The Myth of ‘Latino Racial Innocence’: An Interview with Tanya Katerí Hernández
Tanya Katerí Hernández has consistently tackled what she now calls “Latino racial innocence” by dispelling racial myths of mestizaje and the many ways it surfaces in Latino and Latin American societies. Her new book, Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (Beacon Press), is a must read for its rigorous take on anti-Black racism, one that challenges our communities to address racism head on.
As always, we are so thrilled to learn about Tanya’s work, which was the subject of the first public programing we hosted during the launch of The Latinx Project in 2018, when we hosted a conversation on her last book, Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination (NYU Press). And just this past spring, Tanya joined us as a panelist for a special event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Latinx studies. Needless to say, we are thankful to once again continue the conversation.
Arlene Dávila (AD): Your focus on legal cases of housing, work, and access to public space is enormously important in showcasing the realities of anti-Black Latinx racism in the Latinx community. In particular, you foreground racism as not a matter of beliefs but also actions, which makes your work highly necessary and didactic for our community in spelling out racism for any deniers out there who still believe our mestizaje exempts us from racism. Tell us about the methodological and conceptual difficulties of this approach, and why it is so important to look at anti-Black racism from a legal perspective.
Tanya Katerí Hernández (TKH): Centering legal case stories from across the country and Latinx national origin groups (alongside interviews, memoirs, and news stories) dispels the notion that Latinx anti-Blackness is limited to isolated, individual Latinx rather than a systemic problem within Latinidad. It also dispels the notion that Latinx are too racially innocent to know how to recognize and name racism. Civil rights law is the domain in which narratives about racial discrimination are formulated, and its language effectively deployed to clarify what is racially-motivated bias. With the language and grammar of anti-discrimination legal cases, Afro-Latinx victims of Latinx anti-Black bias are better able to articulate their experiences of Latinx racial bias, in ways that often get obfuscated in Latinx deflection from the realities of racism.
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 to illuminate the contours of Latinx 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 socio-political discussions of Latinx anti-Blackness that currently exist.
This methodological choice created several challenges. This is because the search for stories of Latinx acts of racial discrimination cannot be done with a simple Google engine search. Most law cases do not garner the high level of media attention needed to activate a search engine’s cataloging. Nor will a single query into electronic case law databases suffice. This is because the legal research service databases of Westlaw and Lexis do not neatly categorize cases by the racial and ethnic identity of the participants. For that reason, the hunt for cases necessitated numerous exhaustive searches for judicial mentions of racial and ethnic party identities, with every possible iteration of Latinx identity since the 1964 enactment of the Civil Rights Act.
Furthermore, in order to gather data about cases that victims never file because they are overwhelmed and beleaguered, I also conducted qualitative interviews with civil rights leaders, attorneys, educators, and self-identified Afro Latinx respondents whom I contacted via Afro Latinx identity-based organizations. Finally, I located additional accounts of discrimination in national and local news electronic databases.
What drove me to persist with the painstaking hunt for the narratives of discrimination when so many Latinx scholars and commentators instead suggest that Latinx anti-Blackness does not merit deep exploration? My family history as an Afro Latina would not permit otherwise. This is because embodying Blackness within a Latinx family can so deeply ground one in the materiality of Latinx bias that fantasies of Latinx color-blind unity are unable to interfere with a questioning of Latinx racial attitudes.
AD: The case of Latinx judges who perpetuate anti-Black racism reminded me of so many instances where Latinx people in powerful positions (journalism, universities, corporations and more) become complicit with racism for the same reasons. Tell us a bit about how hierarchy intersects with vernacular and popular culture and racist language to further anti-Black racism in the Latinx community.
TKH: When I share the themes of the book with fellow Latinx they often raise how anti-Blackness seems at odds with the Latinx vernacular use of loving phrases referencing Blackness. For these Latinx, the affectionate phrases often ending in the Spanish diminutive “ito” are 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 towards 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.” Yet, 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 distinctiveness and inferiority of Blacks. To be acceptable, Blackness has to be qualified. That is not emblematic of true racial equality. In fact, these perspectives about persons of African descent are so embedded in the social fiber of Latinx communities that the subordinated status of Afro Latinx is viewed as natural and logical.
AD: While your book focuses on anti-Black racism, similar dynamics play out in regards to anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Brown racism—basically in regards to how colorism affects our community at large. Your book does not make this point, but I wondered if you address it by sharing why it is so foundational to explore anti-Black racism on its own terms for anyone seeking to dismantle racism in our community and beyond?
TKH: While it is of course important to be attentive to all “isms” that afflict our society, collapsing them all together can obscure the simultaneous flight from confronting the challenging particulars of anti-Blackness. Take for instance the dynamic of colorism. Colorism often displaces any conversation on anti-Blackness within Latinx communities. Why? Perhaps because colorism as a concept is ironically a more comfortable space being as it is devoid of systemic analysis. In conversing about colorism we can all decry how our beauty aesthetic preferences whiteness and carries over into the individual selection of intimate partners, without ever contending with how systemic anti-Black racial exclusion is more than a beauty aesthetic. Latinx stereotypes about the intellectual deficiencies of African ancestry underlie Latinx actions of racial segregation regardless of skin shade. In turn, those actions of racial segregation sustain Latinx racial hierarchies in Latinx workplaces, school settings, and housing markets. Using colorism as a more comfortable proxy for talking about anti-Black bias hinders our ability to dismantle these Latinx racial hierarchies.
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Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality
by Tanya Katerí Hernández
212 pgs. Beacon Press. $24.95
Tanya Katerí Hernández is an internationally recognized comparative race law expert and a professor of law at Fordham University School of Law, where she teaches anti-discrimination law, comparative employment discrimination, and critical race theory. A Fulbright scholar, Princeton and Rutgers fellow, and former scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, she specializes in comparative race relations and anti-discrimination law. Hernández is the author of multiple books, including Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination.
Arlene Dávila is Professor of Anthropology and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She studies the political economy of culture and media, consumption, immigration and the geographies of inequality and race. These research interests grew out of her early work in Latinx art and culturally specific museums and spaces in New York City, and have developed through her continued involvement in Latinx advocacy and interest in creative industries across the Americas. She has authored multiple books among them, Latinx Art: Artists, Markets and Politics. Learn more here.