CULTURE
Confronting Latino Anti-Black Bias Civil rights lawyer Tanya Katerí Hernández takes up a sensitive but critical subject. By Yalidy Matos 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, inter v iews w ith leaders, Books educators, and attorneys, and academic research to make the case for openly discussing and confronting antiBlack 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 antiBlackness” may sound paradoxical. How can Latinos, a racialized group of “people of color,” be racist or prejudiced? Hernández 62 PROSPECT.ORG OCTOBER 2022
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 w ithin the Latino community perplex many researchers in the social sciences and Latino and ethnic studies. The historical onedrop 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 challeng ing the exclusion of A frodescendants 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. 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-toprison 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