Racial innocence, p.1
Racial Innocence, page 1
This book is dedicated to the late Miriam Esther Jiménez Román, the bold leader of Afro-Latin@ Studies. I have tried my best to remember all that she taught me and model her fearlessness in addressing how “some “Browns’ are browner than other Browns, that some Blacks are also Latinos, and that many Latinos are victims of racial—as well as cultural—discrimination” (“Real Unity for AfroLatinos,” AfroLatin@Forum.org).
And to James Quentin Walker, for everything always.
CONTENTS
ONE What Is Latino Anti-Blackness?
TWO “No juegues con niños de color extraño”: Playing and Learning in “White” Latino Spaces
THREE Working in the USA
FOUR “Oye Negro, You Can’t Live Here”: Latino Landlords in Action
FIVE Physical Violence: The Criminal Justice System’s “Brown” versus Black Dynamic
SIX Latinos and the Future of Racial Equality in the United States
EPILOGUE On Being an Afro-Latina Interrogating Latino Anti-Blackness
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS LATINO ANTI-BLACKNESS?
Even before I understood the word “nigger,”
I heard “negro” in Spanish.
—JOSÉ LUIS VILSON, Afro-Latino educator1
Wherever the Negro goes, he remains a Negro.
—FRANTZ FANON2
Latinos can be racist. Some may be startled to hear this. After all, our national conversations about racism appear oblivious to this fact, and some civil rights leaders are also seemingly reticent to “air the dirty laundry” of the bias that exists within communities of color, lest it distract from the “real racism” of White supremacy. However, all the while Afro-Latinos and African Americans suffer from discrimination at the hands of Latinos who claim that their racially mixed cultures immunize them from being racist. I call this the “Latino racial innocence” cloak that veils Latino complicity in US racism. In turn, public ignorance about Latino anti-Blackness undermines the ability to fully address the interwoven complexities of US racism in developing public policies and enforcing antidiscrimination law. Judges, in addition to the rest of society, need to learn that Latinos can be prejudiced toward both Afro-Latinos and African Americans.
The pervasiveness of anti-Black violence, still so pronounced decades after the achievements of the civil rights movement, cannot be readily understood nor addressed with the traditional sole focus on White non-Hispanic (non-Latino White) actors. According to the US Census Bureau, non-Hispanic Whites are declining in number. The 2020 census reported the first decline in the White non-Hispanic population since the introduction of the national survey; White non-Hispanics now represent 57.8 percent of the population, down 8.6 percent from the 2010 census.3 Moreover, White non-Hispanics are predicted to decline to 15 percent by 2060.4
The continued vibrancy of White supremacist attitudes thus cannot be explained exclusively by the perspectives of the declining number of White non-Hispanics. The ongoing upkeep and silent acceptance of anti-Blackness implicates many other racial and ethnic groups in the United States as well as across the globe.5
Exploring Latino complicity in anti-Blackness is particularly helpful. As a multihued ethnic group, Latinos are often viewed as free of racism or, at the very least, free of its most exclusionary forms. Examining how anti-Blackness still does manage to manifest itself among the racially mixed rainbow of Latinos (who currently comprise 18.7 percent of the population and are predicted to increase to 28 percent by 2060), is thereby a powerful illustration of how people of color can fortify racism.6
All the same, when I tell people that part of my research is on the topic of anti-Blackness in Latino communities (and explain “Yes, that is a thing”), light-skinned and fair-skinned Latinos often react by telling me that most Latinos and African Americans get along and frequently live in neighboring areas or the very same buildings. In other words, they’re conveying that they do not believe anti-Blackness is a real issue in Latino communities like it is in White non-Hispanic communities.
While it would certainly be ideal if Latinos were all truly color-blind and incapable of committing racist acts, as an Afro-Latina myself I do not have the luxury of indulging in the fantasy of a Latino racial mixture utopia. As I share in the epilogue, the visibility of my family’s Black ancestry means I literally have “skin in the game” of accurately assessing the operation of racism in its many forms. Consequently, this book excavates the voices of Afro-Latinos and African Americans who have actually experienced Latino anti-Black bias, in an effort to help disrupt the public ignorance and Latino disinclination to grapple with Latino anti-Blackness. The need for such an intervention is usefully demonstrated by a consideration of the Latino adoration of Afro-Cuban Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz.
When Celia Cruz died on July 16, 2003, her wake in Miami attracted at least one hundred thousand fans. Later, when her body was brought to New York City, thousands waited to see her body, exceeding the crowds that honored Judy Garland and Ed Sullivan at the very same funeral home. Anyone viewing the news footage of all the racially diverse Latinos expressing their love for Celia would find it difficult to envision any of those mourners as also harboring anti-Black bias.7 Indeed, the Latino mourners themselves would be quick to denounce such an accusation. And yet, absolute love for the art that Black individuals create can coexist with the hierarchical impulse to generally denigrate Blacks as intellectually inferior and socially dangerous.8 This dualism is readily apparent in the profound US worship of African American pop star Beyoncé, simultaneous with the pervasive killing of unarmed African Americans presumed inherently dangerous.
However, anti-Black racism that arises outside the unfortunately familiar US frame of White non-Hispanic versus African American bias can be mystifying for many people. This is in part because US Blackness is primarily conceived of as embodied solely by English-speaking African Americans. In turn, anti-Blackness is popularly understood as a uniquely US phenomenon affecting those English-speaking African Americans (with occasional recognition of the racialized struggles of Africans and others in the African diaspora).9 This skewed vision is only compounded by how Latino communities themselves marginalize or entirely erase the existence of Afro-Latinos.
Notably, the seminal volume “The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States” highlights this marginalization in its opening definition:
Afro-Latin@? What’s an Afro-Latin@? Who is an Afro-Latin@? The term befuddles us because we are accustomed to thinking of “Afro” and “Latin@” as distinct from each other and mutually exclusive: one is either Black or Latin@.
The short answer is that Afro-Latin@s belong to both groups. They are people of African descent in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and by extension those of African descent in the United States whose origins are in Latin America and the Caribbean.10
So to be clear, Afro-Latinos are simultaneously ethnically Latino and racially Black.11 In daily life few people are preoccupied with how and when ethnic identity differs from racial identity. Indeed, there are those who view the concepts as the same, or at least are cognizant of how much they can overlap as social constructs. Some researchers even prefer the hyphenated term “ethno-racial” to refer to the overlap.12 But for Afro-Latinos living at the intersection of Blackness and Latinidad (a vision of a panethnic Latino community), the two terms usefully highlight important differences. As Afro-Peruvian writer Kayla Popuchet Quesada, notes, “All Latinos are nationally oppressed, but not all Latinos are racially or ethnically oppressed.”13
Generally speaking, ethnicity refers to how individuals are associated with a social group based upon cultural markers like language, religion, customs, traditions, food, geographic origin, and so on, and not primarily their physical appearance.14 Within an ethnic group, physical appearance can vary widely. Accordingly, when this book refers to “Latinos” without a racial qualifier such as White or Afro, it is a reference to the general ethnic group of Latinos.
Race is more directly rooted to imposed social hierarchy based upon physical differences or presumed physical differences from ancestral lineage.15 Skin color is only one of the physical markers like facial features, hair texture, body shape all enveloped in a matrix of demeaning stereotypes. Unlike ethnicity, race is always about creating and maintaining a caste system.16 The default presumptions we make about physical features automatically revealing inherent truths about a person have a pecking order.17 That ranking is socially understood as a racial order. The racial social meanings are so deeply entrenched that even individuals without the physical markers are exposed to derogatory stereotypes when their ancestral connections are revealed.
While racial group members in particular geographic spaces can, over time, come to identify themselves as culturally different, racial groups, unlike ethnic groups, have no single culture. Thus, for example, the Black culture of US African Americans is not the same in the South as in the North, and is also distinct from that of Afro-Colombians, Afro-French, Afro-Koreans, and so on. But across all those distinct cultural spaces, racialized physical markers create common experiences of social marginalization.
Racial Blackness and the term “Blacks” in this book thus includes not only African Americans but Afro-Latinos as well. Afro-Latino poets, novelists, and memoirists have long depicted this duality. Their numbers include but are not limited to writers like Elizabe
Yet our national conversations about racism appear oblivious to this fact apart from a few notable exceptions.19 This disregard is a problem. The lack of public awareness cannot be justified with the presumption that the plight of Afro-Latinos simply duplicates caste system problems among other groups (such as color hierarchies among Indo-Americans or African Americans and the interethnic tensions between Serbians and Croatians, Tutsi and Hutu, or Irish Americans and Italian Americans at the turn of the nineteenth century). An important distinction is that Latino anti-Blackness is not publicly acknowledged as a problem like other caste systems, and when instances of Latino anti-Blackness are called out, they are deemed inconsequential.
Nevertheless, the societal befuddlement about who Afro-Latinos are does not change the fact that Latino life circumstances are influenced not only by the social meaning of being of Hispanic ethnic origin but also by physical markers of Blackness in skin color, facial features, and hair texture.20 Visible facial connections to Africa racialize a Latino as also Black. Indeed, the constrained socioeconomic status of Afro-Latinos in the United States is more akin to that of African Americans than to other Latinos or White Americans. Latinos who also identify themselves as racially Black often have lower incomes, higher unemployment rates, higher rates of poverty, less education, and fewer opportunities and are more likely to reside in segregated neighborhoods than those who identify themselves as White Latinos or “other.”21 In addition, Afro-Latinos report greater racial harassment from law enforcement and involvement with the criminal justice system.22
Just the same, publicly identifying as Black is immaterial to how African ancestry adversely affects a Latino’s socioeconomic status and psychological health.23 (The Latino cultural pressure to reject Black racial identities will be addressed in chapter 6 in the discussion of census racial-category politics.) Those who appear to others as Afro-Latino, have meager access to health insurance and health services in ways that parallel the disparate health outcomes of African Americans.24 These racially distinctive health-related outcomes exist among Latinos even as they share common foods and other cultural commonalities. For instance, in Puerto Rico, high blood pressure rates vary based on skin color. Those perceived as Afro–Puerto Rican have higher blood pressure levels and rates of hypertension than Puerto Ricans socially perceived as more European descended.25 Furthermore, socially perceived Blackness is more predictive of Latino mental health status than Latino racial self-identification.26 Given the significance of how much African phenotype, hair and skin shade, influence the socioeconomic status of Latinos, some researchers suggest that interviewer observations of racial appearance provide the most accurate tool for monitoring discrimination among Latinos of varying shades.27 Despite mounting evidence that there are distinct social outcomes based on intermarriage, housing segregation, educational attainment, prison sentencing, and labor market access that vary for Latinos according to externally perceived racial status, the unequal treatment of Afro-Latinos is invisible in our public discourse with its reference to all Latinos regardless of appearance as “brown.”28
Hidden from view is the way Latino disregard for Blackness plays a role in the subordinated status of Afro-Latinos and in turn the exclusion of African Americans. Latino workplace supervisors deny both groups of Blacks access to promotions and wage increases. Latino homeowners turn away Black prospective tenants and home purchasers. Latino restaurant workers block Black customers from entry and refuse to serve them. Latino students bully and harass Black students. Latino educators belittle Black students. Latino police officers assault and kill Blacks. Most heinous are the Latinos who join violent White power organizations and harm Blacks. However, even when Latinos do not racially identify as White, like a White Supremacist, their identities as solely Latino do not mitigate the aforementioned instances of anti-Blackness.
Yet, many Latinos deny the existence of prejudice against Afro-Latinos and any “true” Latino racism against African Americans. This denial is rooted in the Latino mestizaje (racial mixture discourse) cultural notion that as a uniquely racially mixed people Latinos are incapable of racist attitudes. In turn, Latino mestizaje situates anti-Blackness as a culturally foreign North American construct learned only once in the United States when “racially innocent” Latinos encounter racist thinking for the first time.29
Latino racial innocence thus characterizes negative interactions with African Americans as either strictly moments of cultural misunderstanding, disputes over scarce resources, or generic interestgroup political skirmishes. This stance of denial about Latino anti-Black racism is frequently accompanied with a reference to anecdotal descriptions of the many times Latinos and African Americans get along, collaborate, and live in neighboring areas. At the same time, Latinos dismiss the reported instances of discrimination against African Americans by Latinos as inconsequential as compared to the enormity of White non-Hispanic racism. In California, even the murder of African Americans with no gang involvement for the explicitly stated purpose of keeping Latinos segregated from Blacks has been characterized by Latino commentators as unrelated to histories of Latino anti-Blackness. In fact, there was a virulent Latino reaction when in a Los Angeles Times op-ed I dared to characterize the California murders as “Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”30 For example, one reader, Mario Ashla, wrote in to say:
I take exception to [the writer’s] conclusion that Latino-Black tensions are mainly rooted in Latino prejudice. A major flaw in [the writer’s] thinking is equating Latino “racism” to the historical racism of the United States. Moreover, the majority of Latinos in the U.S. are racially mixed.31
Reader Adriana E. Padilla agreed and accused the op-ed writer (me) as being “way off” because “her historical analysis is irrelevant” to the context.32 The hate mail I received was similarly imbued with outrage by my assertion that Latino anti-Black bias exists. Closer examinations of the violence suggest a more complex racial reality influenced by many factors and varying by context.33
Nonetheless, anti-Blackness persists as a relevant factor. For instance, when Latino-immigrant racial attitudes are compared to those of non-migrant Latinos still residing in the Dominican Republic, there is little difference in the degree and nature of anti-Black racial attitudes.34 Thus, negative attitudes toward Blackness in general and Black Americans in particular develop long before immigrants land in the United States.
Strikingly, the negative racial stereotypes that Latino immigrants harbor can exceed those of US native-born Whites. Dominican immigrants in Boston and New York are significantly more likely to view Blacks as preferring to live off welfare.35 Even younger generations with US bicultural frameworks have negative racial views shaped by their older relatives.
Yet, when any public or scholarly attention is focused on the subject of Latino–African American race relations, the predominant interest is in exploring the presumption that African Americans harbor resentment and bias against Latinos for “leapfrogging” over them in a competition for jobs and resources.36 In fact, the disproportionate focus on African Americans as the cause of any perceived hostilities between Latinos and African Americans can itself be understood as part of the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness that quickly attributes the cause of bad attitudes as emanating from African Americans.37 For this reason, I seek to balance the picture by exposing the role of Latino agency in manifestations of anti-Blackness.
I intentionally bring together the Latino discrimination against Afro-Latinos and African Americans for the purpose of disrupting the narratives that dismiss the significance of the bias each group experiences. First, the Latino bias against Afro-Latinos is dismissed as merely a part of the hierarchies internal to Latino communities that is not like the “real racism” that White non-Hispanics commit against African Americans. Second, the Latino bias against African Americans is dismissed as simply in-group favoritism or common interethnic group competition that is also distinct from the “real racism,” that White non-Hispanics commit against African Americans. Unifying the analysis of Latino discrimination against both Afro-Latinos and African Americans helps illuminate the significance of Latino anti-Blackness as a contributing factor to the exclusionary actions Latinos take against all groups of Afro-descendants.
