Tanya Katerí Hernández, Afro-Latina researcher: ‘Those who love you most can at the same time harbor racist thoughts and attitudes’

In the 1940s, in New York, a Puerto Rican woman named Lucrecia considered giving away her daughter, Nina, for one reason: the little girl was too dark-skinned and her hair was too curly. Lucrecia’s family pressured her to give Nina up for adoption to an African American family. Or to any family, it didn’t really matter, but it had to be as soon as possible, so that the girl’s complexion did not tarnish the “white” lineage that the family had taken such care to protect, despite being descendants of Black and Indigenous enslaved peoples in Puerto Rico. Fortunately, Lucrecia chose to ignore her family’s demands. Years later, Nina would give birth to her own dark-haired, curly-haired daughter, Tanya Katerí Hernández. But unlike the childhood Nina endured in a home plagued by racism, Tanya grew up proud to be Afro-Puerto Rican thanks to her mother, who instilled in her a love of Blackness.

Hernández (New York, 60 years old) is today an expert in law, racial discrimination and critical race theory. Also a professor at Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, she has devoted her entire career to researching Latino Anti-Blackness: its origins, its manifestations in different areas such as labor and education, its consequences... But above all, Hernández has focused her efforts on conveying what she has experienced first-hand and what she has later proven through her research: that racism exists within the Latino community. For some, like the writer of this article, another Afro-Puerto Rican woman, this statement may seem obvious. Because those who exist in a Black body do not need to be reminded of what their skin color implies.

But for many Latinos, whose skin is lighter, their hair straighter, their noses and lips smaller, racism is a subject that has always been taboo. Anti-Blackness is considered, according to Hernández, to be someone else’s problem — specifically, a United States problem — because the myth persists that the Latino community is a mestizo community and, therefore, that mixed race makes it impossible for a Latino to be racist. In order to debunk this myth and many others, Hernández publishes on August 6 the Spanish translation of her book Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality, originally published in English in 2022 by Beacon Press.

In this work, the researcher analyzes an array of court cases in which Latino anti-Blackness discrimination has taken place to demonstrate how racial discrimination against Afro-Latinos permeates the Latino community. Hernández explains that she decided to use this narrative framework “because the fact that these are court cases makes the reader better positioned to believe that this is a real problem, because they see that it has reached the courts, as opposed to just being a personal story.” But she recognizes that in the end a case is also a story, as is her own.

Question. At the beginning of the book you write that “when it comes to Latino racism, the family is the scene of the crime.” At that point the reader doesn’t realize that you are actually talking about your own family as well. Why did you decide to include your personal story at the end of the book and not before?

Answer. Latinos who have not been conscious of these issues are often very resistant to hearing about them, and they look for the immediate way to be able to dismiss it. So I didn’t want the personalization of my particular, you know, skin in the game with regards to the issues to be the distraction. And I wanted the collective of the stories, both in the cases and in the interviews, to really kind of put forth that big picture. That makes it much too hard to ignore.

Q. In the epilogue you also mention that your mother was always frank with you about the racism she had suffered within her own family. What was it like for you to learn about that side of your family?

A. It was hard. It was painful to watch a beloved parent be in pain and to still want to be in relationship with the rest of the family. I could see that for my mom, it was a continual thing she had to navigate. But the best thing about a mother and daughter relationship, if it’s a good one, is that there’s less concern that the child cannot handle what they’re going to share. And so hearing those stories, I had the strength to hear them because I was secure in her love for me and also her very strong Black identity.

Q. Because she was very proud to be Afro-Puerto Rican.

A. Of course, it can be very counterintuitive, that despite sort of this onslaught of anti-Blackness within her own family, she still managed to have a sense of Black pride. I mean, I guess you have to make a choice for yourself. Either you’re going to believe all the horrible things, or you’re going to find an alternative way to be in the world. And she always modeled that for me, and I very much value that she did share the honest, although difficult, stories of racism in the family.

Q. And how did all this affect your relationship with your grandmother?

A. When you hear about the horrible things that people who love you do, there can be a kind of cognitive dissonance because they are not that way with you. But that doesn’t mean that the people who love you can’t also have race problems. And that is something that so many of my potential readers within the Latino community can be fearful of. They think that what I’m trying to say is that everybody’s a racist. But instead, the book comes from love, knowing that someone can love someone in the family and also be damaged by their own racist thoughts and racial attitudes and actions.

Q. Were you ever able, as a family, to talk about racism? Was your grandmother ever aware of her anti-Blackness?

A. For her it was completely normal. But what was so interesting is how — and I don’t know if it was because of all the conversations we had or the way older people mellow with age — she loved her great-grandchildren, my children, who are much darker and have the hair texture that she always found so problematic. And yet those great-grandchildren, she thought were adorable and loved to be around. She didn’t live long enough to really see them grow, but she saw them as toddlers. And so my hope is that there had been some shift in her, that there is hope in general. I wouldn’t have written the book otherwise, if I didn’t think there was a way to transform how we ignore the issue and then get ready to actually try to make some changes.

Q. Why was it important to you to have the book translated into Spanish?

A. When the English version came out many people told me, “I wish I could share this with my relatives,” not all of whom read in English. The other thing too, is that when I speak to young people, I often get asked, “how can I talk to my family about this? How can I talk to my abuelita about this?” Abuelitas always get all the heat [laughs]. And I say to them, well, lecturing your elders is probably never a very effective tool. But sharing with your elders, right, is a way in which to invite them in to be on a growth journey with you. And so this idea of having a resource that folks can have within their families is just very exciting to me.

Q. Would you have liked your abuela to read the book?

A. I would have loved it. Part of the reason I identify so much with the young people who come up to me at events and chat to me about this is because I remember trying to engage in these conversations with her. And part of the difficulty when you do not have resources — like this book — is that it’s always about “I think, I think, I think.” And it’s too easy for people to dismiss you when it’s just about what you think, as opposed to saying, “Look at all this data, look at all these other people’s stories, look at all the ways in which there are these harms being done that are tangible, that you can count.”

Q. In the book you raise the idea of the “veil of racial innocence” of Latinos. What do you mean by that?

A. I actually started to use the term much earlier, back when I was researching and writing about Latin America itself. I was writing the book Racial Subordination in Latin America (published in 2012) and I was looking at the ways in which in Latin America, there’s this idea that we don’t have racism because real racism is in the United States, not here. And so anything that happens here that kind of looks bad, that’s not real racism. That dynamic of a strategic comparison that’s meant to minimize the actual racism is what I call the veil of racial innocence.

Q. And it’s a notion that Latino immigrants then replicate in the United States...

A. Of course, the same dynamic exists in the United States. Here, the argument is that racism is something other people do, specifically non-Hispanic whites. So I thought this idea of racial innocence might capture the way in which it’s not just about denying that racism exists, but it’s about this sense of superiority that white Latinos feel.

Q. Because in reality white latinidad is created on the back of Blackness. In fact, in the book you write: “Latinos’ quest for social status is traversed by the disparagement of Blackness as a mechanism for representing whiteness.”

A. I’m going to tell you a story. I was recently in Arizona giving several talks and one day I decided to take a walk in one of these cactus parks. And there’s an older Latina woman, who’s with seemingly her grandson, and she’s a bit in the way, so I say “buenos días, con permiso, quiero pasar.” She turns and asks me, shocked, “How do you speak Spanish?” I tell her that I am from Puerto Rico, that my parents are Puerto Rican. “But you are adopted?” she replies. She felt she had to find some way to explain away my Blackness, because for her it did not mesh that speaking Spanish could be authentically coming out of a Black face. I share that anecdote because I think it encapsulates what I call a racial pathology: the way in which there’s this constant making of boundaries around what we think latinidad is because we want to make sure that we are separate and apart from the Afro diaspora.

Q. In the book you also talk about the idea of a “linked fate,” which refers to the mechanism by which group consciousness leads to political cohesion among members of a social identity group. In the case of Latinos, you explain that anti-Blackness hinders the political organization and mobilization of the Latino electorate. How could this be detrimental in this year’s elections?

A. The concept of linked fate, or “sentido de destino común” as we translated it for the book, comes from political science. And what political scientists have documented over and over again is that if a group does not have a sense of linked fate, it makes them less of a voting bloc. And it comes to anti-Blackness, experiences of racial discrimination within your so-called ethnic group disrupts that sense of linked fate. And so, with the upcoming election, the need to galvanize the Latino vote will not be effective until we deal with our own racism.

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