Hispanics/Latinos Beware — Becoming a “Race” is Not All That
Hispanics/Latinos/Latinx — BEWARE
As recently as 2022, Pew Center for Research noted that approximately 25% of Latino/a/x/e’s self-identified as Afrolatin, and among those 1/3 identified as Black, effectively 4–6 million self-idenified in the U.S. In changing the Categorizations, it will severely hamper any further opportunity we, the Afrolatinx community has to be counted and recognized. from Statement of AfroLatino Project (https://bit.ly/censusafrolatinx)
Once POTUS Biden racializes you by making Hispanics/Latinos/Latinx a “race,” you will find yourself ensnared in the battle for racial justice and equality that Black people of African descent and Indigenous Americans have been battling for over 300 years, and still today.
Becoming a “race” in a country where it is used to disenfranchise is not all that. Indeed, making Hispanics a race on top of the immigrant status, will subject you (those unable to pass for “white”, to prejudices rooted in biology in addition to citizenship status challenges that can never be reversed!
Becoming “White” in America
The Irish did it (see How the Irish Became White), yet still face religious stigma, and the Jews did it (see How Jews Became White Folks and What that says about Race in America), yet Anti-Semitism is pervasive and resurfacing. The rich Cubans who abandoned their country after the Cuban Revolution in 195– like to pretend they are “white.” They marry white women, anglicize the pronunciation of their names and spend a lot of energy subjugating American Black people, and their own Indigenous and Afrolatinos people to show white Americans that they fit, and prove to their real white (American) masters that they have learned to authentically hate themselves, their heritage, and anyone, regardless of national origins, who is nonwhite.
I imagine it is difficult for people like DeSantis and Rubio to go home every night and peer into the mirror chanting the mantra — I’m white, I’m white, when their native language, culture and history say otherwise!
The Continuing Rule of White Masters/Massa in the 21st Century?
Now ask yourself, who gave this lowly white man (POTUS Joe Biden), who has authority over OMB (Management and Budget Office), the “power” to redefine an entire continent of Latin America, Central America, and the country of Mexico?
Is he God? Or merely another white Wiz of Oz hiding behind the curtain of whiteness?
Hispanic is an invented census term. It is “honorary white” classification for people like DeSantis and Rubio, but it often obscures Afrolatinos, Indigenous, and Asian people of Central and Latin America and some Caribbean Islands, who someimes check the “Other” box.
Becoming “white” may seem a way to navigate the racial landscape of America — but people with origins in Latin and Central America already have a problematic racial history founded on trying to make invisible and erase the Black presence in Latin America — no can do.
The Racialization Agenda
You see “race” is not a biological reality — it was/is created as a social system of classification designed to make sure that white, heterosexual (cisgender) men were always at the top of the food chain.
Systems of racialization are predicated on mistaken beliefs that biology created so-called “races.”
To the contrary, it people who established the social classification that has come to known as “races.” Black anthropologist, the late Audrey Smedley, confirms the invention of “race” as a social development.
Race as a mechanism of social stratification and as a form of human identity is a recent concept in human history. Historical records show that neither the idea nor ideologies associated with race existed before the seventeenth century. In the United States, race became the main form of human identity, and it has had a tragic effect on low-status “racial” minorities and on those people who perceive themselves as of “mixed race.” (Smedley, A. (1998), “Race” and the Construction of Human Identity. American Anthropologist, 100: 690–702. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.690)
In its implementation, race was presented as if it stemmed from biology. Because of this connection to biology, beliefs about the intellectual and physical capabilities of a racialized group were considered “fixed,” “immutable,” and unable to be changed. So a person from a “race” perceived as “unintelligent” or “subhuman” was considered to be that based on biology rather than education, environmental or other external factors that might impact learning capacity such as malnutrition.
We now know “race” is not genetic — e.g., biological (https://understandingrace.org/race-is-not-genetic/). Or do we? Clearly, OMB and Biden missed the science lessons, which has been circulating for several decades that race is a social construction, although racism is real in its impact on human lives.
The Biology of Human Variation
I do, however, want to make one fact clear — human variation is a real thing. That is, the observable differences we can see or analyze in skin color, hair texture, blood types are biological aspects rooted in human variation and our adaptation to geography as well as inherited traits — we carry both dominant and recessive traits, which can appear suddenly — like that cousin with red hair who just pops up in a family tree where everyone else’s hair is brown. Eyebrows are raised until it is revealed that there was once a red-headed ancestor way, way back — a recessive inherited biological trait — human variation. Such traits like red hair, blood types, skin color are rooted in biology and our environmental adaptation.
Race is not a biological fact. Also, our visible differences have absolutely NO connection to intelligence or wealth or class. The latter are functions of education, access to the means to make wealth, and the social class one into which a person is born — though they may escape birth social class through education and the accumulation of wealth.
The North American system of racialization is one used to justify treating certain human beings as subhuman and labeling my ancestors (and now me) as “inferior” in order to exploit our labor, support human trafficking (e.g., the buying and selling of slaves), and to justify the genocide of a nonwhite people, as well as the occupation and appropriation of their indigenous land and strategic resources. The battle with the U.S. government for indigenous rights to land and water is ongoing, with some successes after decades of struggle and protesting (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/15-native-american-tribes-to-receive-580-million-in-federal-money-for-water-rights-settlement#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Supreme%20Court%20ruled,any%20given%20reservation%20has%20existed).
The U.S. racialized social system of stratification remains firmly in place today both formally and informally. Indeed, as many have observed, “Zip code may not be destiny but it operates with the strength of something like gravity. The place you live exerts a terrific pull in one direction or another” (https://www.edpost.com/stories/zip-code-may-not-be-destiny-but-its-as-hard-to-fight-as-gravity ). But such social stratification is essential to ensure the perpetuation of white privilege, which was/is built upon the non-privilege of Black, brown, and Indigenous peoples
The fallacious ideology of white superiority is rooted in the presumption of white supremacy, and is part of the foundation of American democracy and its white wealth. Without such a system of so-called superior whites and so-called subordinate Blacks and Indigenous, and more recently Brown/Latinx, there would be virtually NO white wealth.
It is the labor of Black enslaved people and the theft of indigenous land and resources through genocide and/or disingenuous treaties that have made white wealth and white privilege possible.
These acts of enslavement, human trafficking, genocide, and violated treaties are the facts the “The W.O.K.E Act” legislation in Florida and the anti-CRT (Critical Race Theory) legislation in Iowa want to hide and erase.
Blanqueamiento: On Hispanics Becoming “White” in America
Hispanics are not new to racial politics. They have their own history of how Black and Indigenous people are always at the bottom of the social ladder — Always! Though theire is a phrase “money whitens,” which means that economic success can move a person up the social ladder, regardless of their ancestry.
Whitening up or blanqueamiento has always been at the heart of the racialization system in Latin America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanqueamiento ) Even if born in the U.S., Hispanics/Latin Americans, have absorbed a system of racialization in which the goal is to become less Black or Indigenous — e.g., erase any evidence of Blackness — and become recognized as white — those who can participate in “passing.” They rely upon their light-skin color to help them navigate white America — often marrying white and changing their last names, anglicizing the pronunciation, losing their Spanish accent, not teaching their children to speak Spanish, and masking any evidence of their cultural heritage.
Blanqueamiento contrasts sharply with the one-drop (hypodescent) practice in the United States; in effect, one drop of Black blood (ancestry) relegates the person to being identified as “Black.” Such a practice enabled slaveholders who raped Black enslaved women to ensure that the children from such a violent union would always be classified as Black and enslaved, regardless of their appearance. This sexual brutalization of Black women occurred on slave ships and during slavey was considered ‘entertainment” for slaveholders. Indeed, white masters could walk into slave cabins and assert power over Black men by taking Black girls and women, considered property, to use as sexual playthings. The children that came from these encounters account for the rainbow of skin color, hair texture, and other features (now all confirmed by DNA testing) observable in the Black population today. No amount of legislation will be able to erase this fact.
Historically, countries like Venezuela (Café con leche: Race, Class, and National Identity in Venezuela: https://utpress.utexas.edu/9780292790803) and Argentina (The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940: https://utpress.utexas.edu/9780292738577), advertised in the early 20th Century for Europeans and whites from Latin America to come and whiten the population of enslaved (Afrodescendants), indigenous people and mestizo, the latter a direct result of the Spanish mixing. Venezuela, often viewed as a “white” Latin American country is a good example of the steps taken to whiten the population and leaving those with African ancestry at the bottom.
Wright’s [Café con leche] research suggests that, contrary to popular belief, blacks in Venezuela have not enjoyed the full benefits of racial democracy. He finds that their status, even after the abolition of slavery in 1854, remained low in the minds of Venezuelan elites, who idealized the European somatic type and viewed blacks as inferior. Indeed, in an effort to whiten the population, Venezuelan elites promoted European immigration and blocked the entry of blacks and Asians during the early twentieth century.
And Graham explains in his Introduction to The Idea of Race in Latin America,
The idea of race also made it possible, paradoxically, for mestizos and mulattos — by identifying themselves with white elites as against Indigenous and black majorities — to accept theories that justified white domination over “colored“ populations.
These books provide a description of the reality of the pervasive and ongoing discrimination that exists throughout Latin America where total mestizaje never occurred and significant percentages of Afrodescendantes are found in Brazil (the largest population of people of African descent outside of Africa — over 50% of Brazil has African ancestry in their DNA), Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Panama. But there are also Black people in Argentina, Ecuador, Columbia, Honduras, Nicaragua, etc.
Sheila Walker, Black anthropologist, as well as many others, have documented that “[The] … fundamental roles [of Africans and their descendants] in the creation and definition of the new societies of the “new world,” and their significance in the development of the Atlantic world, have not been acknowledged.” But the efforts to become visible and heard by Afrodescendentes are historic and ongoing.
But Afrolatinos refuse to remain hidden or rendered invisible, and are protesting this U.S. Census change, while simultaneously demanding recognition at home.
So, this is my warning — Hispanics/Latinxs/Latinos Beware. Having white people decide who and what you are is heading into dangerous terrain, and puts whites once again into positions of enormous powers. Race is NOT Real. Don’t be suckered into this fake social categorization; things will only go downhill.
Black people in America know. We have been trying to remove the stigma and shackles of being defined as a “race,” and its collateral damage of individual, structural, and systemic racism, for almost 400 years.
Take it from us Hispanics/Latinxs/Latinos/Latin American, becoming a “race” is NOT all that.
Additional Readings:
Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White: https://a.co/d/d56IY6j
Brodkin, Karen, How Jews Became White Folks and What that says about Race in America: https://a.co/d/fHA0GSm
Roediger, David, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs: https://a.co/d/1HgZhAl
©2023 Irma McClaurin. A version of this was first published in Insight News on March 26, 2023.
Irma McClaurin (https://linktr.ee/dr.irma ) is the Culture and Education Editor for Insight News, a columnist named “Best in the Nation Columnist” by the Black Press of America in 2015, and a commentator on “The Conversation With Al McFarlane” (https://bit.ly/TCWAM). She is a past president of Shaw University and former Associate VP at the University of Minnesota and founding ED of UROC. This activist anthropologist was a recipient of the 2021 American Anthropological Association’s Engaged Anthropology Award, is author of Women of Belize and Editor of the award-winning Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis and Poetics, as well as a former Fulbright Specialist. A collection of her columns, JustSpeak: Reflections on Race, Culture & Politics in America, is forthcoming in 2023. She recently appeared in the 2023 PBS American Experience documentary, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space and is working on a book-length manuscript entitled Lifting Zora Neale Hurston from the Shadows of Anthropology.
