Mixed Race Studies

Confronting Latino Anti-Black Bias

The American Prospect
2022-10-06

Yalidy Matos, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Latino and Caribbean Studies
Rutgers University

Civil rights lawyer Tanya Katerí Hernández takes up a sensitive but critical subject.

Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality by Tanya Katerí Hernández from 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…

Read the entire review here.

Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality

Beacon Press
2022-08-23
208 pages
5.5 x 8.5 Inches
Hardcover ISBN: ISBN: 978-080702013-5

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law
Fordham University School of Law, New York, New York

The first comprehensive book about anti-Black bias in the Latino community that unpacks the misconception that Latinos are “exempt” from racism due to their ethnicity and multicultural background.

Racial Innocence will challenge what you thought about racism and bias, and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. As Latinos are the second largest ethnic group in the US, this revelation is critical to dismantling systemic racism. Based on interviews, discrimination case files, and civil rights law, Hernández reveals Latino anti-Black bias in the workplace, the housing market, schools, places of recreation, criminal justice, and in Latino families.

By focusing on racism perpetrated by communities outside those of White non-Latino people, Racial Innocence brings to light the many Afro-Latino and African American victims of anti-Blackness at the hands of other people of color. Through exploring the interwoven fabric of discrimination and examining the cause of these issues, we can begin to move toward a more egalitarian society.

Latinos have many skin tones. Colorism means they’re treated differently.

The Washington Post
2022-03-31

Rachel Hatzipanagos

Growing up, Anyiné Galván-Rodríguez was not the darkest-skinned member of her part-Dominican, part-Puerto Rican family, and not the lightest.

“In every Dominican family, because you have such a melting pot of Spaniard, African and Taino origins, you always have a rainbow of colors,” she said.

Even as a child, Galván-Rodríguez noticed that her physical features shaped how she was treated. While some grandchildren were praised for their looser curls, Galván-Rodríguez was chastised for her coarse, curly hair.

“No one ever directly said, ‘Oh you have bad hair and because you have bad hair, you’re less than the other cousin,’” said Galván-Rodríguez, 40. “But it was said like microaggressions.”…

Read the entire article here.

The history of Afro Latinos is not taught in American schools, and the idea that someone can be Black and Latino still feels novel to some people, according to Tanya K. Hernández, a professor at Fordham University School of Law.

Blanca Torres, “‘We Are Black. We Just Speak Spanish’: Why Some Afro Latinos Want More Visibility During Black History Month,” KQED News, February 18, 2022. https://www.kqed.org/news/11905454/we-are-black-we-just-speak-spanish-why-some-afro-latinos-want-more-visibility-during-black-history-month.

‘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.

Commentary and Book Review: Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development
Volume 34, Issue 1 (Spring 2021)
pages 1-11

Jasmine Mitchell, Associate Professor of American Studies and Media Studies
State University of New York, Old Westbury

Can a drop of whiteness or “looking white” save someone from anti-Blackness? Are mixed-race peoples special, and should they be a protected class under the law? Did Loving v. Virginia’s legalization of interracial marriage lead to race becoming insignificant? Tanya Hernández’s Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination debunks persistent myths that racial mixture will eradicate racism and heal the racial wounds of the United States. Using cases and other legal sources, Hernández persuasively argues that multiracials are not exempt from racial discrimination. Multiracials and Civil Rights crystalizes the pervasiveness of white supremacy while offering a sociopolitical lens by which to tackle racial injustices.

Hernández’s book hails from legal studies and offers a much needed lens to augment understandings of race, law, and the state. Much of the scholarship on mixed race studies comes from sociology, political science, psychology, history, media studies, and literature. The book accomplishes an important intervention, with an evident dedication to engaged research and scholarship, marking the tangible material realities of multiracials in the legal system. Presenting a valuable archive of legal records, Hernández addresses how multiracials experience discrimination and captures a U.S. landscape of white supremacy and racial discrimination coexisting with ideologies of colorblindness and racial progress. Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination converses with literature in several fields and joins a recent plethora of scholarship on mixed-race identities, stories, and experiences.

Read the entire commentary and review here.

Personal Identity Equality and Racial Misrecognition: Review Essay of Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development
Volume 34, Issue 1 (Spring 2021)
pages 13-37

Taunya Lovell Banks, Jacob A. France Professor Emeritus of Equality Jurisprudence
Francis King Carey School of Law
University of Maryland

Tanya K. Hernández in her book, Multiracials and Civil Rights, responds to arguments by multiracial legal identity scholars. According to Professor Hernández, these legal scholars who argue that anti-discrimination law fails to protect their right to racial personal identity equality. Specifically, the gravamen of their harm is the misrecognition or non-recognition by law and society of a multiracial person’s chosen identity. Professor Hernández’s book provides an opportunity to consider the extent and degree to which the multiracial identity movement undercuts, not only the right of multiracial individuals to seek legal remedies for race discrimination in various aspects of their lives, but more importantly, the larger project, namely the dismantling of an American hierarchy grounded in an ideology of white dominance. This review essay explores the problems with the multiracial legal identity scholars’ arguments and Hernández’s suggestions for remediation.

Read the entire essay here.

The accusation of colorism in the light-skinned casting choices illuminates a problem regarding whom Hollywood presents as “Latino,” and whom it excludes, according to Tanya K. Hernández, author of Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination. “There is often a complete erasure of Afro-Latinos, and a frozen, overly romanticized picture of indigenous peoples as only historical figures from a Mayan past,” she says. Any viewer of American TV or movies can observe that mainstream media typically highlights light-skinned Latinos, even though a 2014 Pew Research Center survey showed nearly one in four Latinos identifies as Afro-Latino.

Andrea Marks, “How ‘In the Heights’ Casting Focused a Wider Problem of Afro-Latino Representation,” Rolling Stone, June 16, 2021. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/in-the-heights-casting-colorism-afro-latino-1184945/.

How ‘In the Heights’ Casting Focused a Wider Problem of Afro-Latino Representation

Rolling Stone
2021-06-16

Andrea Marks, Research Editor

MELISSA BARRERA (center) as Vanessa in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “IN THE HEIGHTS” Macall Polay/Warner Bros

A prevalence of light-skinned actors demonstrates Hollywood’s — and Latin America’s — history of colorism

When the musical In the Heights debuted in 2008, it was considered a triumph of Latin American story-telling. Written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent, it brought the barrio to Broadway and centered Latino immigrants building a community in New York “north of 96th street” so their children could chase the American Dream. The plot is centered around Usnavi (originally played by Miranda himself), the son of Dominican immigrants, who runs the family bodega but dreams of something bigger.

The movie version of the Tony Award–winning show hit theaters and HBO Max last week to largely positive reviews and praise for its three-dimensional portrayals of Latin-American characters, not to mention its ambitious full-cast musical numbers. A majority-Latino cast carries the film, starring actors like Anthony Ramos, a star of Miranda’s other Broadway blockbuster, Hamilton, who is of Puerto Rican descent, playing Usnavi; Mexican TV actress Melissa Barrera; and Bronx-born bachata singer Leslie Grace, who is of Dominican descent. At the same time, many viewers have expressed disappointment at a lack of Afro-Latino representation in the cast, especially among lead characters…

Read the entire article here.

Being mixed-race in the age of BLM

The New York Daily News
2021-06-12

Tanya K. Hernández, Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law; Associate Director & Head of Global and Comparative Law Programs and Initiatives
Fordham University School of Law, New York, New York

Protesters march for the sixth consecutive night of protest on September 7, 2020, following the release of video evidence that shows the death of Daniel Prude while in the custody of Rochester Police in Rochester, New York. (MARANIE R. STAAB/AFP via Getty Images)

Today marks the 54th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia, the landmark Supreme Court decision that invalidated interracial marriage bans in the United States in 1967. Interracial marriage has been legal across the nation for nearly half a century, but the children of mixed-race marriages and other interracial unions are still subject to many other types of discrimination that their parents and ancestors faced. The persistence of such bias shows that while courts have may have remedied the bias behind interracial marriage bans, but they remain unable to blunt the continued vibrancy of white supremacy in the United States.

In my book, “Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination,” I found that mixed-race arrestees describe their experiences of racial profiling and police violence in much the same way that single-race identified non-whites do. Thus, like George Floyd, the African-American man killed in 2020, by police officer Derek Chauvin, multiracial people can also experience being viewed as so inherently suspicious that they warrant out-sized interventions based upon their non-white racial appearance…

Read the entire article here.