Catherine Powell 

Tanya Katerí Hernández’s book, Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality Racial Innocence, builds beautifully on her previous work. This latest book provides a trenchant critique of the racial democracy myth prevalent among Latinos and Latin Americans—that racial mixing will eliminate racism. While commentators throughout the Americas have pointed to mestizo identity as moving us toward a post-racial future, Professor Hernández reveals how Black identity continues to be entrenched, stigmatized, and (treated as) inferior. Let’s face it: Rather than moving us toward a universalism in which everyone’s humanity is affirmed, the racial ambiguity of Afro-Latino (and other mixed race) identities enables those with lighter/whiter features to operate strategically within a framework of white privilege and Black inferiority. 

My work grapples with a related myth concerning the notion of a post-racial future: we must pierce the mythology of colorblindness in the virtual world of cyberspace, just as Tanya disrupts racial innocence in her work. In this post, I’ll use Afrofuturism as a touchstone to connect the pessimism I suspect Professor Hernández and I share concerning our ostensible post-racial future. 

Why Afrofuturism? From Octavia Butler to the Black Panther film franchise, Afrofuturism “refram[es] and reimagin[es] the past, present, and future through a global Black lens [as a] multi-media movement rooted in issues of social justice and equity, [] center[ing] African and African American contributions to the advancement of science, technology, and culture [] often explored through music, art, and literature.” Alondra Nelson explains Afrofuturism “as a way of examining alienation and the aspirations of Black people for a better future.” Afrofuturism is a comparative project, in that it allows us to time travel—to look to the past to understand our present, even as we look to the future we are striving toward to inform where we are headed in the present moment. In the sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, we travel across time and geography—from the mythical Wakanda to Cambridge, Massachusetts to Haiti, the first Black Republic. Rather than imagining a post-racial future, Afrofuturism acknowledges the endurance of race, but imagines a future where each of us are celebrated, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, and other characteristics that make us unique, while part of shared traditions.

Professor Hernández’s work is comparative as well—taking us to Latin America and then back to the United States. In fact, we can draw a direct line through a trilogy of her books, concerning how law and practice obscure Blackness, even as it remains salient, here and there. Her first book on Racial Subordination in Latin America helps us understand the endurance of Blackness as a social construct, even in the midst of the phenomenon of “blanqueamiento” (or whitening) in Brazil and in other parts of the Americas. In a subsequent book—Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed Race Stories of Discrimination—Hernández interrogates related themes, making visible the significant work Blackness performs, informing the discrimination that people of mixed race face. 

In this post, I explore two themes from Professor Hernández’s latest, remarkably well-researched book, and then use Afrofuturism to tie these themes to my own current work on race in the digital space. The first theme is ways in which we see—and don’t see—race. I then turn to a second theme: the role of place and space in marking race and Blackness. In an Afrofuturist vein, rather than imagining a post-racial future, this post imagines a future in which race is enduring as a social construct, but one in which we are each celebrated, regardless of race and other protected characteristics. 

Race as Both Invisible and Hypervisible 

First, Professor Hernández’s book documents ways we see—and don’t see—race. In several parts of the book, she explores how race is made visible and invisible within the Latino community. For example, she points to the adoration of, say, Celia Cruz and the mythification of Black women and folkloric others, and the absolute love for the art that Black individuals create. But Hernández also notes how this co-exists with the hierarchical impulse to generally denigrate Blacks as intellectually inferior and socially dangerous. 

At another point, Professor Hernández notes that despite the mounting evidence that there are distinct social outcomes within Latino communities based on race—for example in housing, education, labor market access, and criminal justice outcomes—the unequal treatment of Afro-Latinos is invisible in our public discourse. Hernández laments, “hidden from view is the way Latino disregard for Blackness plays a role in the subordinated status of Afro-Latinos and in turn the exclusion of African Americans.” 

Racial Innocence cites to Latino workplace supervisors, Latino homeowners, and Latino police officers discriminating against Blacks—and even how Latino educators can belittle Black children. Professor Hernández goes on to note that most heinous perpetrators of anti-Black bias within the Latino community are the Latinos who join violent white power organizations. Yet, she points out, “many Latinos deny the existence of prejudice against Afro-Latinos and African Americans.” 

Notably, Professor Hernández discusses the ways that anti-Blackness is situated as an ostensibly “culturally foreign North American construct learned only once in the United States when ‘racially innocent’ Latinos encounter racist thinking for the first time.” And yet, as her earlier work helps us understand, because the legacy of slavery touched so many parts of Latin America, anti-Blackness have been prevalent throughout the Americas. This mythology of “racially innocent” Latinos encountering racism for the first time upon arrival in the United States connects to the second theme I found revelatory in this new book. 

Space and Place in Recreating Race 

This second theme relates to the ways that Professor Hernández analyzes the role of place and space in recreating race. From an Afrofuturism standpoint, we can recognize that even as race travels across time, it travels across space. And space, place, and belonging do important work in recreating race. I appreciate Hernández’s treatment of this, having previously worked as a NAACP LDF litigator challenging school inequities and other forms of discrimination related to residential segregation. As we all know, many parts of our countries remain racially segregated, for example, in housing and education, because of both the de jure Jim Crow in the past and the ongoing de facto realities. Scholars, such Elise Boddie, have theorized about racial territoriality and the salience of place and space in recreating and reinforcing race and race inequality. 

Illuminating the theme of race and place in Racial Innocence, Professor Hernández notes that Afro-Latinos are more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods—more so than white Latinos. She also argues that Latinos attribute “disorder” to predominantly African American neighborhoods. Further, Hernández reports that Latinos in Los Angeles have even proposed having block associations meetings that exclude African American residents. 

According to Hernández, the residential sprawl in Los Angeles and Miami results in Latinos and African Americans being more spatially segregated than in New York City. By contrast, in the Big Apple, “the urban density of the built environment has historically contained Puerto Ricans and African Americans in closer proximity to one another in ways that have fostered greater interaction and community[.]” Nonetheless, Hernández notes that Dominicans and African Americans have a high level of residential segregation from one another in NYC. 

Afrofuturism in Cyberspace 

Along similar lines, in my Race and Rights in a Digital Age essay, I explore how we see and don’t see race online. The adage—“on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”—reflects a now naïve belief in the emancipatory potential of cyberspace. Supposedly, you could “cross-dress” online and cloak identifying features such as race, gender, accent, age, etc. However, far from blinding us from race, we now know cyberspace recreates and even reinforces our attention to race through the datafication of our identities and amplification of this data through algorithms. 

While residential segregation both produces and reinforces racial hierarchy, the digital universe promised to dissolve such geographic and identity boundaries. During my time working on the National Security Council during the Arab Spring, many observers viewed the so-called “Twitter Revolution” as illustrating the possibility of social media as a liberatory space for cross-racial and cross-national organizing and solidarity. 

Yet, the cyber utopian vision quickly proved illusory. Egypt and Syria violently repressed activists and bloggers, using censorship and surveillance to counter online organizing. Racial and other forms of hatred crept in from the hidden corners of bulletin boards to mainstream sites. Cybermobs have beset women and queer people with online abuse. In fact, far from being colorblind, tech platforms and aggregators of online data know our identities, our political preferences, and the intimate details of our lives in excruciating detail. The use of race, gender, and other protected characteristics spills over from the non-virtual to the virtual world (and back again). Further, algorithms—which are now widely used by landlords, advertisers, banks, and law enforcement—makes it possible for race to be impermissibly used as a basis of decision making in ways that are hard to detect. 

Consider also our personal relationships with each other across race. Professor Hernández points to the preference within the Latino community for marrying lighter skinned Latinos (in parallel to blanqueamiento/ whitening in Brazil). In the United States, residential and other forms of integration (i.e., in education and employment) facilitated a rise in interracial dating and marriage, as potential mates could more easily get to know each other in increasing integrated neighborhoods and other shared spaces on college campuses and in the workplace. In a forthcoming book on interracial intimacy, family law scholar, Solangel Maldonado, argues that the rise of online dating has reinforced default assumptions—encouraging users to rely on search parameters for potential mates from within one’s own racial group, given that this is what is familiar (and given the practical time constraints of wading through an infinite number of dating profiles). 

Building on these themes, my current work explores how despite the liberatory potential of technology, cyberspace recreates race in ways that are oftentimes problematic. On the one hand, technology offers the freedom to construct and perform identity as well as build online solidarity within and across communities. But, on the other hand, race awareness bleeds through into digital space in ways that perpetuate and even amplify discrimination through algorithms that embed conscious and unconscious bias.

I draw inspiration from Osagie Obasogie’s book, Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind—which shows that even people who are literally blind perceive race in the same way as sighted people, despite not being able to see race. Similarly, even if race is not seen (or included) as an explicit variable in an algorithm, algorithmic decision making imports proxies and embed many of the biases that humans have. Further, humans are often “in the loop” in algorithmic governance, the operation of artificial intelligence (AI), and content moderation. 

Cyber optimists had speculated that new technologies could help usher in a post-racial future, perhaps not entirely unlike the ways futurist vision that forecasters claimed intermarriage and “whitening” might inaugurate (as Professor Hernández explores in her work). Automated decision-making seemed free of human bias. Yet, instead of stripping away race identity, these technologies have in fact imported our attention to race, using a variety of algorithms, markers, and proxies that predict or reflect our identities. So rather than helping us embrace the humanity of others, regardless of their race, AI has replicated the dehumanizing features of racism and racial hierarchy. That machines can now make such decisions with adverse racial impacts poses a challenge for the idea of colorblindness. Thus, even as we move into a digital age of posthumanism and transhumanism, race endures as a construct. 

While other scholars have explored how algorithms can be used in discriminatory ways, I’m making a different point: we must skewer the mythology of colorblindness not only offline, but also online. Focusing on the role of race in automated decision-making is significant because of its role in determining housing access, which school a child may attend, how a credit score is calculated, whether an individual is offered credit from a bank, whether someone will receive an interview for a job, whether to allow an individual out of jail on bail, and where to dedicate police resources (based on predictions about where crimes will occur and who is likely to commit a crime). 

In sum, whether in Latino communities or in other communities on- and offline, we must be alert to how we see and don’t see Blackness as well as the role of space and place in reifying race and race inequality. From an Afrofuturism perspective, the health of our democracy depends on lifting the blinders to better redress the role of inequality in our nation’s past and present. Racial Innocence is an especially vital read for the critical project of building coalitions—between Black and Brown communities in particular—to advance a range of urgent social justice goals and needs today.