Hispanic. Criollo. Peninsular. Castizo. Mestizo. Ladino. Raizales. Palenqueros. Pueblos Indigenas. Quechua. Aymara. Zapotec. Pardo. Zambo. Afro-Latinx. Afro-Carribean. Negro. Moreno. Mulato. Cultural Mulato, Latinx…
Is your head spinning yet? That’s just a taste of the intersectional world of racism in Latin America, where skin color is also deeply and inextricably marinated in colour, culture, class and origin. I come from this broad tradition of mestizaje, or mixing of the races and cultures, and by that measure, I find that many people have a relatively superficial understanding of what racism actually is. Even tomes of reading about the black experience in America exposes us to just one facet of racism, albeit its worst manifestation in our country’s history. To understand racism and address problems highlighted by Black Lives Matter, I believe the Latinx experience also has much to offer.
When people ask me what’s my ethnicity or where I’m from, I’ve often shrugged and said I’m a “citizen of the world”, because it’s easier than explaining that each of my parents’ genetic ancestry is equally “Iberian” even though one is as light skinned as it gets and the other is quite dark skinned… or that they were born of different continents (Europe and South America), that I was born and raised in a third culture (United States), and that my olive skin is perhaps as much Native American as it is Moorish. By some federal measures, I am considered racially “white” as well as ethnically a “person of color”. Elsewhere, my racial and ethnic mileage varies depending on how that culture or government ascribes it. There is no precise word for what kind of Latinx I am, only borrowed ones like mestizo which can obfuscate as much as elucidate.
However I might answer the question about my ethnicity, chances are most people will ground on whatever measure they have of it anyway. Many of my white friends are unaware or forget that I am not white quite like them, and are mighty judgmental when I don’t behave in ways they expect a white person like them should act. That is, if they think of me as white to begin with. My POC friends may think I’m too white, or not white enough. Or a different kind of POC. And my black friends often don’t know the Latinx experience any more deeply than I know theirs, yet we share certain experiences that make us natural allies in the fight for Black Lives Matter against white supremacy.
In any case, I sometimes have white privilege and I sometimes don’t, depending on the situation and the eye of the beholder. Whatever room or video call I walk into, I’ll be sized up by my ethnicity, consciously or unconsciously according to that person’s standards, and rarely know which of the myriad of judgments about POC has been rendered until a microaggression arises. Or two. Or three.
It’s complicated being Latinx. Or Hispanic. Even POC can’t agree amongst ourselves what these terms mean sometimes. And these experiences are not unique to being Latinx; they are shared by many BIPOC who identify one way but are ascribed differently depending on the circumstances and who they are with.
So here’s three invaluable things that growing up Latinx taught me about racism and what I think it means to be truly anti-racist. These perspectives are my own, of course, and do not necessarily represent the multitude of experiences BIPOC have.
1. Colourism is the forgotten stepchild of racism.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other laws like it prohibit discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or national origin.” Have you ever paused to think about why race and color are called out separately?
Colourism is the prejudice that exists against people with a darker skin tone. It’s not uncommon, for example, for white people to feel more comfortable around black people that are lighter skinned than darker skinned. Study after study backs up that colourism, whether intentional or not, is widespread and immensely damaging even amongst people who don’t think of themselves as racist.
For some white people, colourism means that their support for light-skinned BIPOC blinds them to how unaware and complicit they may be in implicit biases towards darker-skinned BIPOC. Conversely, I’ve seen ardently anti-racist white people call out racism towards dark-skinned BIPOC while being woefully clueless about their own racism towards lighter-skinned BIPOC when it doesn’t fit their coloured paradigm of what being “sufficiently” BIPOC looks like.
Yeah, colourism is complicated. It bends backwards over itself and challenges the binary narrative of racism in unexpected ways, but gives us new tools by which to understand and level up what it means to be anti-racist.
For BIPOC, colourism is also the ugly underbelly that recognizes that we can be racist towards other BIPOC. And that when those of us with lighter-skin play on white privilege because we can, we are participating in white supremacy against darker-skinned BIPOC. For example, as a Latinx, I have privilege afforded to me by the federal government of checking a box marked “white” if I think it will help me on a job application whilst still identifying as a POC, an advantage not shared by black or indigenous people. Racism by Latinx towards black people is a real problem, too, both here in the United States and throughout Latin America. And some lighter skinned black people are also racist towards darker-skinned Latinx immigrants. These are not things that we in the BIPOC community like to take about, lest it be exploited to divide us and negate criticism against white supremacists. It certainly is NOT the same, as white supremacy is systemic and and supported by powerful institutions like corporate boardrooms and the police state that disproportionately favors white people, whereas BIPOC-on-BIPOC colourism is predominantly an interpersonal problem within certain communities. But colourism is something that needs to be addressed — amongst BIPOC, not by white people looking over our shoulder.
In some ways, I feel that colourism is the root from which we ought to be starting anti-racist work. On the other hand, it complicates things, and some of y’all may not be ready for that. Wherever you are on your journey, colourism will be waiting for you when you are.
2. Racism is often just another word for cultural discrimination.
The human brain is a remarkable pattern-recognition machine. We make snap judgments about people on the basis of the expressions they make, the words the use, the clothes they wear, and — yes — the color of their skin. Making such snap judgments was once critical to our evolutionary survival as a failure to quickly size up what’s dangerous and what isn’t could mean the difference between life and death. Which is to say, these are processes deeply embeded in our amygdala and deeply human.
We can slow this process down, become more aware of it, and even shape it through exposure to a diversity of cultures and people. But we can’t eradicate it altogether. Because race is often such an obvious and visual cue, it’s also often one of the most impactful and damaging ways we end up sizing people up, whether consciously or unconsciously. And it’s been this way for a long, long time. But what exactly are we sizing up when our amygdala sees race? In a word: culture.
In Ancient times, colourism was a way to characterize groups of people that were often culturally dissimilar and geographically disparate. Artistotle considered the very light skinned Celtic “barbarians” of the North and the “burnt faces” of Africans to the South to be inferior to the “civilized” (and tanned) Greek culture. Geraldine Heng expands on how race was also a proxy for cultural differentiation throughout the Middle Ages, and Ibram X. Kendi argues that by 1453 differences in colourism became codified into racial categories. At times, racism has been justified using religious beliefs that God has ordained one race over another, or with (debunked) scientific arguments that certain races possess genetic advantages over others. But mostly, throughout history and especially today, racism is the offspring of conscious and unconscious cultural judgments about people who look and act differently than we do, with race as shorthand for those judgments.
All of this served another very human and well-documented tendency, which Elizabeth Culotta articulates well in her article Roots of Racism: the one towards in-group love and out-group hate. Systemic racism, one could say, is little more than the in-group love and out-group hatred for people who don’t follow white supremacist cultural values.
When most people nowadays say “I’m not racist” or “I don’t see color”, what they usually mean is that they don’t consciously believe that one race or skin color is superior to another. But what they critically miss is that we invariably still do harbor conscious and unconscious cultural biases against people on racial lines. You would be hard pressed to find large groups of people today making a religious or scientific argument for prejudice against BIPOC. But you will find plenty who associate black people with a violent and/or lazy culture, and POC with an outlaw culture that has no regard for borders, refuses to integrate, and socializes inappropriately. These cultural stereotypes and judgments also help explain why a first generation African immigrant from Ghana will often face the discrimination afforded a descendant of slaves from Chicago. And it explains why a Latinx Stanford graduate who was born in New York will be told to “go back to Mexico”: we look the same enough to people who ascribe race to a singular, stereotyped culture, class, education, and place of origin.
So much so that in 1965, the United Nations defined racism to be inclusive of “descent, or national or ethnic origin.” In the United States, the notion that racism should inherently include things beyond skin color may be an odd concept, but in Latin America and to Latinx people where these things are deeply intersectional, it would be terribly odd not to because we know that racism and culture are inextricably interlinked.
Things get really interesting when we consider all this through the lens of colourism. BIPOC essentially experience two forms of racism to varying degrees: The darker we are, the more likely those conscious and unconscious cultural biases will come into play against us, especially if we do anything to trigger them. A black man that raises his voice in a meeting becomes that “angry black man”. A Latinx who speaks Spanish becomes that “illegal immigrant”. Conversely, the lighter we are, the more likely cultural ignorance will come into play, as people assume that we are white-cultured and therefore subject to (their) white cultural values, in which amounts to a form of interpersonal colonialism.
I’ve experienced both as a light-skinned Latinx. White conservatives will whitesplain their understanding of who I am as a Latinx, while white liberals will whitesplain who they think I ought to be as a white person. Two different kinds of racism, borne of similar fruit. Either way, there’s very little curiosity or respect for my values as a first generation POC that is different from their white supremacist cultural expectations. And it sucks.
3. We have all been the oppressor and the oppressed.
It’s important for me to acknowledge, as a mestizo Latinx, that my ancestors were oppressors. My surname is found not only in Latin America, but also in the Philipines, both of which were colonized by the Spaniards. I will never know precisely what role my ancestors played in the colonization of the Americas, whether they were brutal or kind. But one my ancestors was known as a the “Burro de Oro”, or the Golden Donkey, for his role in managing gold mines. Other indications are that they owned land, which a privilege unto itself and one most likely granted to them by the King of Spain. As newcomers, they also eradicated local culture — the language and the religion, specifically — to the point that Latin America amongst the most Spanish-speaking and Catholic regions of the world. Neither of which is native to Latin America. I carry their ancestral privilege with me to this day, and the knowledge that they were most likely oppressors to the Pueblos Indigenas whose land they stole.
As a Latinx, I also trace my lineage back to Spain, where the Celtic-Roman population waged an 800 year war with the Moors. My mother’s surname is of the Christian tradition, and my father’s is of the Moorish tradition. Some people fought on both sides of the war, such as El Cid, and there was a great deal of mixing of Pagan, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic through those many centuries — not all of which was consensual. My olive complexion comes perhaps as much from this Moorish period as it does from a Native American mix. Some of it may even be rape-colored, as Carol Randall Williams so powerfully wrote.
All of this to say nothing of what I do not know about my ancestry prior to the European arrival in the Americas, where many Pueblos Indigenas were not exactly known for being kind to one another. There were oppressors here too, although we’ve lost those stories to a history that predates written chronicles (with the exception of the Maya).
Being Latinx to me means recognizing that in our hearts, we all have the capacity to be the oppressor and the oppressed. Certainly across the centuries. But often within the span of one lifetime, month or week. Cognitive biases blind us to how we can be treated unfairly in one regard but then treat others in the same way. Such contradictions are well-documented hallmarks of trauma (which perpetuates itself from one generation to another) and power (which corrupts). And there is no discussing racism without considering trauma and power. Being anti-racist, I believe, means recognizing the human capacity for contradiction, for hypocrisy, and for self-righteousness. We can, in the same turn, play the victim and the abuser.
As a Latinx, I also hold to the belief that being anti-racist means holding with compassion alongside resolute judgment and accountability to put an end to it where it is in our power to do so. And that begins with looking within and taking accountability for our own contradictions, our own internalized biases, and the ways that we may have been complicit in the very thing we fight against.
So what’s all this mean? To me, it means that the rabbit hole towards anti-racism is far deeper than many of us realize, and may not always be quite where we’re actively digging. But come through the looking glass, and I believe we can all become that much more powerful, less guilt-ridden, and effective advocates for change.
We Can't Go Back 