Revisiting race: Examining ”Blackness” in Latinx communities

Dr. Shantee Rosado, professor in Africana Studies at Rutgers University, delves into the intersections and emergence of Afro-Latinidad in the United States. Joined by D&I advisor Iveliz Crespo and Life Sciences partner Julia López, Rosado discusses coalition-building to advance racial equity, and shares strategies to combat anti-blackness and colorism in Latinx communities.

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Transcript:

Intro: Hi, I'm John Iino. And I'm Iveliz Crespo. Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast, Inclusivity Included: Powerful Personal Stories. In each episode of this podcast, our guests will share their personal stories, passions, and challenges, past and present, all with a goal of bringing people together and learning more about others. You might be surprised by what we all have in common, inclusivity included.

Iveliz: Welcome everyone to our podcast, Inclusivity Included. I'm today's host, Iveliz Crespo, and I'm joined by guest host Julia Lopez, a life sciences partner, and the firm's nationwide partner chair for the Hispanic Latinx Business Inclusion Group known as UNIDOS. And we are joined by our very special guest, Dr. Shantee Rosado, a professor at Rutgers University in the Africana Studies Department. Thank you both for joining me. I'm very excited for this discussion.

Julia: Thank you, Iveliz, for that introduction and welcome Dr. Rosado. Before we start, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your academic research, your background, and how it has influenced your work exploring blackness in Latinx communities?

Shantee: Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much to Iveliz and to Julia for having me on the podcast. So in order to talk about myself and my research, I think it helps to start with my personal background. I am Puerto Rican and Dominican, and I grew up between Puerto Rico and Connecticut. I find that my background really influences my research and it helps guide me towards the type of questions that I should be asking in my own work. So my research in essence looks at racial differences within the Latino group. So thinking about how do Latinos, and in my case, particularly Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in central Florida, what do they think about race? What do they think about politics? How do they engage with US society and ideas about race, politics, immigration within the country? So my current project, which is about emotions, really looks at how emotions can help kind of shape Latinos views on race and politics. So when you hear the idea that, for example, when you hear fear mongering around racial inequalities or racial unrest in the country, how does that affect someone who doesn't necessarily fit neatly into the categories of white, black, native American, Asian, within the us within those racial categories that the US has established and how it's affected my work exploring blackness is that I've really come to question how we value certain views on race versus others. So there's oftentimes the idea that when Latinos come to the US that they're confused about how race operates here, that they don't understand where they fit in terms of racial categories here, or how important race is here versus in Latin America. But really my work is trying to show that there's so many similarities across the Americas when it comes to race. There's a similar history in terms of colonialism, a similar history in terms of slavery, similar histories in terms of assimilationist projects by the state. So I argue in my work that there are more similarities than differences, and that when we pay attention to the similarities, we can start to understand why Latinos think the way they do about racial difference.

Iveliz: Thank you so much. So in your research and in your work, you talk a lot about the concept of Afro-Latina. For the viewers who may not, and the listeners who may not have an idea of what that is, could you just explain that, define that for us.

Shantee: Sure. So for me, Afro-Latina is really a way of making visible something that has always existed, or at least has always existed since the colonial period. An Afro-Latino is any Latino or any person from Latin America who has African ancestry. Usually the African ancestry is through the transatlantic slave trade in which only 5% of enslaved Africans were brought to the US to what we know today as North America. And the other 95% went to the Caribbean and to South America. And oftentimes when we talk about race in this country, we forget how many enslaved Africans were brought to the Caribbean and to South America, central America and Mexico. And instead, our views are that blackness and whiteness are what dominate here, and people in Latin America are just all racially mixed, which I think Afro-Latina kind of naming that African ancestry and pointing to it in particular really kind of forces us to think, wait, where does that come in? I thought that for folks who think that Latinos are all of one race, that really pushes back against that notion of Latin as ham homogenous, when in reality we know that there are roughly 150 million Afro descendants in Latin America. So I think it's very important, the project of Afro-Latina la, if we could talk about it as a project, aside from a self-identification, the project is really to make visible the blackness that has existed in Latin America since the colonial period, but that has been erased through different processes of colonization and through the hegemony, really, of the United States. Because when it comes to talking about race or really anything, US ideas are the ones that tend to dominate our thinking. And so Afro-Latina really kind of pushes against these easy notions of Latino equaling a certain kind of skin tone, hair type, et cetera, and saying, no, we're going to put the African ancestry that we have and that we know to exist in Latin America at the forefront.

Iveliz: It's really interesting to me. I think one of the things that I find most interesting in Latinx communities in the United States is that they find themselves navigating these racial constructs, this whiteness versus blackness, but they're also very much influenced by the history of colonization that you mentioned and the slave trade in Latin America and the Caribbean. Can you tell us a little bit about this history and how it plays a role in identity development, specifically how Latinos view themselves in terms of this US conception of blackness?

Shantee: Yeah. So one of the things, as I noted, a lot of people like to look at the slave trade as something that affected North America and not necessarily Latin America. But as I mentioned before, for the most part, it did affect Latin America and more so than the US in the sense of just pure numbers. So one thing to think about is that when enslaved Africans were brought to Latin America, when they were brought to Latin America, there were several things happening. First, the Spanish colonizers and Portuguese colonizers oftentimes came without their families. So there were mostly men who were coming into the Americas, enslaving Africans in places like Colombia, like Brazil, like Peru. And what ended up happening there is that they couldn't really find a way to develop nuclear families in the Americas except through the non-consensual essentially the rape of African women, which is where you see the beginning, the roots of mestizaje or race mixing in South America and the Caribbean and Mexico and Central America. So it's really important to remember that those differences in colonization influence what we see as Latinidad today. What we see as when someone asks you, what does a Latino look like? This is what they're basing their views on. One of the things that I like to remind people is that the colonizers were different, but the mission was the same. We are seeking to extract profit from the labor of enslaved Africans, right? Everything enslaved Africans were property in both places. The children of enslaved women, for example, if they were raped by a slave master, those children were also enslaved. And that is commonly spoken of as a US phenomenon, but also happen across Latin America as well. So it's really important to remember those things, particularly when you're thinking about how the colonizers then created, led to the creation of independent nations. So when the creation of independent nations began, what you ended up seeing in Latin America was state apparatuses trying to figure out how do we reconcile this idea of our nation as sovereign from Spain, as separate from Spain as independent, while also making sense of the racial diversity within those countries, right? We're talking about countries that, for example, in Dominican Republic, which shares an island with Haiti where 80 to 90% of the population was of African descent. So you have these situations where folks who were in the political elite we're thinking up ways to reconcile those two things. How do we separate ourselves from Spain while also gaining a footing relative to North America and relative to Europe as independent strong nations? So this is where the idea of the diesel starts coming more to the forefront. So the idea of mestizaje is just the idea that through mixing our races, we can improve our race. It's really an idea that later on got taken up by eugenics. It was obviously not a great idea, but the idea was, okay, we have all these black and indigenous people here and we can't necessarily get rid of them. What do we do with them? And what ended up happening was just this idea, this nation building concept of mestizaje, that if we have people mix racially, then eventually we can get rid of black and indigenous blood. So again, this ties into ideas around José Vasconcelos, who was a Mexican Mexican thinker. He developed this idea of La raza cósmica or this idea, this concept that Mexicans who were indigenous and Spanish in descent, that they were a superior race to Europeans, that actually the mixing of indigenous and European blood led to a superior being. But in essence, what that did was it completely erased African ancestry from the picture, completely erased black people, and ended up kind of reinforcing this idea that still lives today, which is that Latinos are all brown and they're brown because they're a mix of indigenous and European. So you can see how that erases indigenous contributions to Latin America and black contributions to Latin America. But it really did influence how people self-identified it influenced how people saw themselves. So then you kind of saw this narrative that nations aren't, that we aren't white or black, we're just Mexican, or we aren't white or black, we're just Puerto Rican, right? This idea that nationality was equal to race is very much tied to me. It's tied to this idea that, or this myth. I would say that we are all racially mixed and therefore there's no racial inequality. We are all one people. I think it does push back against obviously the horrors of Jim Crow and legalized racism in the us, but at the same time, it does erase the contributions of indigenous and black Latin Americans who still exist and whose contributions slowly people are trying to recover. So then for example, you see in the US things like a poll that was taken by Pew Research in 2016. So Pew Research ran a poll where they asked over a thousand Latinos to identify whether they have African ancestry or whether they saw themselves as Afro-Latino. And almost a quarter of respondents said that they did that they did identify as Afro-Latino or of having African ancestry. But of those who said that they had Afro-Latino who saw themselves as Afro-Latino, only 18% self-identified as black, 18% of the 24% identified as black, whereas 39% of those who identified as Afro-Latino said that they were white. So here you can see how we replicate this idea of mestizaje, of trying to attain whiteness of mixing, but with the intent of whitening that persists to this day, and how Latino self-identify and how people view blackness as something to kind of conquer through race mixing. And so we see evidence of that to this day in terms of polls like this, but also just in everyday talking to people, asking people, what are you? And they say, oh, well, I'm brown, or I'm mixed, or I'm whatever. And sometimes that doesn't necessarily correspond with us ideas of race. It's not a bad thing. I wouldn't say that, for example, Latino's way of viewing race is better than what is done in the us. But I would say that it is different and that at the end of the day, it still values whiteness over blackness or indigeneity. It still centers whiteness as the end goal, as the superior race amongst lots of races. So it's a problem and something that we need to combat.

Iveliz: Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you recapped our history for US history, and you also talked about the present day because I think not only is it reflected these ideas and these notions are just reflected in our everyday conversations. They're then reinforced, I think by Latino media when I turn on the TV to watch telenovelas. Well, my mom, what do I see? I don't see blackness represented. And I think that's something that is really interesting and is important to talk about, right? It's important to learn from our history and also recognize how that history impacts our day today.

Shantee: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think speaking of telenovelas, it really makes me think about what happened to young Afro-Latinos who don't see themselves reflected in the media that they're watching, who don't see themselves reflected in the fashion industry, and really any of the industries, with the exception of some, including sports for example, they might see themselves reflected there, but it really kind of limits the thinking, the imagination of what you can be, of what you can do when you don't see yourself reflected in media.

Iveliz: Absolutely. Now, Julia, I know you and I had a lot of discussions around what it means to be brown. Any thoughts or any input that you want to make?

Julia: Absolutely. And thank you for that background, Dr. Rosado. I want to focus now on colorism. I was born in Guatemala. I immigrated to this country when I was five years old. I'm not white, I'm not black, I'm brown. But I've lived in the skin that has marginalized me in the United States. Can you discuss colorism for us now and this broader concept that skin tone is paramount to how we each face racism and experience it in the United States?

Shantee: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's important when talking about colorism, I've heard people say things like racism exists in the us but in Latin America it's colorism. I disagree with that. First, I think there is racism in Latin America, and colorism is an aspect of that. It's kind of like saying colorism is like an outgrowth of racism. So you can't really separate the two and kind of make it seem like, oh, it's a little better in Latin America, not as blatant as here. So there's institutionalized racism and interpersonal racism in Latin America and throughout Latin America, and I think it's very easy to detect that when your safer example in Latin America, you can go to rich parts of town and then go to poorer parts of a certain city or town, and you're going to see the disparity in what people look like. You will see that distinction. So I think colorism is really important, again, as an outgrowth of the concept of racism for understanding why, for example, why there is a whitewashing of people in the telenovelas. Why do they all look the way that they do? It's important for thinking about access to resources. For example, in Dominican Republic and in many other places in Latin America, when you go to apply for an office job or a nicer job where you get to be inside and comfortable, usually the request is we want someone with CIA is the language that they use. CIA. CIA literally just means good presence. And when you think about how it's enacted, though, good presence equals lighter skin, straighter hair, fewer indigenous or Afro features, that is what CIA means in these spaces. So even though they're not explicitly saying it, they're kind of implicitly signaling that they would like to employ people who look closer to a European ideal. The thing in Latin America that a lot of people don't understand is that you can have different experiences of colorism within the same family. I think perhaps black Americans can relate to that because there is colorism within their families too. But in Latin America, it's almost like it's everywhere. It's not in the us. It's kind of because they follow this one drop rule. You have one drop of African blood and you're considered black. Therefore, colorism is seen as perhaps not mattering as much, but it does matter. It matters in the us. It matters in Latin America, and it's a product of colonialism. One interesting thing that might allow people to kind of understand how this works in Latin America is the Castas paintings in Mexico mostly. So the Castas paintings, in essence, they tried to picture what the children of different racial mixtures would look like. So there was a series of paintings. There were almost, I think 200 something paintings made. And each of the paintings show a man and a woman of a particular race and then what their child would look like and what they would name the child. So for example, if you have a European man and a black woman, the child of that couple would be called a mulato or a mulato, which is an outdated term in the US now. And so those racial hierarchies, the mulatto is above the Negro. The mulato is above the black person, but doesn't have the social status that a European or Criollo, which is just a European born in Latin America, would have. So colorism, really, it affects your access to opportunities. And that is the essence of racism, right? Is limiting of the access of people to resources, whether those resources are employment income, a good life, or even the ability to live a long life. As we find in the medical system here, it all kind of stems from where you are relative to power. This idea of positionality, where are you positioned relative to power? And the further that you are positioned from power, in this case, power equals whiteness, at least in this country and in Latin America, it does. The further that you're positioned from power, the less amount of access that you have to those resources.

Julia: That's right, and I can totally relate to it even within my family where I have two siblings that have light eyes and very fair skin. One is blonde and you can pass as white, and sometimes they are definitely, they don't face the same racism as a result of their skin tone and what they look like. Thank you for that, Dr. Rosado. So in your research, you also highlight how this anti-black sentiments among Latinos has several ramifications. Can you talk a little bit about that before we talk about how we're going to combat this anti-blackness and colorism?

Shantee: Yeah, absolutely. So in my research, one of the things that I found is that my respondents, for the most part, they were a mix of different appearances of different features. I had people who were incredibly fair skin, light eyes, straight hair, and I had respondents who were very dark skin, kinky hair. And that diversity within my sample really allowed me to ask these questions to kind of gauge what are the feelings of these Latino groups in particular Puerto Ricans and Dominicans? What are their feelings about blackness, particularly because they come from countries where blackness is very obvious, very visible, and a significant part of the culture. So how do they view blackness from a US standpoint? And what I found is that a lot of my respondents were ready to accept and ready to claim their African ancestry, which was in line with that pew research poll that I mentioned earlier. But at the same time, a lot of them were not willing or not able to combat negative narratives and racist narratives about African-Americans in particular. So I asked my respondents about the Black Lives Matter movement. I asked my respondents about police brutality and asked just how do these things make you feel, right? How does police brutality make you feel? How do the protests make you feel? And what I found is that there was a lot of policing of African-Americans behavior. There was a lot about how African-Americans should be less aggressive towards the police, should follow instructions better, how police officers have it tough too. And I think that things are slightly changing now. I think 2020 has kind of upended all of my expectations, and we're seeing a lot more solidarity between Latinos and African-Americans, and I think that's very hopeful. But in essence, those sentiments, those beliefs that African-Americans, that even if they are affected by police brutality, that if they behave differently, that it would be better. Those views, which I view as anti-black views, I think that they really harm. They harm the ability of us to create coalitions between marginalized groups. They harm our ability to create understanding between different racialized groups in the us. In essence, it really does normalize and allows the us, the state apparatus and police officers and law enforcement to perpetuate these injustices, and it normalizes this mistreatment.

Julia: Thank you, Dr. Rosado. So let's talk about how to combat anti-blackness narratives in the Latino community. I hear it broadly all the time, just generally in the community. I don't see color. I'm not a racist, but I also hear that narrative in Latinos who say, we're not racist. We're all Latinos. But in my opinion, that's not a reality. I don't believe that you can just eliminate racial inequality by ignoring racial differences. The reality of course, is that the experiences of black Latino are very different as we know from a white Latino. What broad lessons Dr. Rosado can we learn from the diaspora of the Latinx community on how to combat anti-black narratives?

Shantee: So I think that one of the things that we need to do is first, we have to acknowledge that racial differences exist. This idea that no, we're all Latinos or we're all Puerto Rican, or we're all Mexican or whatever, really does erase the experiences of those who do not have a similar experience, who have been marginalized, whether that's in Latin America or whether that's in the US relative to folks here. So I think it really matters to that folks. Remember that acknowledging racial differences doesn't mean that you are racist. I think that's the first lesson to learn. I think we also have to acknowledge that we do need to work together to combat injustice that our oppressions are woven. So for example, I may be fighting against anti-black racism, but I also have a brother who was deported from the US back to Dominican Republic, and his first encounter was not with ice, it wasn't with immigration, it was with the police, it was with law enforcement. So I think we have to acknowledge that those things intersect. That what people perceive as the black struggle and the Latino struggle are not two separate struggles. They both overlap and are connected, and that the way that folks choose to oppress black people is also used in different ways to police Latinos, right? Like when we're talking about policing, immigration and ice are connected to the police system. They're part of the police system pretty much at this point. So we have to acknowledge that our struggles are interlocked or they're interwoven, they are connected. And that if we don't start seeing the similarities between our struggles and the similarities in our histories, that we are never going to achieve freedom. We're never going to achieve equity. We aren't going to achieve anything resembling that. If there are these tensions and these misunderstandings between groups that are both racialized and marginalized in the us,

Julia: That is a very powerful Dr. Rosado. So again, listen and validate the black experience, acknowledge it, and work to deconstruct it together, really focusing on intentional collaboration and community building among our marginalized groups.

Iveliz: I echo that as well. I think it's really important for us to recognize our proximity, right? There is a difference between the white Latino experience, the black Latino experience, but also recognize how all of that oppression really impacts all of us as a whole, and we really do need to work together to combat it, because that's how we're going to bring about systemic change. I just want to say thank you both as we wrap up. Thank you. This has been a very informative discussion. I can't thank you enough for joining us and sharing your lived experiences as well as your professional experience experiences. So thank you, Dr. Rosado, and thank you, Julia.

Shantee: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on.

Julia: Thank you, Iveliz. Thank you, Dr. Rosado.

Outro: Inclusivity Included is a Reed Smith production. Our producer is Ali McCardell. This podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, PodBean and reedsmith.com.

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