PAUL HENNESSY/AP PHOTO
The share of Latinos voting for Trump increased by an estimated eight percentage points between 2016 and 2020.
This article appears in the October 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality
By Tanya Katerí Hernández
Beacon Press
The Latino vote has confounded Democrats who were expecting it not only to grow but also to become a bulwark of a new progressive majority. While a majority of Latinos voted Democratic in the past two presidential elections, the share voting for Donald Trump increased by an estimated eight percentage points between 2016 and 2020. That shift, along with more recent polling data, has prompted scholars and journalists alike to ask why Latinos would support a party whose nominee for president was overtly racist and anti-immigrant.
In Racial Innocence, Tanya Katerí Hernández points to Latino anti-Black bias as one answer to this puzzle. A professor of civil rights law at Fordham University, Hernández draws on legal cases from 1964 to 2021, individual stories, interviews with leaders, educators, and attorneys, and academic research to make the case for openly discussing and confronting anti-Black racism within the Latino community.
As an Afro-Latina herself, Hernández explains how her own family history motivated her interest in the topic. Her mother suffered mistreatment and exclusion even by family members, part of a larger pattern of colorism in the Latin world that affects family relations, public spaces, educational institutions, workplaces, housing, and the criminal justice system.
For many in the United States and across the Americas, the phrase “Latino anti-Blackness” may sound paradoxical. How can Latinos, a racialized group of “people of color,” be racist or prejudiced? Hernández argues that 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.” This is what Hernández calls “Latino racial innocence,” a form of collective denial that enables “Latino complicity in US racism.” Ignoring Latino anti-Blackness, Hernández says, undermines the ability to combat racism not only through public policies, such as antidiscrimination laws, but in everyday life as well.
The complexities of race within the Latino community perplex many researchers in the social sciences and Latino and ethnic studies. The historical one-drop rule in the United States, which has held that one drop of “Black blood” makes a person Black, does not capture race in Latin America and the Caribbean, where different racial conceptions come into play. One of the strengths of Hernández’s book is that it shows how race works within a community that is itself often racialized as a homogenous group. Latinos are not a race but an ethnicity; they can be of any race or a mixture of multiple races, as many Latinos are. “Latino expressions of color bias,” Hernández writes, “are intimately connected with assessments of phenotype, hair texture, size and shape of noses and lips, and socioeconomic class standing.” Racial differences matter, but they matter in a different way than among non-Hispanics.
Latinos racially police public spaces and discriminate against Afro-Latinos, Hernández argues, citing the growing number of legal cases in Latin America challenging the exclusion of Afro-descendants from such places as dance clubs. These cases “parallel the narratives” of Afro-Latinos who enter spaces dominated by white Latinos in the United States and its territories. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, for example, Héctor Bermúdez Zenón and his friends were denied entrance to a restaurant while white patrons were swiftly seated. They filed a claim of discrimination in U.S. federal court in Puerto Rico and successfully reached a settlement.
The complexities of race within the Latino community perplex many researchers in the social sciences and Latino and ethnic studies.
Hernández details similar cases of discrimination against Afro-Latino students by Latino school officials. At a predominantly Dominican public school in New York City, educators treated dark-skinned students as less competent and more prone to misbehavior. Afro-Latino and African American children and adolescents are often perceived as older than they are and subjected as a result to harsher punishments. This “adultification,” Hernández argues, “is where the school-to-prison pipeline begins.” Hernandez shows us how the school-to-prison pipeline is experienced within the Afro-Latino community; this type of adultification has real-world consequences that can change the course of these students’ lives. In Texas, for example, students who are suspended or expelled are about three times more likely than other students to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year. Nationwide, Black and Latino students face suspension and expulsion more often than whites. And once in the system, a high percentage of juvenile offenders, about 40 percent, were incarcerated in an adult prison by the time they turned 25.
Cases of bias against Afro-Latinos also arise in the workplace, but Hernández argues that because judges are inclined to see all Latinos as a homogenous group, they often miss discrimination by and among them. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of “color” as well as “race” and “national origin,” but judges have acted as if the categories “do not relate or reinforce each other” and tended to reject colorism claims. José Arrocha, a dark-skinned Afro-Panamanian, was an adjunct faculty member at the Medgar Evers College campus of the City University of New York, where he was not reappointed after a supervisor, who was herself Latina, gave him a negative evaluation. The judge in the case rejected the possibility that discrimination might be involved because 5 out of 8 of the adjunct instructors who were hired or reappointed were of South or Central American origin. From the judge’s perspective, all the Latinos involved were racially and ethnically interchangeable. Latino racial innocence, the idea that “Latinos can’t be racist,” results in less legal protection for Afro-Latinos and African Americans when their cases involve Latino employers, supervisors, landlords, and defendants.
Over the course of the last six years, there has been more media attention to far-right white nationalism in the Latino community, an extreme example of the anti-Blackness rampant in less obvious forms. Latino leaders prefer to see their community as homogenous and hardly ever acknowledge anti-Blackness as an issue. But the problem of anti-Blackness isn’t limited to Latinos who are strongly white-identified; Latinos of all shades and racial backgrounds are drawn toward whiteness.
Latinos, as a group who are victims of racism and discrimination, are also in pursuit of a higher social status. According to social identity theory, all human beings are motivated by wanting to belong to a group that is seen in a positive light. Hence for Latinos, as Hernández briefly touches on, the pursuit of social status “is entangled with denigrating Blackness as a device for performing Whiteness. To police the boundaries of Latino White spaces (metaphorically and often literally) from unwanted Black incursions is to effectively embody Whiteness itself, regardless of one’s racial appearance.” Latinos are not only victims of racism themselves “but also part of the problem of White supremacy,” and if racial equality is what we are after, this is an uncomfortable truth that can no longer be ignored.
In her last chapter, Hernández highlights how consequential ignoring Latino anti-Black bias truly is for understanding electoral politics, policy choices about the census, and Latino–African American racial coalitions. Anti-Black bias in the Latino world is not just an academic question; it’s a political challenge.
Hernández has not only written a much-needed book for judges and attorneys; she has also written a book for readers like me. As a Black Latina woman, I felt a sense of belonging when I read about stories that reflect some of my own life experiences. As a Black Latina scholar, I have often felt excluded from both Black politics, where I am not Black enough, and Latino politics, where Blackness is usually ignored. Hernández has written a book where people like me feel like whole human beings rather than bifurcated versions of ourselves. My hope is that Racial Innocence is widely read by all who say they care about racial equality and equity.
