New book takes on latino anti-black bias
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When Dr. Tanya Katerí Hernández was an exchange student from Brown University in Brazil in the mid 1980s, she asked to be placed with a host family more like her own — that is to say, a Black family. Brazilian university administrators thought she meant she wanted to live in a favela, or shantytown, she recalls. But the family they placed her with “didn’t identify as Black, they identified as Morenos (Brown) — light skinned of ambiguous racial backgrounds — not quite white, but white-ish, in the right sunlight. So there was this irony there, right?” she recalls.
“If I kept my mouth shut, nobody would see the blue passport from the United States. I wasn’t getting special treatment. I was able to sort of see what this ‘racial democracy’ business was all about,” and how context specific and fleeting “the accessories of democracy could be within Brazil, let alone other spaces,” she recalls.
The time she spent in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil’s first colonial capital, gave her a window into Latin American racial dynamics in one of the most racially mixed countries in the region. But she challenges the concept of a harmonious “racial democracy.” First introduced by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s, Hernandéz says “racial democracy” has been used to deny racism by the white Brazilian elite, a phenomenon that Hernandéz has seen all over Latin America and the United States.
Decades later, she says her experiences in Brazil as well as her own Puerto Rican and Cuban family background supplemented the academic research behind her new book, “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality.”
“Latino communities deny anti-Black bias because they claim that their racially mixed cultures immunize them from being racist. I call this the ‘Latino racial innocence’ cloak that veils Latino complicity in U.S. racism,” she wrote in the first chapter of the new book, published in August 2022 by Beacon Press.
Today, as the Archibald R. Murray professor of law at Fordham University School of Law and associate director of the school’s Center on Race, Law, and Justice, Hernández has written three books examining racism in Latin America and among U.S. Latinos. She visited Washington, D.C., last fall to give the lecture, “Racism in the Barrio: Addressing Anti-Blackness in the Latino Community,” at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown D.C. The lecture was part of the League of 2022 United Latin American Citizens’ LGBTQ+ Unity Summit.
Hola Cultura’s Afro Latino storytelling group interviewed Hernández about the new book and her research that uses discrimination case files and civil rights laws to expose racism in schools, places of recreation, workplaces, the housing market, the criminal justice system, and Latino families. She also shared the impact of her book among Afro Latinos and discussed how racial inequality is being treated as trauma with “lots of different layers and angles at which exists the monster that is known as racial injustice.”
What kind of reactions are you getting to your book?
“There’s a range, but there are patterns. One part of the pattern is almost like testimonials from people where I’ll go and do a book event in a school or nonprofit. And the question and answer session turns into people just sort of sharing their own experiences of being the targets of Latino anti-Black bias, whether they are Afro Latino, African American, African, or West Indian, from the African diaspora. There’s this commonality. They have fewer questions, and instead, [have] expressions of being seen for the very first time, being gratified that their experiences are being accurately portrayed. For many, it’s painful, but also a relief to have a language and a grammar for articulating what they have long known was a problem. But feeling empowered by seeing where there is data, there is an ability to come together and work on these issues as a community. That’s one reaction that’s quite typical. It’s very worthwhile to me, when I have readers who feel like they’ve gotten a lot out of the book both because they feel seen, but also because they feel they have tools to fight oppression within the book itself.
The other, which is on the opposite end of the spectrum, is a great deal of skepticism, typically on the part of white Latinos, and the sense that I am being divisive by raising the issue, as opposed to what is inherently divisive — to have racial subordination within a community. The kind of questions I will typically get as a response is, ‘well, you’re not talking about the other side.’ What this other side seems to be, in their mind is, the potential for people who are African American (they don’t talk about Afro Latinos, because that messes up their little picture of the other side), but the African Americans as being … biased in various ways against Latinos. I’m very quick to let them know that it’s an overstatement. Empirically, in all the social science research, data on African Americans shows that they’re much more supportive of Latino communities than Latinos are of African Americans.
Even if bias by African Americans toward Latinos wasn’t overstated — even if it were true that there was this massive African American bias against Latinos — how can one bias excuse another? Why is it inappropriate to talk about Latino anti-Blackness, in the face of other forms of bias that exist in the world? Why aren’t all of them worthy of consideration? Why isn’t it useful to have one book focus on one kind? There are plenty of other people out there to do lots of other scholarly interests. You’re not asking them to write about everything all at once. Why are you asking me to write about everything all at once? For me, that is an indicator of their own racial innocence and resistance to taking in the facts on the ground and the problematic patterns of anti-Blackness that have been long standing within the Latino community.
The third sort of typical reader response I get is, ‘I never knew about this,’ or ‘Is this really happening?’ It’s interesting, the way this goes across [demographic] from white, U.S.-based Anglo-English speakers. There’s not so much resistance to the information, but just sort of shock and surprise. I think part of their shock and surprise is because they have lumped together all Latinos, so they don’t see Afro Latinos. They see a homogeneous, racially harmonious pan-ethnic grouping and a simplified perspective: the idea that all people of color are homogeneous, that one person of color is like another person of color, the idea that they all get along, and that their only problem is English speaking, white Anglos.
Those are the three kinds of reactions that I’ve been getting from readers, both when I meet them in person or when they write to me via email, or send me messages on Twitter.”
This denial kind of reminds me of the concept of “white fragility.” Do you see any parallel to this at all?
“What’s interesting is that some people have described it as a kind of a Latino fragility. The reason why I didn’t use that language so much is because white fragility — pretty much for me, at least as I read it and understand it — it sort of encapsulates this dynamic where white Anglo folks in the United States feel threatened and destabilized by the possibility that they could be implicated in a systemic racial inequality and have a role in sustaining it just by their inaction.
Whereas I view racial innocence as sort of a much more active space. What I mean by an active space is that Latinos are also victims of discrimination, but within that context of discrimination, [for] them be actively denying how darker skin — African ancestry — further complicates that discrimination, that’s more than just fragility. That’s a purpose, almost a very strategic, intentional headspace: to put on the blinders and see the relevance of African ancestry and skin color shading, African phenotype, hair texture, and facial attributes that bring one closer to Africa than others. All of these factors are relevant within a Latino context, as far as differentiating us from one another and attaching material goods, access, and a lack of access, based on those factors.”
What are the implications for Afro Latinos who also identify as queer?
“The way in which intersectionality works for everyone is that the multiplicity of ways in which a person can identify are infinite, and also very context specific. And so for Latinos who are identifying as both Afro Latino and queer, that means that implicates for them many more opportunities to be victimized, unfortunately. I don’t mean to suggest that [there is] … a competition as far as oppression is concerned. But the more convergences that there are across categories of oppression, [it] enhances the probabilities of being caught in the crosshairs of some forms of systemic inequality.”
Are there resources for people of color struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because of racial discrimination?
“When I hear of PTSD, I tend to think of it as a trauma that ended, and now these are the repercussions. For issues of racial subordination, they’re ongoing. They don’t have an ending, although, of course, people can have a heightened experience of a particular exclusion that was especially painful. But that doesn’t close the door to more trauma. The trauma and the reactivation of trauma over and over again better captures the way in which there is not a finite point for which we can say this ended and now I’m living with posttraumatic stress syndrome, where there’s no “post,” at least not yet.
What I have found very interesting with a growing number of people who are attending to issues of racial inequality as trauma is that there are lots of different layers and angles at which exists the monster that is known as racial injustice. We need all hands on deck with lots of people using their brain power to come at it from different angles. I have a colleague. His name is David Troutt. He works at Rutgers University’s School of Law, and focuses closely on these issues of trauma and the idea of what the medical institution has to offer people, for instance, who experience housing inequality because of race. Those two things are tied together.
I will be perfectly frank: you don’t have a particular intervention for PTSD that I identify with. Although, I will say that what I have learned trying to do this work is that one of the very first things people need — as far as learning to handle, live with., and not be limited by the trauma they have experienced — is to acknowledge that it exists. An idea that is a long standing problem within the Latino community is that if you bring up issues of racism, then you’re the racist. ‘It’s not racism, it’s you, and your own personal failing, and inability to have a hard work ethic,’ or ‘you have a bad culture.’ There’s always some reason why it’s some individual’s fault for bringing up issues of discrimination.
A part of the intervention to racial trauma is having a space in which it is acknowledged. You can’t heal something when it’s kept in the dark — when there’s silence and a taboo about it. It needs to be brought out into the light. That’s the very first step. That’s something I’m hoping that I’m helpful in doing by providing the storytelling that’s in the book. The book is a project, essentially to uplift the voices of the victims of Latino anti-Black bias.
It is sort of a series of narratives that come from cases, people’s memoirs, news reports, and from interviews that I did directly. So the methodologies are mixed. But all of it has one central focus, giving light and a voice to the otherwise silenced victims of Latino anti-bias.”
What can we do in racial microaggression situations?
The racial hate speech that people utilize in the United States — that language alone, doesn’t give rise to a discrimination claim. The United States, compared to many other countries, is somewhat of an exception in treating hate speech as just another form of free speech that should have wide access and circulation. The thinking here is that otherwise, our democracy would collapse, though many would say empirically it’s the opposite, but let’s leave that for another conversation. I bring it up, because there is one legal space in which words do matter, not because you’re going to prosecute someone because of their words, but because of what the words reveal about the actions that they have taken.
For instance, within the workplace, one form of racial discrimination is racial harassment by coworkers, supervisors, and employers who are constantly throwing a barrage of anti-Black statements. That’s a space in which the words are part of the evidence, but you are able to sue not because of the words, but because the words created a hostile work environment. They altered the conditions of your employment. You weren’t allowed to just be an employee and do your job. You had to do the extra work of hearing all of this negative commentary. So legal recourse is one space for a victim of these particular kinds of microaggression.
Racial harassment can also come up within the housing context. If you live in an apartment, and the landlord is constantly using racially discriminatory language — creating racialized disparate treatment — some might call it a microaggression, because you have an apartment and you haven’t been excluded from the apartment, but your conditions of living there are being altered by the harassment that you’re experiencing.
Because of the peculiarities of the legal system and its hyper celebration of the First Amendment and protection of free speech, anti-discrimination law and the 14th Amendment protection for racial equality have to navigate those peculiarities to provide some form of recourse from what would otherwise be called microaggressions.”
What are the possibilities of coalitions between African Americans and Afro Latinos?
Coalitions have long existed, but part of what some view as the problem with coalitions is that they haven’t been long standing. Committees come together for an issue. They deal with that issue and disband. For instance, in instances of extreme police racial violence when there’s a Latino victim who has been racially identified, Latinos can view themselves as being in community with African Americans, who have had a long experience with the forms of extreme racialized violence from the police. But once the memory of the person who was victimized is gone, the marches have stopped, etc., those coalitions seem to disband. Same thing with electoral politics, etc.
There are some exceptions. I point them out in the book, as well. One of them is called BAJI, or the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. It’s a nationwide organization that brings together Latinos and African Americans or other people from the African diaspora to talk about justice for an equal and unbiased immigration policy. The union is for racially equal treatment of Black and Brown immigrants, because it’s often forgotten that people in the diaspora are immigrants too. It’s as if immigration was posed as only a Latino issue, as opposed to a Black issue as well. That’s one organization that is a longer-existing organization that comes together to form coalitions.
The primary thing that has to be kept in mind is that you can’t have a coalition that is long lasting and effective if one community is involved in sustaining racial hierarchies within its own community. So how can Latinos possibly engage with African Americans if within Latinidad there’s a racialized pecking order? How can this engagement happen if the leadership is always white and issues of racial inequality are put on the backburner, as if they were inconsequential, in light of what all Latinos need, and the Black ones are viewed as sort of a small segment not needing much attention, if they’re even acknowledged?”
I noticed that you wrote about yourself at the end of the book. I was wondering, why did you do that?
I made a choice to put my story in, but to have my story be at the end. Some people will say, ‘Wait a minute, why don’t you start with that, so that people know right away what you’re dealing with?’ The reason is because I didn’t want the book to be perceived as ‘This is all about her stuff, her family, etc.’ When I’m at the end, I’m there for parity, for fairness; I’ve delved into other people’s trauma and have dug into the messiness of their experience and put it out on public display, with permission. So it only seemed fair that I too situated myself within those experiences, but not because my story was more important than anybody else’s.
Lived experiences are so informative. And it’s always something I have to remind my students that their story matters. It doesn’t matter in and of itself, it matters in community. If your story enables you to better understand a community, then it contributes.
Visit the website to learn more about the book, “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality.”
*This story has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
– Marco Cerqueira and Shanique Lovelace
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