Social Distance, Social Reproduction, and Dismantling “Latino Anti-Black Bias”: A Comment on Tanya Katerí Hernández, 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).

Linda C. McClain

Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality, by  Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández, is a courageous book and a vital addition to a growing body of work helping readers to recognize and to dismantle anti-Blackness and structural racism in the United States. (Two powerful examples are  Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation). In Racial Innocence’s skillful melding of personal narrative with scholarly inquiry,  I also found some illuminating resonances with Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness, by Professor Maureen H. O’Connell.  In challenging the premise that “Latinos can’t be racist” with powerful stories, case law, and statistics, along with personal and familial narratives,  Professor Hernández demonstrates the limits of viewing anti-Black racism as being solely about “White non-Hispanics” (12).  As Professor Rhonda Reaves observes in this symposium, Racial Innocence challenges “the traditional notion that race in the United States coalesces around a Black/White binary and that only Whites can engage in racist behavior.” In a generative exchange between Leslie Espinoza and Angela Harris, Embracing the Tar-Baby: Lat-Crit Theory and the Sticky Mess of Race (published both in California Law Review and La Raza Journal), these two scholars candidly explored the tension between, on the one hand,  criticisms by LatCrit theorists of the “black-white paradigm” in the U.S. for making “other non-whites invisible”  and, on the other, a defense of  “[B]lack exceptionalism,” which centers the “black-white paradigm” because Black people must be placed at the “center” of “any analysis of American culture or American white supremacy” (10 La Raza L.J. 517; 85 Calif. L. Rev. 1603). They candidly addressed the worry (citing Ian Haney-López) that the embrace of “ethnicity” (rather than race) by Latino/as could implicitly be a rejection of “blackness” and an accommodation of the “white over black” hierarchy.  Twenty-five years later, Racial Innocence carefully and unflinchingly charts “Latino discrimination against Afro-Latinos and African Americans” to disrupt the narrative that “Latino anti-Blackness is a made-up problem” and to reveal how this bias contributes to the racial caste system (5-6, 10).

I recently had the good fortune to participate in a panel, “Can We Talk About Racism?,”  with Professor Hernández and Professor O’Connell—sponsored by Fordham Law School—putting their books into conversation with my Who’s The Bigot? Learning from Conflicts about Marriage and Civil Rights Law.  The prominent role played in Racial Innocence by “social distance” (as understood in the study of prejudice) was of particular interest to me. In Who’s the Bigot?, I reviewed classic texts in the scientific study of prejudice. One early tool was the “social distance scale,” used to measure the willingness of “Americans” to admit members of particular “races” (there were initially 40 such “races” in Emory Bogardus’s scales from the 1920s, including “Mexicans”) to various forms of contact. Such contact ranged from the most intimate (“close kinship by marriage”) to the most distant (willing to allow as a “visitor” to “my country” or “would exclude from my country”) (Who’s the Bigot?, 39). Many subsequent instruments aimed at revealing prejudice asked college students, for example, their willingness to engage in direct personal relations or social relations with Catholics, African Americans, and Jews: intermarriage was a frequent topic in such questions (39-40). These instruments also gauged attitudes about social equality—how willing were people surveyed to cross ethnic, racial and religious lines not only in marriage but also in a range of close social relations?  The use of these instruments highlights the Black/White binary or paradigm. As psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald observe, in Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, in the second half of the 20^th century, researchers “focused increasingly on Black-White relations, which became the most intensely studied form of prejudice—a status it retains to the present day” (175).

Professor Hernández expands that focus: while there are few “social science measures of Latino racial attitudes,” she finds that those that do exist “depict a consistent picture of a general Latino preference for maintaining social distance from African Americans” (20).  Racial Innocence  also looks beyond survey data to actual practices of social distancing between Latinos and African Americans in housing, schools, congregations, and workplaces  A powerful feature of the book is how Hernández brings in personal narratives and antidiscrimination cases involving  Afro-Latinos (persons who are “simultaneously ethnically Latino and racially Black,”  4)  to document how, across “diverse geographies,” “Latinos regulate public spaces to exclude and demean Blackness” (55).

As Isabel Wilkerson argued in Caste, “Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste” (19).  The place of families in perpetuating caste is a sobering topic that Professor Hernández examines, and of particular interest to me as a family law scholar. She  shows the role of “colorism” in creating a “Latino racial hierarchy,” as part of a “tightly woven caste system that prizes approximations to Whiteness”—and how families perpetuate that hierarchy (81). In her Epilogue, she shares painful experiences from her own family history as an Afro-Latino to show the disturbing role that family can play in reproducing anti-Blackness and creating family trauma. That personal narrative amplifies her broader documentation of “familial vigilance against Blackness” through pressure to marry “lighter and ideally Whiter partners” as a means of “improving and advancing the race” (18).

Here, Racial Innocence resonates with other scholarly investigations (e.g., Solangel Maldonado) of “romantic discrimination”—everyday choices in the dating and marriage market that reflect and perpetuate racial hierarchy. Even as Professor Hernández identifies the family as an important transmitter of “anti-Black racism,” she also recognizes the broader structural forces contributing to anti-Blackness. Similarly, the scientific study of prejudice looked to the family as a vital site either for inculcating in children attitudes of social equality and appreciating diversity or replicating the prejudices of the older generation. But it also recognized the vital role of the state and civil society actors in fighting prejudice. As pioneering social psychologist Gordon Allport once wrote, “No young child is ever a bigot.” He stressed that children should be educated for equality and for democracy (Who’s the Bigot?, 25). Today, a similar claim is that “children aren’t born racist” and that parents have an obligation to keep them from becoming so.   (Who can forget Senator Ted Cruz’s questioning of then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in her Senate confirmation hearings on that point and his obsessive referencing of the blown-up image of my BU colleague Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s book, Antiracist Baby?)  Professor Hernández seeks to disrupt the social reproduction in families of anti-Blackness. She also recognizes that this is one element in a broader agenda that must include, among other things, educating lawyers and judges about the role of anti-Blackness so that they can better enforce antidiscrimination law and inter-ethnic coalition building. 

In their significant scholarly conversation 25 years ago, Professors Espinoza and Harris addressed the importance of narrative to racial healing, praising the LatCrit project of telling and listening to stories, including uncovering “lost and obscured histories” (10 La Raza L.J., 557; 85 Calif. L. Rev. 1643). Professor  Hernández anticipates that some of her readers may question why the stories that she samples in Racial Innocence “should matter” (134). She first reminds readers of how social movements (such as the feminist movement) are built with individual stories.  Professor  Hernández’s further answer is a fitting way to conclude this commentary on her courageous—or, to agree with the term used by Professor Berta Esperanza Hernández-Truyol— “awakened” book: “The excavated voices lifted up in this book illuminate a pattern of Latino anti-Blackness across time, geographic spaces, and contexts. It is time to listen to those marginalized voices and have them matter” (134).

Linda C. McClain is Robert Kent Professor Of Law at Boston University School of Law. You can reach her by e-mail at lmcclain@bu.edu.