Mixed Race Studies

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio serves as a brown face of white supremacy

MSNBC
2022-03-15

Julio Ricardo Varela, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

White supremacy will always attract nonwhite believers.

It should come as no surprise that there are several Latino male white nationalists who have gotten disproportionate attention in recent years, but in a country that keeps misunderstanding why the U.S. Latino community is nowhere near close to being a monolith, it is critical to examine how this notion of Latino white nationalists still feels strange to some.

Last week’s news that Enrique Tarrio, the former Afro-Cuban leader of the Proud Boys, was arrested on federal charges surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has sparked some interest in an apparently paradoxical reality: nonwhite Latino men worshiping at the altar of American white supremacy and providing cover to ensure that white nationalists stay mainstream.

As a journalist who’s been covering Latino communities for years, I know that this supposed paradox has never existed and that the country’s estimated 62.1 million Latinos have ideologies from one extreme to the other. American whiteness is a prize; it is where the power lies, and people like Tarrio would rather bask in that whiteness than fight against it and appear too “woke,” even it means tearing down democracy.

Non-Latino media have long been obsessed with proving the claim that more and more Latinos are longing to become white, which ignores the fact that being Latino is not just a sole racial construct but more of a messy combination with ethnicity. Voices from within the U.S. Latino community have responded by diving into the complexities of what it is to be Latino in modern-day America. While it is apparent that the country has become more multiethnic and multiracial, the quest for what Cristina Beltrán calls “multiracial whiteness” will always have an appeal in our community…

Read the entire article here.

‘We Are Black. We Just Speak Spanish’: Why Some Afro Latinos Want More Visibility During Black History Month

KQED News
San Fransisco, California
2022-02-18

Blanca Torres

Nelson German, the chef and owner of alaMar, a seafood restaurant in Oakland, remembers the day a Black family asked a staffer about the Black owner they had heard about.

“This isn’t a Black-owned restaurant,” he recalled the staffer telling the family. “This is a Dominican-owned restaurant.”

Hearing about that interaction was a turning point for German. As a Black Dominican American, German, 41, realized he hadn’t done enough to educate those around him about his Blackness and the importance of it.

“We are Black. We are part of the African diaspora. We just speak Spanish,” German said. “The African continent influenced the world. We should embrace that, and really give tribute to it now, because there’s a lot of people who had to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for us to be in this position. We should show them some respect.”

“So, I always say Afro Latino,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

The 2020 census had big undercounts of Black people, Latinos and Native Americans

National Public Radio
2022-03-10

Hansi Lo Wang

The 2020 census continued a longstanding trend of undercounting Black people, Latinos and Native Americans, while overcounting people who identified as white and not Latino, according to estimates from a report the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday.

Latinos were left out of the 2020 census at more than three times the rate of a decade earlier.

Among Native Americans living on reservations and Black people, the net undercount rates were numerically higher but not statistically different from the 2010 rates.

People who identified as white and not Latino were overcounted at almost double the rate in 2010. Asian Americans were also overcounted. The bureau said based on its estimates, it’s unclear how well the 2020 tally counted Pacific Islanders…

Read or listen to the story here.

The Afro Latino who redefined how Black history is remembered

NBC News
2022-02-24

Nicole Acevedo, Reporter

Arturo Schomburg’s experiences as an Afro Puerto Rican at the turn of the century influenced his approach to rescuing and preserving Black history.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg is regarded as one of the foundational figures of Black history in the United States, with one of the nation’s most important research and cultural institutions named after him.

Yet his legacy goes beyond the work he did as a historian, writer and collector of global Black art and historical materials.

By identifying as a Black and Puerto Rican, Schomburg’s acknowledgment of his diverse heritage helped him earn a global understanding of Black identity — a view he implemented in his approach to rescuing and preserving Black history — while he recognized the way Blackness had been erased, including in the Caribbean and Latin America…

Read the entire article here.

Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism

The New Press
August 2020
272 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-59558-917-0

Laura E. Gómez, Professor of Law; Professor of Sociology; Professor of Chicana/o Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

An NPR Best Book of the Year, exploring the impact of Latinos’ new collective racial identity on the way Americans understand race, with a new afterword by the author

Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in just a matter of decades, but many Americans still struggle with two basic questions: Who are Latinos and where do they fit in America’s racial order? In this “timely and important examination of Latinx identity” (Ms.), Laura E. Gómez, a leading critical race scholar, argues that it is only recently that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and others are seeing themselves (and being seen by others) under the banner of a cohesive racial identity. And the catalyst for this emergent identity, she argues, has been the ferocity of anti-Latino racism.

In what Booklist calls “an incisive study of history, complex interrogation of racial construction, and sophisticated legal argument,” Gómez “packs a knockout punch” (Publishers Weekly), illuminating for readers the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making processes that Latinos have undergone over time, indelibly changing the way race functions in this country.

The paperback features a new afterword in which the author analyzes results of the 2020 Census, providing “much-needed insight into the true complexity of Latinx identity” (Kirkus Reviews).

ASU professor takes leadership of NEA

ASU News
Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
2022-02-08

Mary Beth Faller, Reporter

Jackson sees opportunity in re-imagining the role of arts in creating healthy communities

An Arizona State University professor is taking over the nation’s top arts agency just as arts organizations are working to re-emerge from the pandemic.

Maria Rosario Jackson is the first African American and Mexican American to lead the National Endowment for the Arts. She was confirmed by the Senate in December.

Jackson is an Institute Professor in ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and holds an appointment in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. She is on leave from ASU while she fulfills her term as the NEA’s 13th chair.

Read the entire news release here.

2022 CMRS Conference Is Two Weeks Away!

Critical Mixed Race Studies Association
2022-01-24

*** View the program schedule here! ***

REGISTER NOW!
It is not too late to register for the 6th biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference titled Ancestral Futurisms: Embodying Multiracialities Past, Present, and Future to be held virtually February 24-26, 2022. To register, click here.

BECOME AN EXHIBITOR
For a small $10 fee you can advertise your business and/or sell your wares during the CMRS Conference in our virtual exhibitor space. Register here.

BECOME A CONFERENCE SPONSOR
It’s not too late to become a 2022 CMRS conference sponsor. Sponsors receive advertisement on the conference website, free registration for students or community members, and conference merchandise featuring the brilliant art image “Transition” by artivist Favianna Rodriguez.

To become a sponsor please go to our Eventbrite page here.

NEW! View the program guide here.

Debate is growing over use of ‘Latinx’ for ethnic identity

The Houston Chronicle
2021-01-24

Olivia P. Tallet, Staff Writer

Latinx is a buzzword for individuals of Latin American origin in the United States, yet the use of “Latinx” as a noun to identify people of Latino and Hispanic heritage is not universally welcomed.

“Ooooo, you’ve entered the dangerous territory of ‘identity politics,’” said Rice University professor Luis Duno-Gottberg on a social media post where a journalist asked for opinions about the use of Latinx.

The word “Latinx” and its plural “Latinxs” spark passionate discussions, with supporters asserting it is more inclusive than the predominant “Latinos” or “Hispanic” to group the multifaceted identities of people who trace their origins to Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries.

Some analysts trace the original use of Latinx to the mid-2000s when it began to appear in web searches. The word started a slow trend upward in June 2016, according to Google Trends data. Some observers associated it with the mass shooting that month at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando where 49 people were killed and 53 injured…

Read the entire article here.

Can You Be “White Passing” Even if You Aren’t Trying?

Mother Jones
January-February 2022 Issue

Andrea Guzmán, Ben Bagdikian Editorial Fellow

Lisa Taniguchi

The phrase has become popular on social media. But there’s a lot left out of the conversation.

When pop star Olivia Rodrigo released her album Sour in May 2021, listeners took to TikTok to debate whether she was “white passing.” The question was not really about how Rodrigo perceives or publicly identifies herself. She is of both Filipino and white ancestry. Rather, it was about whether others see her as white. The Rodrigo discourse soon enflamed more general discussion about who deems one “white passing.” As one Iranian-born TikToker explained, she “did not grow up being white” when she came of age in post-9/11 America, but after others began to associate her appearance with whiteness—partially because of the rise of the Kardashians—she now recognizes the privilege of being “white passing.”

The conversation differed from how “passing” has traditionally been used in the United States. In the Jim Crow era—when “one drop” of Black ancestry subjected a person to segregation—“passing” was a deception to assume the privileges of whiteness. From 1880 to 1940, experts suspect about 20 percent of Black men passed for white at some point. It was commonly an attempt to “access things that wouldn’t have been available to them otherwise,” says Nikki Khanna, a sociology professor at the University of Vermont. But it was also a certain betrayal—leaving behind collective uplift for personal gain…

Read the entire article here.

The woman defending Black lives on the border, including her own

The Los Angeles Times
2021-12-27

Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Houston Bureau Chief
Photography by Gina Ferazzi

REYNOSA, Mexico — So much of her is hyphenated, not just her name: Felicia Rangel-Samponaro. With caramel skin and curly brown hair that’s often tied back, she can pass as Latina.

But she identifies as Black.

On the Texas-Mexico border, she’s emerged as a vigorous defender of immigrants, and that work often forces her to reckon with how race and ethnicity — real and perceived — shape lives on the border, including her own.

“There’s a lot of oppression, discrimination and racism that goes on, on both sides of the border,” she said…

Read the entire article here.