Despite the fact that Latinx communities also suffer disproportionate levels of violence and arrests at the hands of the police, their silence and lack of staunch support for the Black Lives Matter movement is deafening.
“And to all the racist Latinos: eso no se hace, eso no se hace, y yo no me voy a quedar callado,” read a sign at a recent Black Lives Matter protest against racism and anti-Blackness in Miami. Translated from Spanish, it reads, “You can’t do that, you can’t do that, and I’m not going to stay silent”. “Where are my Latinos?” read another amidst the sea of protesters and posters — a sea lacking in Latinx individuals.
For Afro-Latinx individuals in Miami, the lack of support for Black Lives Matter was no surprise. In many ways, anti-Blackness in Miami is just as prominent and widespread as it is in other areas with much smaller minority communities. North Carolina native Omilani Alcarón, an Afro-Latinx filmmaker and director of “Latinegras,” points out that Miamians often try to separate themselves from the stereotypical ideologies of the South when they are not all that different. “Growing up in the ‘South South,’ you know, you’d see people who have Confederate flags and all of these kinds of things. And honestly, even my experience with that kind of people who wear red [MAGA] shirts and everything, it wasn’t as racist as the humans I encountered here in Miami,” she said.
In a city like Miami, where Latinx communities comprise the majority of the population, their absence from large-scale protests is especially noticeable. Thus, the absence of these communities from the protests that shook Miami in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was palpable.
These protests were against the history of police violence in the United States, violence that Miami is in no way exempt from with its long history of police violence against Black communities. For example, President Trump’s now-infamous “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” tweet is a direct quote from Miami’s police chief in 1967, Walter Headley. Known for his “get tough” crime policy — one which disproportionately affected Black and Brown communities — he used the phrase to describe his message to Black criminals and was sharply criticized by civil rights activists of the time.
Despite the fact that Latinx communities also suffer disproportionate levels of violence and arrests at the hands of the police, their silence and lack of staunch support for the Black Lives Matter movement is deafening. While Black people, both Latinx and non-Latinx, are vastly overrepresented in Miami-Dade County’s criminal justice system, Black Latinx Miamians suffer the largest disparity. Compared to White Miamians, they experience a four times greater arrest rate, a 5.5 times higher conviction rate, and a six times greater incarceration rate. Latinx communities failing to support Black Lives Matter is not just a lack of solidarity with another community. It is evidence of the denial of Afro-Latinx individuals and the racism they face within the Latinx community. This racism is a result of Whiteness being viewed as the norm so Afro-Latinx individuals are cast aside.
Alcarón sees the problem in Miami as one of deeply entrenched anti-Blackness. “I was so excited to be coming to a town that is known as ‘America’s Latin City,’” she said. “They use these terms like ‘diversity’ and talk about how Latinidad flourishes here. But then I was in all these spaces, and people would act like they saw an anomaly. Like ‘What? A black person speaking Spanish? Where did you learn it? Oh, how come you can say your last name?’” In many Latinx communities, a history of colorism and anti-Blackness within Latinx homes and Latinx culture, stemming from Latin America’s colonization, has led to the erasure of the Afro-Latinx identity that people like Alcarón claim. It also underlies the now-monumental lack of support for Black Lives Matter.
Anti-Blackness in the Home
“Tenemos que mejorar la raza,” my aunt explained to me from across the crowded dining room table as she sketched out the ideal mate for my 10-year old self: tall, blonde, blue-eyed, White. Growing up, I would find myself at the center of these conversations at countless family gatherings. The setting and family member in question would vary, but the underlying message of anti-Blackness, and the idea that White beauty standards were ideal, was always the same.
As is true in many Latinx families, many older members of my family celebrate Whiteness openly, even if unintentionally. They praise Eurocentric beauty standards, while casting aside those with darker skin and African or Indigenous ancestry. They maintain a hyper-awareness of skin color that has existed for centuries. Armed with the countless terms used to describe dozens of multiracial identities and fluctuations in skin tone — mulato(a), moreno(a), negrito(a), indio(a), mestizo(a), prieto(a), zambo(a), to name a few — they hold up the vestiges of a deeply entrenched system of race inequality and White supremacy. Jokes about marrying a gringo for the ‘betterment of the family line’ were often touted as just that, innocent jokes, but underlying the old-fashioned quips is the insidious reality of a deep-rooted colorism — one that finds dangerous manifestations in the home and greater Latinx culture.
At present, amidst widespread mobilization for the Black Lives Matter movement, the deep-rooted anti-Blackness of Latinx communities drives feelings that this is not our fight to take part in. The desire to distance ourselves from our origins — something that goes hand in hand with the desire to be White or, at the very least, Whiter — allows many to wrongfully disengage with the demands of Black Lives Matter, relegating the issue to the side as something that does not affect Latinx individuals.
The pervasiveness of anti-Black attitudes in Latinx communities is such that it affects Afro-Latinx individuals’ perceptions of their identity. According to a 2016 study, 25% of U.S. Latinx individuals identify as Afro-Latino or Afro-Caribbean with Latin American roots. However, these individuals are more likely to identify as White or Hispanic (which is an ethnicity, not a race) than Black when asked about their race. Even among Afro-Latinx individuals alone, only 18% report their race as Black, with 39% reporting their race as White and 24% as Hispanic. This desire by certain Latinx individuals to be seen as more White — sometimes regardless of racial background — is rooted in a long history of colorism and anti-Blackness in Latin America.
The Historic Roots of Colorism
Leading up to and following Latin American independence, mestizaje, or racial mixing, was celebrated as a method for remedying racial inequality. In reality, it was a front for colorblindness. As multiracial individuals often enjoyed privileges previously afforded exclusively to White colonizers, their very existence was touted as a testament to racial harmony in Latin American communities. Latin American leaders often pushed the narrative that if multiracial individuals with Black or Indigenous ancestry were treated as well as White individuals, then surely there was something to be said about the progressivity of racial politics in Latin America. This gave rise to the flawed belief that Latin America had successfully solved racism.
After independence, mestizaje would be encouraged for the sake of ‘Whitening’ the population and blurring ethnic lines, as evidenced by the practice of branqueamento in Brazil during the early 20th century. According to Deborah J. Yashar in her piece “Does Race Matter in Latin America?: How Racial and Ethnic Identities Shape the Region’s Politics,” Latin American leaders believed that White genes were stronger than those of other races, so multiracial individuals would be a step towards the greater ‘Whitening’ of the population. This ideology made multiracial individuals the national ideal merely because of their perceived proximity to Whiteness.
Later on, in the 20th century, Latin American governments implemented policies that ignored race as a political distinction, instead of focusing on the institutionalization of economic status as the primary identifier in order to consolidate support from the working class. Indigenous communities and Black communities, for example, lost the ability to use their race and ethnicity as a distinction in many countries and were instead lumped into the category of “peasants.” This created an incentive for governments to ignore the racial inequities that were prevalent in Latin America, serving to further perpetuate Latin America’s anti-Blackness and the false idea that Latin American countries had solved the problem of racism. It left Blackness to be ignored and therefore continually oppressed despite it being at the base of Latinx culture. Much of Latinx popular culture — from bachata to reggaeton — finds its origins in Black culture, but because of this history of colorblindness and colorism, the realities of Afro-Latinx identity are often erased.
The anti-Blackness in Miami’s Latinx communities comes from a history of anti-Blackness in our countries of origin and the colorblindness instilled in us from youth. While this history is not an excuse it offers context to the widely-held belief in Latinx communities that their home countries have solved racism, that the racism they experience or perpetuate upon immigrating is not one that is native to their home countries but one that is distinctly American. For example, in Cuban American communities, it is common to hear people say, “‘Well in Cuba we all got along. We didn’t have the race problem like we do in the United States, so how can you accuse us of being racist? We’re not racist,’” said Michael Bustamante, an assistant professor of Latin American History at Florida International University in an interview. “And yet, you can be around a family of Cuban people and you can hear things that are blatantly racist.” It is this very belief in the lack of racism within Latinx communities that is at play when we see the lack of fervent support for Black Lives Matter coming from our communities here in Miami. For Latin American individuals such as myself to believe this and ignore the complex histories of anti-Blackness and colorism of our own patrias, and the ways they manifest within our homes and community spaces, is tantamount to complicity. We cannot excuse ourselves from our own racism.
The Miami Bubble
Many Latinx Miamians, like myself, benefit from the color of our skin in Miami’s bubble. Because of the city’s insular nature, its distinction as a hub for immigrants, and the fact that 70% of its population is Hispanic or Latinx, White-passing Latinx individuals make up much of the elite of Miami society. According to Bustamante, this comes from “a tendency to equate Cuban or Latino or Hispanic with Whiteness, especially in a place in Miami where Hispanic and Latinos are the dominant force and have the luxury of defining themselves as white.” Like the propensity of colorism in Latinx communities, this, too, has historical precedent.
When what is often considered to be the first big wave of Cuban immigrants came to the United States in the 1960s, they were mostly welcomed with preferential immigration status into Miami, a city of the Jim Crow South which was at the time still in the midst of desegregation. This “red carpet” entry — in the words of Bustamante — coupled with the fact that many of the people fleeing Cuba were light-skinned individuals from the upper and middle classes, meant that Cuban Americans were able to replace White Miamians in positions of power. While Cuba was more racially integrated than the U.S. at the time, it was not less racist or less anti-Black, according to Bustamante. He said that this, coupled with the labor displacement going on in Miami in the 1960s when Cuban Americans started to work in jobs usually worked by Black people, “sets the ground for a really long history of tension between the African American community in Miami and the Cuban American community.”
In many White-passing Latinx communities of Miami, anti-Black sentiments persist. This is true of more recent Cuban immigrants, who, according to Bustamante, are some of the most vocal in using extreme rhetoric against Black Lives Matter and the surrounding protests. The case of the Proud Boys, a far-right, White supremacist hate group and its chairman serves as a clear example of this. Though the group is one which would target Latinx communities otherwise due to its connection to White supremacy, its chairman, Enrique Tarrio, is a first-generation Miami-born Cuban-American. “From the vantage point of the Miami bubble, people can delude themselves into thinking that they are as White as everyone else,” Bustamante said. This phenomenon only adds to the anti-Blackness in Latinx communities.
At its core, anti-Black racism in Latinx communities stems from and feeds into a system of White supremacy. This dangerous ideology oppresses Latinx people. Collective organizing and allyship amongst Latinx and Black communities — and all their intersections — are crucial in the fight against White supremacy and anti-Blackness. “No one will experience true liberation unless we are all free,” said Jasmine Haywood, an Afro-Latinx researcher on anti-Black racism. “Unless White-presenting Latinos join in solidarity with Afro-descendent Latinos and Black folks, no one is going to win and no one is going to experience liberation. All the struggles they both experience are intertwined and intermingled, the common denominator is racism and white supremacy.”
White-passing and lighter-skinned Latinx Miamians must join the fight against anti-Black racism, not just in solidarity with the outward Black Lives Matter movement, but within their own communities as well. We must break down the internalized anti-Blackness instilled in us from youth, an anti-Blackness with deep-seated roots in our own cultures that we must recognize in order to take down, to stand with those oppressed within our own Latinx communities and in the greater Miami community. We, the Latinx community, are set to become the most influential minority voting bloc in the United States for the 2020 election. We must support policies that combat systemic racism and anti-Blackness. And just as we must take the fight to the polls, we must also bring it to our streets, to our social media platforms, and especially to our once-complicit family conversations around the dinner table.
Image Credit: “George Floyd Protests in Miami, Florida” by Mike Shaheen is licensed under CC BY 2.0.