalit sanitation workers in India to Roma street vendors in Europe, from Haratine labourers in Mauritania and Burakumin in Japan to Quilombola farmers in Brazil – the same pattern repeats:

“Those at the bottom of inherited hierarchies do the hardest work and are excluded from the rewards of progress.”

This is not “inequality.” It’s structural exclusion, reproduced through stigma and it is institutionalised. This is the reason why descent-based discrimination must be recognized not as a local issue but as a global human rights crisis.

Change begins when people reclaim their right to define themselves. Movements led by communities discriminated on work and descent – like those connected through GFoD – are rewriting the narrative: from victimhood to visibility, from exclusion to leadership.

The Inclusivity Project (TIP) echoes this call by working across identities to ensure that the language of inclusion goes beyond policy and reaches daily life – who gets hired, who is heard, and who is humanized.

Inclusion doesn’t mean being invited into someone else’s system. It means rebuilding systems that never saw you as equal in the first place. It means representation, data, and decision-making that reflect the people most affected by injustice.

Equality without recognition is a façade. Recognition without power is a performance and power without inclusion is oppression reborn. The world cannot claim progress while descent still decides destiny. Let’s build a world where the only thing inherited is dignity.