James Baldwin and Latino Racial Innocence

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Tanya K. Hernández, Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (Beacon Press, 2022).

No writing on race today should ever be done without 1) considering the work of James Baldwin, and 2) being in meaningful conversation with the contemporary scholars you respect.  I am honored that this book symposium enables me to do both. I wish to express profound gratitude to Jack Balkin and Linda McClain in organizing the book symposium and to all the participants for their generosity of time in carefully assessing what Racial Innocence has to offer. 

It was exactly 60 years ago, that Baldwin articulated the concept of racial innocence in his essay “A Letter to My Nephew” in The Progressive Magazine, and later included it in his seminal book The Fire Next Time. In it he observes:

[T]his is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen  . . . that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it . . . but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent.  It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

Racial Innocence extends the Baldwin insight to examining how people of color themselves commit the crime of racial innocence.  The Latino community serves as the case study for the book. Blogger Gerald Torres importantly questions whether racial innocence is more a reflection of disingenuity than of true innocence. Like Baldwin, I do not believe that the two are mutually exclusive when innocents “do not know and do not want to know” how they are implicated in systems of oppression. Admittedly, constructing and maintaining the mindset of racial innocence in a world of evident racial disparities certainly entails concerted effort. Blogger George Martinez aptly characterizes this as an “epistemology of ignorance.” However, regardless of the extent of effort involved, it is the self-image of innocence that does the deleterious work. Blogger Linda McClain’s work on the “rhetoric of bigotry” also supports this premise.  This is because the national framing of bigotry as being the opposite of beliefs we sincerely hold, only reinforces the inclination to resolutely hold onto a self-image of innocence. 

The book’s study of Latinos forcefully underscores the harm that the racial innocence mindset unleashes in normalizing racial hierarchies and abdicating any responsibility for addressing them. That Latinos are a racially diverse pan-ethnic group viewed “as people of color” further entrenches the notion that a “Latino-style” allegiance to colorism is not as serious as US-style racism. Not as serious for Latinos to address nor for courts to apply anti-discrimination law to. Yet, labeling Latino racial attitudes as less serious relies on ignoring the existence of Afro Latinos.

As Racial Innocence documents, Afro Latinos are targeted by White and lighter-skinned Latinos with the same derision, and exclusion in the labor market, housing market, educational sphere, and public accommodations, as are African Americans and other people from the African Diaspora. Including the Latino treatment of Afro Latinos within the examination of how other Blacks are treated, subverts the presumption that racism is not involved. Indeed, as Blogger Rhonda Reaves astutely points out, the LA City Council Latino race debacle of October 2022, was first understood as a Latino versus African American political turf skirmish. Inserting Afro Latinos into the picture illuminates a pattern of racialized actions that extends beyond ethnic interest group political competition. In other words, when the Afro Latino subject is made legible, an overarching anti-Blackness is also made visible that is bigger than just a Latino versus African American political narrative.

Attending to the Latino patterns of systemic Black exclusion disrupts the notion that Latino actions of racial exclusion are somehow different from how racism is always enacted across global Blackness. As Blogger Darren Lenard Hutchinson reminds us, Latinos are not beyond the Black-White binary.  In fact, the Black-White binary and White Supremacy exist within Latinidad (the Latino collective ethnic community).

This world within worlds concept is what makes Blogger Catherine Powell’s invitation to situate Racial Innocence as part of the Afro-Futurism conversation so appealing. Indeed, Octavia E. Butler’s articulation in Parable of the Talents, that “in order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn” resonates deeply with the book’s objective to deliver the harsh truths that burn but can transform.  However, as a proud Critical Race Theorist (CRT), I know that the book’s insights are anemic if not put into a public conversation beyond the legal academy. For this reason, my version of a book tour has included many talks at non-profits and community-based organizations. And when I participate in bookstore events they are organized as roundtable conversations with community stakeholders.

These efforts as CRT praxis (connecting theory to practical work aimed at transforming concrete social institutions) or as a student once said to me “the effort to change the world one person at a time,” have shown me that in order to effectuate the “awakening” that Blogger Berta Esperanza Hernández-Truyol describes, all three buckets of public reactions to the book will need to be addressed.

Response Bucket One: Denial

“I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, ‘No, this is not true. How bitter you are.’” James Baldwin, “A Letter to my Nephew.”

One segment of Latino event attendees challenges the veracity of the premise that Latinos exercise agency in anti-Blackness.  For these Latinos who are often White identified and/or otherwise light in appearance, there is a discomfort in acknowledging that racial attitudes are part of a group’s cultural heritage.  It is my hope that the book’s methodical documentation of the varied instances of Latino anti-Black bias in the workplace, sale and rental of homes, educational institutions, the criminal justice system, and public spaces of leisure, help to disrupt that denial.

Response Bucket Two: Emotional Identification

“I am writing this letter to you to try to tell you something of how to handle them.” James Baldwin, “A Letter to my Nephew.”

Another segment of event attendees is visibly moved by the narratives I share of the victims of Latino anti-Black bias contained in the book, and deeply appreciative of having found a language and grammar to articulate their own experiences of this bias. They are often Afro Latino, African American, African, West Indian, and light-skinned Latinos with a deep commitment to addressing social injustice wherever it is located. Regardless of racial identification, these are attendees who are relieved to finally have a resource with which to respond to the Latino racism-deniers.

Response Bucket Three: Surprise

“We with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” James Baldwin, “A Letter to my Nephew.”

The final segment of event attendees (often White non-Latino) is that of those with no previous knowledge of Latino racial pathologies. They parallel some of the jurors and judges in Racial Innocence, whose similar ignorance leads them to excuse Latino acts of Black racial exclusion simply because a defendant is Latino (as a kind of pseudo-defense). However, I am encouraged by how these event attendees are receptive to the book’s advocacy for the expansion of our nation’s racial literacy coverage.

The Takeaway:

Racial Innocence serves as an invitation for continued nuanced examinations of how other communities of color can be complicit in the operation of racism in the U.S. In addition to social justice activists and civil rights leaders, the lawyers and judges who enforce our nation’s anti-discrimination laws will find useful insights. Educating both lawyers and judges about how Latinos are not only victims of discrimination but also part of the problem of societal discrimination will fortify the ability of law to accurately assess and redress discrimination in an increasingly diverse society. Broadening our global racial literacy is not a cure-all, but it can certainly be part of the solution.

Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law. You can reach her by e-mail at THernandez@law.fordham.edu or on Twitter while it exists @ProfessorTKH.