How White Latinos are Against Reparations for Black Americans

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.