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 Elizabeth Acevedo, Jaquira Diaz, Junot Diaz, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Marianela Medrano, Willi Perdomo, Spring Redd, Daniel Serrano, and Piri Thomas.¹⁸

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.

Given the state of denial about Latino anti-Black bias and the confusion about the existence of Afro-Latinos amid demonstrable harms to Black bodies caused by Latinos, it is crucially important to disrupt the status quo. In this book, I seek to intervene by introducing the world of law cases into the sociopolitical discussion of Latino racial attitudes. Why is that helpful?

News stories alone cannot be a corrective to ignorance about Latino anti-Blackness. Media outlets provide inconsistent coverage. And when journalists do choose to direct their attention to instances of Latino anti-Blackness, many Latinos and others dismiss the accounts as isolated incidents overblown by the press. Even firsthand accounts of Latino anti-Blackness provided in social media outlets have not fully disrupted the deficiencies of the public discourse on Latino racial attitudes. These social media sites include but are not limited to the Black Latinas Know Collective blog, the Radio Caña Negra podcast, and the Latinx Racial Equity Project training center.³⁸

Bringing in legal case stories to be considered alongside the news stories dispels the notion that Latino anti-Blackness is a made-up problem. Civil rights law is the domain in which narratives about racial discrimination are formulated and its language is effectively deployed to clarify what is racially motivated bias. The language and grammar of antidiscrimination legal cases illuminate what is often obfuscated in societal deflection from the realities of racism. The book’s cases navigate instances of individual-focused bias in addition to structural forms of discrimination, because Latino anti-Blackness is manifested in both forms.

This is not to say that law is perfect and always precise in its articulation. Nevertheless, the legal domain has the advantage of being the space in which long-standing attended focus has been dedicated to formulating devices for identifying and describing discrimination. In short, legal cases help illuminate the contours of Latino anti-Blackness because it is the public space dedicated to exposing and naming the harms of discrimination. As such, law has much to contribute to the limited number of sociopolitical discussions of Latino anti-Blackness that currently exist.

At the same time, I will also assess those instances in which judges misconstrue the manifestation and salience of Latino anti-Blackness. The jurisprudence of US antidiscrimination law has long understood Black to be solely a reference to African Americans and has viewed non-Latino Whites as the primary agents of discrimination. Within that context, Afro-Latinos asserting discrimination by other Latinos presents a conundrum that does not fit the traditional narrative of US discrimination. Afro-Latinos can thus be an enigma for the United States courts of law, just as the Latino expression of bias against African Americans can be judicially misunderstood. I aim for the book to deepen our understanding of the evolving challenges to antidiscrimination law in the face of the growing significance of Latino racial attitudes.

To be sure, educating legal actors and the greater public is not a cure-all, but it can certainly be part of the solution. Yet, assisting people in becoming literate in the existence of Latino anti-Black bias can be a tool for change only if it is accompanied by a critical engagement with how such bias adversely affects Afro-Latinos and African Americans in sustaining White supremacy. Social media campaigns to raise awareness about patterns of Latino preferences for identification with Whiteness and disinclination for Blackness, as much of the Afro-Latino consciousness-raising has done to date on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, is just the start of what is needed. In isolation, such information only serves to situate Latino anti-Blackness as a cultural prejudice detached from systems of racism. This is encapsulated by the adage that people of color can be prejudiced but they cannot be racists because they do not create or control systems of racism. The stories of discrimination in this book implicate a revision of that assumption.

When Latinos, and other people of color, for that matter, are active participants in the denial of access to an important life opportunity (a home, a job, an unimpeded education, entrance into public spaces, and freedom from violence) based on race, they are no longer just passive holders of an anti-Black cultural prejudice. They are part of the problem of racism. Certainly none of the victims of anti-Black bias in the narratives of discrimination shared in this book would be placated with the disclaimer “Your experience is not an example of racism because Latinos don’t have the systemic power to be racists in White non-Hispanic created structures.” One can immediately envision such a victim replying, “Oh, yeah? That so-called nonracist Latino is the one who oppressed me for being Black.” A Latino claim of racial innocence in the racist world White non-Hispanics created in the United States is a thin reed of moral superiority when a Latino hand is the one forcefully slamming the door to Black inclusion.

Thus, this book is more than just a call for recognizing that Latinos can be prejudiced too. Rather, it is an entreaty for all future interventions into matters of racism to critically engage how Latinos (and many others) collaborate and sustain structures of racism. By recognizing they are part of the problem, interventions can also address them as part of the solution. Judges and juries can be taught to desist from being distracted by the “I can’t be racist, I’m Latino” defense by instead using a critical race theory focus on the race-based patterns of exclusion and systemic inequality involving Latinos.³⁹ In short, dismantling racism in the United States requires that every component of its structures be taken apart—even the ones articulated in Spanish.

THE ORIGINS OF LATINO ANTI-BLACK BIAS

It is useful to first summarize Latin American and Caribbean perspectives about Afro-Latinos, that is, their own Afro-descendants, before discussing how those perspectives also inform Latino attitudes toward African Americans in the United States. The presentation of Latin American/Caribbean race ideology is not meant to suggest that all Latinos are racist and harbor these racialized perspectives or to insinuate that all Latinos think a particular way. Admittedly, group-focused discussions always run the risk of suggesting a fixed essentialized view of a group.⁴⁰ The research about Latino racial perspectives is provided to demonstrate the nature of Latino racial stereotypes of which legal actors in the United States may otherwise be ignorant. Recognizing and effectively addressing the discriminatory conduct of Latinos necessitates undemanding how Latinos act upon such stereotypes and tolerate structures of racial inequality.

Racism, anti-Black racism in particular, is a pervasive and historically entrenched fact of life in Latin America and the Caribbean (even across the region’s historical and sociopolitical variation).⁴¹ Over 90 percent of the approximately 10.7 million enslaved Africans who survived the Middle Passage voyage were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean, whereas only .036 percent were taken to the United States.⁴² As such, the legacy of slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean is similar to that in the United States: having lighter skin and European features increases the chances of socioeconomic opportunity, while having darker skin and African features severely limits social mobility.⁴³ The poorest socioeconomic class is populated primarily by Afro-Latinos, while the most privileged class is populated primarily by Whites; an elastic intermediary socioeconomic standing exists for some light-skinned (mixed-race) “Mulattos” and “Mestizos.” For example, until the Cuban revolution in 1959, certain occupations used explicit color preferences to hire Mulattos to the complete exclusion of dark-skinned Afro-Cubans, based on the premise that Mulattos were superior to dark-skinned Afro-Cubans though not of the same status as Whites. Even with the socialist revolution’s eradication of formal racial barriers, anti-Blackness continues to plague the lives of Afro-Cubans today.⁴⁴

White supremacy is deeply ingrained and continues into the present. In sociologist Edward Telles’s meticulous empirical investigation into contemporary racism in Latin America, his team of researchers found that skin color is a central axis of social stratification even when one controls for educational level and socioeconomic status.⁴⁵ In other words, the darker a person is in Latin America, the worse their access to opportunity as compared to those with lighter skin and the same educational level and socioeconomic status.⁴⁶

Notwithstanding these racialized patterns, many people in Latin America point to the ubiquitous use of loving phrases referencing Blackness as cultural evidence of the absence of racial discrimination. For instance, affection is expressed by stating, “that’s my Black person” or calling someone “my little Black person.” Even compliments directed toward those who are Black are reserved for those presumed to “supersede” their Blackness by having other “superior” traits. Such racialized compliments include “he is Black but has the soul/heart of a white”; “she is Black but good looking”; “he is Black but well-groomed and scented.” This use of racialized language in terms of endearment, unconsciously invokes the paternalism of slavery’s past. While such statements are not meant to carry racial malice, they still activate racial stereotypes about the inferiority of Blacks. In fact, these perspectives about persons of African descent are so embedded in the social fiber of Latin American societies that Blacks’ subordinated status in society is viewed as natural and logical.

Even in Puerto Rico, where US antidiscrimination laws have been available because of this Spanish-speaking island’s territorial status with the United States, Latin American racial pathologies persist. In a survey of college students in Puerto Rico, the overwhelming majority described “Puerto Ricans who are ‘dumb’ as having ‘dark skin.’”⁴⁷ Conversely, the same students correlated light skin color with a description of “Puerto Ricans who are physically strong.” Such racialized perspectives about African ancestry are not limited to college students. In 1988, when the presiding governor of Puerto Rico publicly stated, “The contribution of the Black race to Puerto Rican culture is irrelevant, it is mere rhetoric,” it was in keeping with what social scientists describe as the standard paradox in Puerto Rico: Puerto Ricans take great pride in the claim of being the Whitest people of the Caribbean islands, while simultaneously asserting they are not racist. The pride of being a presumably White population is a direct reaction to the Puerto Rican understanding that “Black people are perceived to be culturally unrefined and lack ambition.”⁴⁸

Over thirty-one years later, another Puerto Rican governor would again be revealed as a racist in the debacle known alternatively as “Telegramgate,” “Chatgate,” and “RickyLeaks.” On July 8, 2019, Puerto Rico’s Center of Investigative Journalism released over eight hundred pages of a group chat between then governor Ricardo Rosselló and members of his staff on the messaging application Telegram.⁴⁹ Included within Governor Rosselló’s homophobic and sexist message exchanges were racist comments about Afro-styled Black hair and the use of Aunt Jemima imagery to belittle the female mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, whom he opposed. Protests broke out regarding the sexist messages that predominated. The Puerto Rican public was particularly galvanized to protest the jokes Rosselló made about impoverished islanders who died during Hurricane Maria. Because of the political scandal Rosselló resigned, but the racialized stereotypes he made use of continue to flourish. In this respect, the Puerto Rican example is emblematic of the racial attitudes throughout the Caribbean and Latin America.⁵⁰

Moreover, as in the United States, those who disparage Black identity are not limited to Mulattos, Mestizos, and Whites but also extend to darker-skinned Afro-Latinos who can harbor internalized racist norms. Internalized racism can mean either internalized feelings of superiority and privilege or feelings of being less worthy, and racialized group members may experience all at the same time.⁵¹ The Afro-Latino internalization manifests itself in a widespread concern among Afro-Latinos with the degree of pigmentation, width of nose, thickness of lips, and nature of one’s hair–—with straight European hair denominated literally as “good” hair. This concern with European skin and features also influences Afro-Latinos’ assessments of preferred marriage partners. Marrying someone lighter is called adelantando la raza (improving the race) under the theory of blanqueamiento (whitening), which prizes the mixture of races precisely to help diminish the existence of Afro-Latinos.

Even in the midst of Latin American nationalistic emphasis on having individuals identify solely by their country of origin rather than by racial ancestry, distinctions are made about the diminished value of Blacks and Blackness. Indeed, it is even common within Latin America and the Caribbean to rank order the prestige of countries based on a color spectrum in which each country is racially identified.⁵² In this way “nationality is a proxy for race” that embodies White supremacy. As a result, countries with a large percentage of Whites are valued while those with a large percentage of Blacks are discounted as “less cultured.”⁵³ The attribution of a racial identity to countries, with nationality serving as a proxy for race, also permits a schizophrenic ability to cast racial aspersions about a person’s background without ever openly discussing race. These proxies for race are deeply ingrained in Latin American/Caribbean national cultures.

FAMILY RACIAL TRAUMAS

As disturbing as is the anti-Black aspects of Latin American/Caribbean national cultures, for many Afro-Latinos the deepest racial scars are those inflicted within intimate familial structures.⁵⁴ When it comes to Latino racism, the family is the scene of the crime. Racial trauma is instilled when Latino parents show preferential treatment to children with lighter skin,⁵⁵ and consistently make negative appraisals of Black racialized facial features, skin color, and hair texture.⁵⁶ Contemporary Afro-Latino memoirs are replete with recollections of racialized familial slights and injuries targeting the darkest person in even the most diverse array of family skin shades. Afro–Puerto Rican sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes the racially negative familial interactions as affecting a “soft segregation” of separation between darker- and lighter-skinned family members.⁵⁷ Large family gatherings like weddings are emblematic of this soft segregation that has darker family members seated at separate tables from lighter-skinned family members. Families thereby operate their own intuitive Jim Crow systems. The implicit justifications for the racial segregation are continually reinforced with racist comments about Black family members and Blackness in general. Bonilla-Silva recalls some of his aunts and even his own mother saying, “Eduardo, those [Black] people do not have class,” and “You know, your [Black] aunt does not know better because she is accustomed to living in shit.”

Similarly, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen poignantly describes how her White Puerto Rican family members denigrated the Blackness of her Afro–Puerto Rican father and her siblings that inherited his brown skin tone, African facial features, and curly hair:

We were una pena (a disgrace, sorrow, and shame). Both sides of the family continually judged our looks; whoever had the most clearly defined White features was considered good-looking. I was constantly reminded to pinch my nose each day so it would lose its roundness and be sharper like those of my [Whiter] brothers and sisters. My younger sister was openly praised for her long flowing hair while I was pitied for my greñas (long mane of tangly hair).⁵⁸

Cruz-Janzen often overheard her White-skinned Puerto Rican relatives ask her mother in relation to her darker-skinned daughters: “How are you going to get them married?”⁵⁹ In a related vein, Cruz-Janzen’s family constantly reminded her of her responsibility to marry someone lighter or, hopefully, White to improve the family’s status. At the same time, she was also aware that for White Puerto Rican families “to actually bring a Black woman into the family through the sanctity of marriage is an unbearable public nightmare, . . . a real threat to the family’s purity and public honra (honor).” Fellow Afro–Puerto Rican Lillian Comas-Díaz also recounts instances of family racial trauma starting from early childhood when her lighter-skinned brother repeatedly called her moyeta (Black and ugly).⁶⁰ In fact, Comas-Díaz identifies the Latino family as the major source of “racial rejection” of family members with visible African ancestry.⁶¹ As Afro–Puerto Rican scholar Hilda Llorens notes about the Puerto Rican context, “Thousands of girls and women whose hair is other than straight suffer great psychic and psychological distress.”⁶²

Family dynamics often filter interactions through a screen that imbues Blackness as the source of all things negative. For example, when a colicky baby is disparaged as “Esa prieta majadera” (that bothersome Black female baby), the family thereby hammers in the denigration of Blackness.⁶³ This is also the case when family caregivers yell invectives such as “Maldito sea este pelo” (Damn this hair) while combing curly Afro-descended hair, and “Cierra esa bemba” (Close your large African lips) when silencing Black children,⁶⁴ or when the backs of babies’ ears are examined for the dangerous development of future dark skin color.⁶⁵ In short, dark skin, curly hair, and African bodily features evoke familial expressions of ridicule, rejection, and hostility whereby the family nucleus is the incubator for inculcating anti-Blackness. Indeed, even Latino children as young as four years old have higher risks for mental health problems the darker their skin is.⁶⁶

Upon adolescence, the familial vigilance against Blackness is intensified in the Latino project of pursuing and/or maintaining a semblance of Whiteness. The obsession with mejorando y adelantando la raza (improving and advancing the race) by marrying lighter and ideally Whiter partners means each potential suitor is sorted out for taints of Blackness. Afro–Puerto Rican anthropologist Maritza Quiñones Rivera keenly felt the familial pressure to date only White men. Yet, when she met the family of her first White Puerto Rican boyfriend, they called her “unintelligent, negra sucia dirty Black woman, and slut.”⁶⁷ These racial boundaries are so deeply internalized that they transcend parental supervision and extend into the modernity of online dating.

In a study of Latino internet daters in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Atlanta, it was found that across these diverse cities with Latinos from different ancestral countries of origin, Latinos prefer dating Whites and exclude dating Blacks at about the same rates. Fifty-seven percent of the Latinas and 44 percent of the Latinos in the study excluded Blacks as possible dates.⁶⁸ These rates approximate those of White non-Hispanic daters, where 66 percent of White non-Hispanic women and 56 percent of White non-Hispanic men exclude dating Blacks. To the extent that the study did not control for the skin shade or racial identity of the Latino respondents, it is also quite possible that the Black rejection rate is even higher among White-identified Latinos. For as Angela Jorge notes about family lessons in racism, “Any intimacy with a Black American . . . is absolutely taboo.”⁶⁹ Indeed, a qualitative study of young adult children of Latino immigrants in Los Angeles suggests that immigrant parents send strong racialized messages about African Americans that deter their US-born Latino children from dating African Americans.⁷⁰

It should not be surprising, then, that migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean travel to the United States with their familial and national culture of anti-Black racism well intact. In turn, this facet of Latino culture is transmitted to some degree to younger generations.⁷¹ In one ethnographic study of Dominican racial identity within the United States, all the Dominican preoccupations with skin color and European phenotype honed in the Dominican Republic were readily apparent among the Dominican diaspora in the United States.⁷² Similarly, interviews of Dominican clients at a hair salon in Washington Heights, New York, demonstrated the pervasive Latin American/Caribbean racialized denigration of curly African hair as “bad” and straight European hair as “good,” along with the distaste for dark skin.⁷³ Thus, when Latinos are surveyed, Afro-Latinos indicate higher rates of racial discrimination based on their skin color as opposed to their socioeconomic status.⁷⁴

Despite the long histories of anti-Blackness among Latin American and Caribbean populations, there is an inability, or perhaps an unwillingness, to perceive Latino racism in the United States. In US public discourse there is often a blanket acceptance of the Latin American myth that racism does not exist in Latin America and that racism is thus not part of the Latino migrant legacy across generations.⁷⁵ In turn, Latinos and the commentators who describe their racial attitudes tend to accept the related notion that any anti-Black sentiment expressed by Latinos in the United States is a consequence of learning the cultural norms of the United States and its racial paradigm.⁷⁶ However, a growing social science literature discredits that premise.

LATINO SOCIAL DISTANCE FROM AFRICAN AMERICANS

While the COVID-19 pandemic experience, beginning in 2020, made us all unfortunately familiar with the general idea of social distance, the term also has a particular meaning within studies of discrimination. The sociological concept of social distance measures the social unease that an ethnic or racial group has in interactions with another ethnic or racial group.⁷⁷ While social science studies of Latino racial attitudes are few and sometimes dated, those that do exist depict a consistent picture of a general Latino preference for maintaining social distance from African Americans.⁷⁸ It should be noted, however, that these studies rarely disaggregate their findings about Latino attitudes by Latino skin shade or racial identity apart from their Latino ethnicity.

Notably, immigrant status has been identified as influencing racial attitudes. The social distance level is largest for recent Latin American immigrants. A survey of six hundred Latinos (two-thirds of whom were Mexican, the remainder Salvadorian and Colombian) and six hundred African Americans in Houston, Texas, found that African Americans had more positive views of Latinos than vice versa.⁷⁹ While a slim majority of US-born Latinos did use positive identifiers when describing African Americans, only a minority of foreign-born Latinos did so. Of the foreign-born Latino respondents a typical statement was “I just don’t trust them. . . . The men, especially, all use drugs and they all carry guns.” It is thus not surprising that this same study found that although Latino immigrants live in residential neighborhoods with African Americans in the same proportion as US-born Latinos, 46 percent of Latino immigrants report almost no interaction with African Americans whatsoever.⁸⁰

A later study of Houston-based Latinos continued to find that living in integrated areas with African Americans did not increase Latino social contact and friendship with African Americans.⁸¹ White non-Hispanic Houston residents were twice as likely as Latinos to have a Black friend, and four times as likely when compared to Houston’s Latino immigrant population. Similarly, the Los Angeles Survey of Urban Inequality found that recent and intermediate-term Latino immigrants held the most negative stereotypes of African Americans.⁸²

The social distance of Latinos from African Americans is consistently reflected in Latino responses to other survey questions.⁸³ In a survey of five hundred residents of Durham, North Carolina (equally divided among Latinos, African Americans, and White non-Hispanics), Latinos’ negative stereotypes of African Americans exceeded those held by White non-Hispanics.⁸⁴ Specifically, a majority of Latino immigrants in the study—58.9 percent—said that few or almost no African Americans are hardworking. Fifty-seven percent said few if any African Americans could be trusted, and nearly one third said few if any African Americans are easy to get along with. In contrast, of the White non-Hispanics in the study, 9.3 percent said few African Americans work hard, 9.6 percent said African Americans could not be trusted, and 8.4 percent said African Americans were difficult to get along with.

US-born Latino racial attitudes are not so distinctive from that of Latino immigrants. More established communities of Latinos in the United States are also characterized by their social distance from African Americans. In interviews with Latinos living in New Orleans in 2015, the number of years lived in the United States did not impact Latino social distance from African Americans.⁸⁵ Regardless of place of birth or years living in the United States, the New Orleans Latinos interviewed who had lighter skin were the least prone to perceive commonality with African Americans while at the same time feeling little to no economic competition with them.

Mirroring such negative attitudes, Los Angeles Latinos are quicker to reject African Americans as neighbors compared to members of other racial groups.⁸⁶ Across the nation, Latinos indicate that African Americans are their least desirable marriage partners.⁸⁷ In contrast, African Americans are more accepting of intermarriage with Latinos.

Similarly, Latinos state they have the most in common with White non-Hispanics and the least in common with African Americans.⁸⁸ In contrast, African Americans respond that they feel they have more in common with Latinos and the least in common with Whites and Asian Americans. It is ironic that African Americans, who are publicly depicted as being averse to coalition building with Latinos, provide survey responses that are actually more in accord with socioeconomic data that demonstrates the commonality of African American and Latino communities. Meanwhile, Latino responses fly in the face of all the socioeconomic data demonstrating African American and Latino parallels.⁸⁹

Although some might equate the Latino preference for White non-Hispanics over African Americans with the competition they perceive from African Americans in the labor market, the fact is that Latinos more frequently identify other Latinos as economic competitors rather than African Americans.⁹⁰ However, the greater the social distance Latinos prefer to maintain from African Americans, the more likely they are to see African Americans as competitors. ⁹¹ In other words, anti-Black animosity facilitates the perception of African Americans as an economic threat because prejudice contributes to perceptions of group threat and economic competition. This is particularly evident in the US South where African Americans are more numerous and the one region in which Latinos view African Americans as a greater source of economic competition.⁹² In contrast, African Americans have a lower rate of viewing Latinos as economic competitors.⁹³ Latinos also attribute disorder to predominantly African American neighborhoods much more readily than do other racial or ethnic groups.⁹⁴ In fact, Latino stereotypes about African American neighborhoods more powerfully shape perceptions of disorder than actual observations of disorder.

There is a Latino affinity for White non-Hispanics over African Americans that is part and parcel of the Latino identification with Whiteness. Indeed, in contrast to the many reports of a Latino proclivity for mixed-race census racial categories, there is a strong Latino preference for the White racial category, and some Latino groups, like Cubans, disproportionately select that category.⁹⁵ When Latinos select a single fixed category, they disproportionately select White, as did 81 percent of Latino single-race box checkers on the 2020 census and as 92.3 percent did the decade before.⁹⁶ The White racial category is particularly preferred by recent immigrants of all skin-color shades.⁹⁷ And when later generations do move away from the White racial category, they do so in favor of collective national ethnic labels like “Latino” or “Hispanic.”⁹⁸ This is exemplified by the 42.2 percent of Latinos on the 2020 census and the 36.7 percent on the 2010 census who selected the “some other race” option to write in an ethnic label like “Latino” or “Hispanic” or a national origin like “Peruvian” or “Guatemalan,” rather than any other racial category.

In addition, when Latino census respondents alter their choice of racial categories from one census decade to another, they primarily do so by moving from “some other race” to White. For instance, 2.5 million respondents who said they were Hispanic and “some other race” on the 2000 census later told the census in 2010 that they were Hispanic and White.⁹⁹ In their pursuit of Whiteness, Latinos are the largest race or ethnic group to alter their selection of racial categories from one census year to another.

No wonder then that the default Latino media visual representation of Latino identity is a White face.¹⁰⁰ Even for those Latinos who do acknowledge their African ancestry, there is cultural pressure to emphasize their Latino ethnicity publicly as a mechanism for distancing themselves from public association with the denigrated societal class of African Americans.¹⁰¹ This truism is highlighted by the popular refrain “The darker the skin, the louder the Spanish.”¹⁰²

The one area in which Latino anti-Black racism has at least been raised in the United States is with respect to the apparent racial caste system of Spanish-language television that presents Latinos as almost exclusively White and Afro-Latinos as “marginally Latino.”¹⁰³ The Univision Afro-Latina newscaster unicorn Ilia Calderon has Latino viewers who post social media messages saying, “Hispanics aren’t black, YOU don’t represent us on TV.”¹⁰⁴ Because of the scarce but derogatory images of Afro-Latinos in the media, activists once lobbied the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund to consider a lawsuit against the two major Spanish-language networks to challenge their stereotyped depiction of Afro-Latinos.¹⁰⁵ Some Latino activists see a direct parallel between the Whiteness of Spanish-language television and Latino politics. One such activist states:

Latino leaders and organizations do not want to acknowledge that racism exists among our people, so they have ignored the issue by subscribing to a national origin strategy. This strategy identifies Latinos as a group comprising different nationalities, thereby creating the false impression that Latinos live in a color-blind society.¹⁰⁶

Many concrete examples demonstrate that Latinos are not color-blind. To begin with, darker-skinned Latinos and self-identified Afro-Latinos in the United States experience color discrimination at the hands of other Latinos. Tellingly, while 64 percent of them report experiencing discrimination, 41 percent indicate that the victimization is caused by other Latinos.¹⁰⁷ Furthermore, despite variations across regions and ethnic groups, the commonality of Latinos social distance in relations with African Americans remains constant. What follows is an exploration of the social science literature that demonstrates the consistency of anti-Black sentiment in various Latino communities across the United States.

RACIAL ATTITUDES AMONG LATINOS ACROSS ETHNIC GROUPS AND REGIONS

Of all the Latino ethnic subgroups, Mexican Americans have the largest demographic presence within the United States. As of 2020, the Census reports that of the sixty-two million Latinos who are 18.7 percent of the U.S. population, approximately 62.3 percent are of Mexican or Mexican American origin.¹⁰⁸ This large demographic presence represents not only contemporary immigration flows from Mexico but also the generations of Mexican Americans who trace their roots to the incorporation of Mexican lands into the United States after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican American War.¹⁰⁹

The development of Mexican American racial identity in the United States has been subject to a variety of influences. Prior to the Chicano movement of the 1960s, Mexican American leaders claimed that Mexicans were Caucasian and therefore deserving of the same social status as White non-Hispanics.¹¹⁰ Latino race scholar Ian Haney López notes, “The Mexican American generation saw themselves as a White group. This self-conception both drew upon and led to prejudice against African Americans, which in turn hindered direct relations between those two groups.”¹¹¹ A contemporary observer of the Chicano movement developments was Ruben Salazar, a Los Angeles Times journalist. Importantly, he noted that at the time many Mexican Americans still held on to “the idea that Mexican-Americans are Caucasians, thus White, thus ‘one of the boys.’”¹¹² In addition, Salazar decried that “several of the more conservative Mexican-American leaders strongly [opposed] any ‘mixing’ of Mexican-American and Negro grievances.”¹¹³ Only after widespread police brutality and judicial mistreatment of Mexicans in the wake of the Black civil rights movement did a Chicano movement that stressed a non-White Chicano identity emerge.¹¹⁴ Yet, this non-White identity focused upon Chicanos’ indigenous ancestry and completely submerged their African ancestry.¹¹⁵ Moreover, the social distance and negative attitudes about Blackness and African Americans continued.¹¹⁶

Chicanos in California and the Southwest in the 1960s and 1970s expressed feelings of cultural superiority with respect to African Americans that adversely affected intergroup interactions.¹¹⁷ At the time, one Chicano college student summed up this sentiment when he wrote:

We’re not like the Negroes. They want to be White men because they have no history to be proud of. My ancestors come from one of the most civilized nations in the world.¹¹⁸

After the 1965 Watts urban uprising, such sentiments in turn fed Chicano resentment about the allocation of government funds in Los Angeles to service agencies catering to what Chicanos described as “less needy” African Americans.¹¹⁹ Such perspectives have not greatly changed in the new millennium. In Los Angeles, where a predominant number of Latinos are Chicano, it has been observed:

Many Latinos fail to understand the complexity and severity of the Black experience. They frequently bash Blacks for their poverty and goad them to pull themselves up like other immigrants have done. Worse, some even repeat the same vicious anti-Black epithets used by racist Whites.¹²⁰

Thus, Fernando Oaxaca, a prominent Mexican American business executive and commentator in Los Angeles who founded the Republican National Hispanic Assembly and died in 2004, accounted for the difference in Latino and African American economic conditions with the explanation, “We have a work ethic.”¹²¹ Oaxaca’s racialized attitudes exemplify the continuing ill effects of the historic positioning of Mexican Americans as racially White.¹²²

Younger generations are not immune to anti-Black sentiment. Latino high school students in the Los Angeles town of Inglewood have brawled with African American students over several Black History Month celebrations.¹²³ The source of the violence is Latino teens’ resentment at the month-long celebration of Black culture. In one instance, the principal of Inglewood High School simply decided to cancel the Black History Month celebration to avoid a repeat of the violence.¹²⁴

Unfortunately, the interethnic teen violence has not been limited to Inglewood, in as much as “ethnic and racial tension comes to Los Angeles as regularly as the Santa Ana winds.”¹²⁵ When Latino and Black students violently clashed at Poly High School in Long Beach in 2019, Black parents noted that it mirrored experiences they had at the same high school a generation before.¹²⁶ Many also recall the horror of the one-hundred-student fight at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles between Latinos and Blacks in 2005.¹²⁷ Similar incidents have been reported at other area schools in South Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, San Bernardino County, Oakland, Rialto, and San Jacinto.¹²⁸

Los Angeles Latinos have even proposed having block association meetings that exclude the African American residents of the block, prompting one African American resident to state, “It seems like the Latinos don’t even want to try to forge neighborhood unity.”¹²⁹ This social distance extends to congregations in which Latino and African American parishioners who share the same church attend separate services, serve on separate parish councils, and never meet.¹³⁰ It is interesting to note that notwithstanding when African American congregations in other areas of the United States have actively made it part of their ministry to reach out to their Latino neighbors, the social distance with Latinos remains.¹³¹

Ethnographic studies of Mexican Americans in Chicago and the southern states uncover the same disdain for African Americans.¹³² As a Chicago-based Latino high school student said, “It’s crazy. But a lot of the Hispanic kids here just don’t want to be friends with the Blacks.”¹³³ Adult Latinos in the South have mirrored this same racial hostility. In the North Carolina pork industry’s rigid racial hierarchy, with job tasks assigned by race, Latino employees have aimed their venom at their African American coworkers rather than the injustice of all-White management ranks.¹³⁴ For instance, in reflecting on the hardships of working on the slaughterhouse assembly line, Mrs. Fernandez, a Mexican worker stated, “Blacks don’t want to work. They’re lazy.” Her husband agreed and added, “I hate the Blacks.”

A broader study of Latino racial attitudes in the rural South uncovered similar Latino anti-Black attitudes, exemplified by the observation “Hispanics come to this country and want nothing to do with Blacks. We don’t want to socialize with them and be part of that world. Even in our own countries, we learn this. We learn we don’t want to be a part of their community.”¹³⁵ Metropolitan southern locations mirror the Latino anti-Blackness of rural ones. Thus in surveys of Latinos in Richmond, Virginia, the researchers found indicators of social distancing by Latinos in relation to Blacks and little interaction between the groups.¹³⁶

The rare exception to the generalized pattern of anti-Black attitudes are when Afro-Latinos are solicited for their opinions. Thus, in interviews of Latinos in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, it is an Afro-Mexican man who uniquely states, “I’ve got a lot of Black friends. Black people here, they treat you like a friend, like a brother. White people here, they just treat you like another guy.”¹³⁷

Nor have the racial relations of Cubans with African Americans in Florida been much better. In fact, Miami (a city in which Cubans and other Latinos predominate and hold political power) has the distinction of being the only city that was the locus of four separate race riots in the 1980s.¹³⁸ The immediate causes of all four riots were police shootings of African Americans in which two directly implicated Latino police officers. Although police brutality against African Americans is endemic throughout the United States, Miami is a city with many Latino police officers and, more alarmingly, a Latino population seemingly indifferent to anti-Black police brutality.

When Colombian immigrant police officer William Lozano was found guilty of manslaughter for killing African American motorcyclist Clement Lloyd, the Latino community came out to protest the conviction.¹³⁹ Furthermore, Latinos publicly denounced the urban uprisings that marked each affront to the humanity of African Americans as the work of the “criminal element.”¹⁴⁰ This is typical of how Latinos in Miami associate African Americans with crime, along with “an invidious comparison between Hispanic economic advancement—attributed to hard work, family values, and self-reliance—and Black dependency on welfare and other social programs.”¹⁴¹

In contrast, studies of Puerto Rican relations with African Americans in the northeastern United States have often characterized the interactions between Puerto Ricans and African Americans as comparatively less contentious.¹⁴² The larger presence of Afro–Puerto Ricans and culturally Black-identified Puerto Ricans in New York is one factor that mitigates the rates of anti-Black attitudes measured in surveys.¹⁴³ Puerto Ricans who also identify as Black more frequently live in neighborhoods with African Americans.¹⁴⁴

Nonetheless as is so often the case with broad-based comparisons, important nuances can be underappreciated. The social distance between African Americans and Puerto Ricans and all other Latino ethnic groups is also affected by the situational and historical particulars in different regions.¹⁴⁵ In Miami and Los Angeles, the residential sprawl of the landscapes results in Latinos being typically more spatially segregated from African Americans. Whereas in New York, the urban density of the built environment has historically contained Puerto Ricans and African Americans in closer proximity to one another in ways that have fostered greater interaction and community.¹⁴⁶ The settlement of Puerto Ricans in New York also contrasts with the Midwest urban context of Chicago, where government officials sought to disperse Puerto Ricans into predominantly White neighborhoods on the city’s North Side with the hopes of deterring the formation of “problematic” Latino ghettoes.¹⁴⁷ The proximity of Puerto Ricans and African Americans in New York facilitated collaborative political activism during the 1960s’ War Against Poverty and the struggle for quality public school education.¹⁴⁸

However, even in New York and elsewhere, Puerto Ricans manifest anti-Black racism. Angela Jorge noted early on that Puerto Ricans are taught within their family circles to dislike African Americans.¹⁴⁹ Because of the anti-Black prejudice they harbor, Puerto Ricans are not eager to be identified with African Americans.¹⁵⁰ When Afro–Puerto Ricans are not part of the analysis, the measure of residential segregation between non-Black identified Puerto Ricans and African Americans in the United States is high.¹⁵¹

One observer of the civil rights coalitions historically formed between Puerto Ricans and African Americans has even gone so far as to claim that the coalition “was more of a strategic device than a factual description of the true nature of the relationship between the groups. Puerto Rican participation in civil rights organizations and on picket lines was lower than for Whites.”¹⁵² Indeed, Puerto Ricans from New York and the northeast were only 1 percent of the peaceful demonstrators at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.¹⁵³ Furthermore, even though Puerto Rican youth organizations like the Young Lords in the 1960s and 1970s modeled themselves after the Black Panthers, some commentators report that the groups never had much contact with Black Power organizations.¹⁵⁴ As in New York, Chicago has also been the site of racial tensions between Puerto Ricans and African Americans over the competition for housing rehabilitation, in which Puerto Ricans have depicted African Americans as presumed gang members, criminals, and generally the cause of the tightening housing market.¹⁵⁵

The concern with racial tensions between Latinos and African Americans does not dissipate when one examines Dominicans, who are frequently viewed as Black themselves.¹⁵⁶ In fact, Latinos with more pronounced African ancestry, such as Dominicans, more readily cite color discrimination as an explanation for the bias they experience from other Latinos.¹⁵⁷ Yet, despite often sharing the more visible facial imprint of African ancestry with African Americans, Dominicans and African Americans have a high level of residential segregation from one another in New York City.¹⁵⁸ Moreover, Dominicans have been reported to resent job competition from African Americans.¹⁵⁹ Incidents of high school violence show Dominican youth and African American youth involved in fierce clashes as well.¹⁶⁰

In sum, much of the research regarding Latino racial attitudes to date indicates a lingering problem with Blackness across various Latino communities. Nevertheless, this is a truth that many Latinos do not acknowledge or view as significant. In turn, US government public policies are developed in the absence of a full understanding of Latino racial realities to the detriment of racial progress. I seek to address the gap that exists between the research regarding Latino racial attitudes and the politics of how racial equality is addressed in public policy and law. In the chapters that follow I examine legal cases and personal accounts of racial discrimination that elevate concrete examples of how Latino anti-Blackness is manifested in the contexts of schools, public accommodations, the workplace, housing market, electoral politics, and the criminal justice system. Together, all the narratives of individual and structural discrimination illuminate the necessity for a critical consideration of Afro-Latino racial status, the anti-Blackness of Latinos, and the juridical “Latinos can’t be prejudiced” pseudo defense to racism. In the global effort to dismantle all aspects of racial hierarchy and subordination, these Afro-descendant discrimination stories need to be heard and considered. “Never again a world without us.”¹⁶¹

A NOTE ABOUT THE TERM LATINO

This book uses the Spanish language term Latino for pragmatic ease of presentation rather than all the current alternatives of Hispanic, Hispano, Latina/o, Latin@, Latine, or Latinx. The simplicity of Latino as a term is also more inclusive of Latinos across generations and geographic spaces that have yet to embrace the explicitly gender-inclusive Latina/o and Latin@ or the gender-neutral Latinx that has come to be adopted by college students and inhabitants of some large cities.¹⁶² Indeed, the Pew Research Center 2019 National Survey of Latinos found that only about 3 percent of Latinos use the term Latinx, while another 75 percent have never even heard of the term.¹⁶³ Latinos also offers greater clarity for an audience not as familiar with the evolution in the multiplicity of identity terms.¹⁶⁴ The choice then to use the Spanish language Latino is in no way a rejection of the inclusivity that the x suffix is meant to offer but rather a recognition of its awkward English language imposition on the architecture of the Spanish language.¹⁶⁵ My hope is that all readers, regardless of their own choice regarding terminology, will be able to appreciate what the book has to offer at the same time that my own Mami recognizes her Afro-Latina reality in its pages.

In addition, an honest account of Black realities also requires that the linguistic details of how anti-Blackness is expressed be elaborated. However, this book uses “n——r” (and, for the audiobook, the term “the N-word”) rather than articulating the full racist expletive that is a constant feature of the narratives set forth within the book. Recognizing how the unremitting use of the expletive can feel like a racial assault for victims of racism, this book attempts not to participate in the cycle of racial trauma.