 Welcome to our session with Dr. Tanya Pateri Hernandez to discuss her recent book, Racial Innocence, A Mask in Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality. Before we get started, I have a few announcements about what's happening around SFPL. Land acknowledgement. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral home land of the Ramatush Sholomi peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional home land. As unenvited guests, we affirm their southern rights as First Peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestral elders of the Ramatush community. Summer Stride is happening here at SFPL. We have food, tote bags, reading, prizes, games, everything. So if you read 20 hours, turn in your tracker and you'll be able to get this food tote bag. So don't forget to visit your participating branch for the Summer Stride reading and learning activity. Coming up soon at the Excelsior Library, we have Friday film showings. And it is the second, the first Friday of every month. So coming up this Friday, August 4th, we'll be showing Bilumbo. So please join us in person at the branch at the Excelsior branch. Team Game and Night at the Excelsior branch. Wednesday, August 2nd, please teams join us from 1 to 3 p.m. We have a Wii, we have board games, ages 8 to 18. Hope to see you there. We also have Therapy Pat, Friday, July 28th, from 4 to 5, come and meet a friendly animal and show your love and learn how to relax in these stressful times. We also have a hot air balloon activity here, August 1st, 4 p.m. For kids 5 and up, you can create a hot air balloon and learn a little bit about chemistry. And that's it, and we are here to present Dr. Hernandez. Welcome, welcome, we appreciate you being here and joining us here at SFPL to talk about your book. Thank you very much. Can I now have control of the share screen? I want to say thank you very much for inviting me. It is a very special occasion when I get to participate with public libraries. In fact, I view it as the, I guess, one of the, aside from my mother, the place that was the most formative in my own development. She brought me to a public library at the age of five. I got my first library card and the journey began there. Yes, as they say in the chat, library love, it's here. So with that, thank you. Let me get started. Let me share my screen so that you can see something besides just my boring face. See here, I'm going to make sure I have the correct slide show. Oh, and the interpreter will need camera access as well. Okay. So hopefully, yes, you should be seeing the intro screen. And, you know, what's so fascinating to me in talking to people about the book, Racial Innocence, it was published just last August and the paperback version comes out later in the summer of this summer. But there's been, in some respects, kind of a journey with even talking to people about the book. I think of October 2022 as sort of pivotal. There's a couple before and there's an after. Before October 2022, when I talk to people about the book, I get a lot of racial innocence, Latinos, anti-Black bias, what are you talking about? How can Latinos be biased? I don't understand, aren't they people of color themselves? So on and so forth. After October 2022, let me get my next screen up there for you. I see a lot less resistance to at least the idea. So what happens in October 2022? The Los Angeles City Council, in some respects, goes up in flames. What I mean by that is that there was a series, you shouldn't remember, a series of leaked audio tapes of the Latino members of the LA City Council talking amongst themselves, believing they were off the record, and on that tape that the Los Angeles Times released for the viewing public's edification were a lot of anti-Black statements, along with anti-Indigenous statements, and a lot of other foulness. But what that moment revealed for many people on the public stage was that Latinos are not simply a group, a population, people of color who do not also struggle with anti-Black bias. I'm not here to say every Latino has anti-Black bias. What I am here to sort of open up and have a conversation with you about and tell you a little bit more about the book is that we are not shielded from anti-Black bias. And unfortunately, it is a very deep part of many of our cultures. Now some people will think, well, you know, that's a one-off. Nuri Martinez and her colleagues on the LA City Council, they were just individual bad apples. It was just them. It's not about Latinidad, about people from Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. It was just about those individuals who had bad thoughts. They do not represent us in the Latino population. Well, unfortunately, there are many Nuri Martinezes in the world. She is not alone. She comes out of a culture in which those mindsets were developed. So let me tell you a little bit more about this and what I cover in the book. The January 6 attack, terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol included several Latino members of the white supremacist group, the Proud Boys, and their chairman, Cuban American Enrique Tario, who just this earlier this year in May, was convicted of seditious conspiracy to attack the capitals. Just as white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, back in 2017, also included Latino attackers. Oh, I'm going a little too far. Let's see here. Well, somehow I missed this. Okay. And of course, we have the most recent of incidents that of the Allen Texas shooter, Mauricio Garcia, who is understood, you can see from his Facebook page, photos of himself very deeply embedded in supporting Nazi white supremacist viewpoints. Indeed, since 2017, the media has noticed that there is an increasing trend of more Latinos joining white supremacist hate groups. In other words, Kanye's friend Nick Fuentes of the America First Foundation is not the only Latino white supremacist. The racial violence of white supremacy amongst Latinos is also evident amongst white Latino law enforcement members. Here's my Charlottesville attacker for the slide switched up. Okay. White law law enforcement members, these are some examples, as well as Latino opponents of Black Lives Matter movements and demonstrations. And yet Latino white supremacists are not the only problem. Anti-Blackness is also manifested in Latino communities against Afro Latinos, African Americans, Africans, West Indians, all people of African descent in a myriad of contexts such as the workplace, the rental and purchase of homes, educational settings, public spaces of leisure and the criminal justice system. Examining Latino agency and anti-Blackness helps us better understand the complexities of racism and what is needed to be more effective in an increasingly racially diverse world. Now, before I get into the details of Latino anti-Black bias and how they surface these incidents in various cases in the United States, I think it might be helpful for some in the audience if I explain the origins of Latino anti-Black bias. It emanates from our histories of slavery and our histories of slavery are vast and deeply entrenched. You have one historian's depiction of the slave trade and the ways in which much of it was directed towards Latin America and the Caribbean. More recent, though I don't have a photograph for you, more recent depictions from historians estimate that 90%, 90% of the transatlantic slave trade was directed towards Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole. If we try to disaggregate the Caribbean versus languages and colonizers, the estimate goes to about 65%. But whichever number you're looking at, 65 or 90, the huge comparison is to the ways in which only 3.5% went to what we now call the United States. Of the 10.7 million slaves that survived the middle passage, only 3.5% were brought to the United States. That's just an indicator of how the demography of slavery is very much a Latin America and Caribbean story and not just simply a US story. The numbers might even indicate it's more of a Latin American US story. That history of slavery also means that it comes with deeply embedded racial logics. Meaning you don't have colonizers able to utilize slavery without having a whole set of justifications for that slavery, meaning the inherent inferiority, animalistic status, et cetera, of people as viewed as inferior. Those logics don't go away once abolition of slavery occurs to maintain the racial hierarchy. On my slide, I gave a poll that just one country within the region of Latin America, Mexico, in order to give greater texture to what I'm describing here, such that in 1570, Africans outnumbered Spaniards in Colonial Mexico by 1793, Mexico has the largest concentration of African descendants in all of Spanish America. I can go to a long story just about Mexico, but I have a lot to cover here. I want to just give you a snippet of the ways in which it's not a story that we are educated with in Latin America, let alone in the United States, but it bears a remarking upon. Today, people of African descent are usually not counted in decennial senses forms, but to the extent that we can track their presence, they represent at least one third of the population across Latin America and are a significant contributor to culture and the vibrancy of each of these nation states. Despite making up 40% of the poor and being consistently marginalized and denigrated as undesirable elements of the society since the abolition of slavery across the Americas. Unfortunately, the view that racism doesn't exist is very pervasive in Latin America, despite the advent of social justice movements and social science researchers demonstrating the contract. When the BBC surveyed Latin Americans regarding the existence of racism, a significant number infetically denied it and made the remark that Latin Americans couldn't be racist or be in a racist region because the majority of the population was mixed. And so the denial of racism is rooted in what many scholars have critiqued as the myth of racial democracy that comes from racial mixture, misty saje. This is the notion that racial mixture in a population is in of itself symbolic, emblematic of racial harmony and insulated from racial discord and racial inequality. Even though academic scholarship, low these many decades has critiqued these misty saje theories of racial mixture as racial harmony. Many Latin Americans on the ground still are very much enamored of these thoughts with the notion that racial mixture and also the absence of Jim Crow segregation are such a marked contrast to the United States racial history that the region itself use itself as what I call racially innocence. And this is in part because of the absence of a legal critique of Latin American comparisons to the U.S. Jim Crow. This has enabled the Latin American racial innocence stance to remain. I talk about this in the new book that I'm here to talk to you about, but I wanted to cross-reference many people say, oh, but this deserves so much more information. I already did that in this earlier book out of the library has it, but so this one is called Racial Subordination in Latin America, right to me. That's where all the details are about every single country and all the issues regarding the histories of racial segregation and racial subordination in contrast to the U.S. and at the very same time, very legally embedded. And what I mean by that is this, when, oh wait, going a little too fast, actually, before I get there, let me tell you a little bit about what you'll find if you want to go back to the book, is that it looks at the ways in which the Latin American denial of racism operating along with the belief that true racism can only be found in the racial segregation of the United States, that this together actually hides the actual manifestations of racism in Latin America. In the book, I argue that the role of the state after the abolition of slavery in regulating race through immigration law and customary law disrupts the picture of Latin America as racially innocent. It assesses the ways in which the contemporary Latin American anti-discrimination laws seek to eradicate the legacy of racial inequality brought on by the historic racism of the state. The force of racism denial is so strong in Latin America that the very term negro, meaning black or negro, is widely considered derogatory because people of African descent are stereotyped and referred to as inherently criminal, intellectually inferior, overly sexual and animalistic. Because the racialized stereotypes of people of African descent are pervasive, they are commonly understood, and I'm sorry if this is triggering for anyone, I should have given the trigger warning. I know it triggers me. The racialized stereotypes of people of African descent are pervasive because they're commonly understood to smell like animals and in particular monkeys, hence the stamp that was being circulated in Mexico sometime back. In addition to these commonalities and in anti-black stereotypes across Latin America, each country in the region has developed its own subset of derogatory phrases for blacks and blackness. A review of papers in the region has shown the following that, well, you know what, I'm not going to get into any greedy details. If you want the long list of all the anti-black terms that exist in Latin America, cross-reference that book of racial subordination in Latin America. I want to get to good news. That's what I want to do. I want to talk to you about the book Racial Innocence, where I look for ways to go through this in the future and not bring it with us into the United States. When I share this information about anti-blackness in Latin America, a frequent response notes how blackness is also used as terms of endearment. For instance, you know, calling somebody, my little black person, or calling someone, giving them compliments that are reserved for black people who are supposedly have superseded their blackness by having other superior traits. So, no, that person's black, but they have the soul or the heart of a white person. She's black, but good-looking. He's black, but well-groomed and scented. While these statements are not meant to carry racial malice, they still activate racial stereotypes about the inferiority of blacks. And referring to someone as sort of a me negrito, my little black person, what may be a term of endearment, it can also unconsciously or sometimes consciously invoke the paternalism of slavery's past. In fact, these perspectives about people of African descent are so embedded in the social fiber of Latin American societies that persons of African descent subordinated status in society is viewed as natural and logical. That's just how it is. That's how they are. Moreover, when flagrant instances of racist conduct are detailed in Latin American news media, they are understood as the acts of aberrant individuals, their respective Nuri Martinezes. Just that singular person, not the culture, not the society, just that one bad apple. This psychotomy is well exemplified by the ways in which surveys show that in survey questions, many Latin Americans manifest racial bias in their attitudes about blackness, and yet one asks, does racism exist in the society? Very few admit that it does. This is sort of a schizophrenia when it comes to issues of acknowledging the racism in the society. Nevertheless, Latin American racial denial is deeply embedded in these racially hierarchical environments, and that dualism is facilitated by the deployment of strategic comparisons to the US race regime that are meant to depict Latin America as innocent of perpetrating racism. I call this the rhetoric of racial innocence. When the context of customary law is not taken into account, it would seem as if Latin America were so wonderful, they had nothing to do with issues of anti-blackness. But upon the abolition of slavery, Latin American nations sought to restrict immigration through immigration law and provided state fundings explicitly focused on whitening their populations. Their legislative record indicates their interest in whitening their populations and outlawing the immigration of people of African descent. Through the operation of immigration law, Black people were recast into their pre-emancipation status as marginalized people. Moral customary law, that is the enforcement of unwritten laws established by long usage rather than legislative enactment, was also utilized as a tool of racial exclusion. When customary laws fully integrated into a society as a matter of state practice, there's little incentive to have the customs codified. You don't need to go to legislature, everybody's following the rules. What's most salient is whether there is a sense of legal obligation to be bound by the custom and have it enforced. So in the Latin American context, the policing of racial segregation with the deployment of state resources, the dedication of finance financial incentives for European immigration, these are key factors for appreciating the role of customary law in regulating race in Latin America. Assessing the treatment of afro descendants in Latin America through the lens of customary law elucidates the law part of Latin American racial histories. Now, what does this all mean for Latinos in the United States? When we come into the United States or the United States lands on us, that is the Mexican territories that became California, New Mexico and the like, when that we enter into or the Union West lands on us, we have with us already our racialized baggage. If we think of culture as language, music, food, dance, art, et cetera, we cannot exempt out from that picture of culture are racial attitudes. As disturbing as the anti black aspects of Latin American Caribbean national cultures for many Afro Latinos in the US, the deepest racial scars are those inflicted within intimate familial structures. So this is more of what you will see in the book racial innocence. When it comes to Latino racism, the family is the scene of the crime. Racial trauma is instilled when Latino parents show preferential treatment to children with lighter skin and consistently make negative appraisals of those children based on their racialized features, skin color and hair texture. Contemporary Afro Latino memoirs are replete with recollections of racialized familial slates and injuries targeting the darkest person in the family, even in the most diverse array of family skin shades. Afro Puerto Rican sociologist Eduardo Bonilla Silva describes the racially negative familial interactions as a kind of segregation between darker and lighter skin families. He describes large family gatherings like weddings as showing the segregation where darker family members are seated at separate tables from lighter skin family members. Each of these families then operating their own intuitive Jim Crow segregation system. The implicit justification for the racial segregation are continually reinforced with racist comments about Black family members and Blackness in general. So Bonilla Silva recalls some of his aunts and even his own mother as saying, Eduardo, those Black people do not have class. They don't know any better because they're accustomed to living in dirt. Other writers poignantly describe how white Puerto Rican family members denigrated the Blackness of their Afro Puerto Rican parents and siblings that had inherited their parents' brown skin tone African facial features and curly hair. Family dynamics often filter interactions through a screen that imbues Blackness as the source of all things negative. So when a colopy baby is disparaged as that is a Prieta Bajadera that bothers some Black female baby, the family thereby hammers in the denigration of Blackness. This is also the case when family caregivers yell invectives such as, maldito sea este pelo, damn this hair, while combing curly Afro descended hair. Close your large African lips when silencing Black children. Or when the backs of baby's ears are examined for the dangerous development of future dark skin color. In short, dark hair. Curly hair, African bodily features evoke familial expressions of ridicule, rejection, and hostility, whereby the family nucleus is the incubator for inculcating anti-Blackness. Indeed, even Latino children, as in us four years old, have higher risk for mental health problems, the darker their skin is. Upon adolescence, the family vigilance against Blackness is intensified in the Latino project of pursuing or maintaining a semblance of Whiteness. The obsession with mejorando y adelantando la raza, improving and advancing the race, by marrying lighter and ideally whiter partners, means each potential suitor is sorted out for teens of Blackness. Anthropologist Mariza Quiñones Rivera keenly felt the familial pressure to date only White men. Yet when she met the family of her first White Latino boyfriend, they called her una negra sucia, a dirty Black woman, a slut and unintelligent. These racial boundaries are so deeply internalized that they transcend parental supervision and extend into the modernity of online dating. So people asked me, oh, is this just about old people in the Latino community? And when the young people take over the world, all this will be gone? No. Why? In the study of Latino internet, internet daters in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Atlanta. Remember, that's where the young people go, not us old folks, right? It was found that across these diverse cities with Latinos from different ancestral countries of origin, Latinos prefer dating whites and exclude dating Blacks at about the same rates. Indeed, their rates for excluding Blacks and preferring whites approximate those of white non-Hispanic daters. So much for our sort of elite status of not being racist. To the extent that the study did not control for the skin shade or the racial identity of the Latino respondents, it's also quite possible that the Black rejection rate is even higher among white identified Latinos. As scholar Angela Jorge notes about family lessons in racism, any intimacy with a Black is absolutely taboo. Indeed, a qualitative study of young adult children of Latino immigrants in Los Angeles suggests that immigrant parents send strong racialized messages about Blacks and African Americans in particular that deter their U.S.-born Latino children from dating Afro-Latinos and African Americans. Yet anti-Black racism that arises outside of the unfortunately familiar U.S. frame of Anglo-white English speakers versus African American English speakers, that bias, this can be mystifying for many people in the U.S. This is in part because U.S. Blackness is primarily conceived of as embodied solely by English-speaking African Americans. And in turn, anti-Blackness is then understood as a uniquely U.S. phenomena affecting those English-speaking African Americans, with an occasional recognition of the racialized struggles of Africans and others in the African diaspora. Civil rights leaders are also seemingly reticent to air the dirty laundry of the bias that exists within communities of color, lest it distract from the real racism of white supremacy. However, all the while Afro-Latinos and African Americans suffer from acts of discrimination at the hands of Latinos who claim that their racially mixed cultures immunize them from being racist. And this is what I call the Latino racial innocence cloak that veils Latino complexity in U.S. racism. In turn, the public ignorance about Latino anti-Blackness undermines the ability to fully address the interwoven complexities of U.S. racism in developing public policies and enforcing anti-discrimination law. Judges and the rest of society need to learn that Latinos can be racist too. In the book, I excavate the new one, the otherwise silenced voices of Afro-Latinos and African American victims of Latino anti-Blackness from the case files of discrimination charges. In examining how discrimination claims of Latino anti-Blackness arise, two central patterns become evident. First, Latino anti-Blackness is more prevalent and serious in its consequences than many commentators in politics and the media care to admit. Second, the ability to identify and address Latino anti-Blackness is hampered by the notion that Latinos cannot be prejudiced or racist simply by virtue of being Latino. It is for this reason that the tales of Latino anti-Black discrimination recounted in court cases are so important. Inasmuch as they help disrupt the Latino myth of racial innocence and clarify Latino agency in racism, the interrogation of the Latinos can't be prejudiced, pseudo-defense to racism is especially illuminating for the legal enforcement of anti-discrimination law and anyone who cares about it. Let me give you some examples from the book. When Eddie Frazier, an African American man, wanted to rent an apartment in a suburban community in New York, it was a Latino homeowner who refused to consider his application. The Latino landlord instead chose to wait three more months for a non-Black applicant to suffer, meaning he sacrificed his financial self-interest to forgo a rent roll for three home months. Yet a jury was persuaded that no racial discrimination had occurred due to the fact that the owner was a Brazilian who denied harboring racial bias because the landlord was of mixed race heritage to Latinidad and numerous relatives had Black and Indian ancestry. Juries, though, are not alone in being misled about Latino agency in racism. The case of Maxine Sprott is also helpful here. Maxine is an African American woman who worked as a deputy director at a housing authority equal opportunity office and she alleged that her Hispanic supervisor, Rosa Reyes, harassed her with derogatory comments about her work performance despite the fact that Maxine repeatedly received positive performance evaluations on her written evaluation forms, which is good and very good. And each positive evaluation, though, was followed by commentary about Maxine's lack of leadership skills. When Maxine wanted to report her and she couldn't withstand the onslaught of derogatory comment any further, she filed a claim with the general manager of the office. Exactly three days after following that claim, her supervisor Reyes submits a performance evaluation that for the first time rated Maxine as marginal and as a result she was denied a managerial merit salary increase. Any expectations that Maxine might have had that working for an equal opportunity office focus on addressing discrimination in public housing that this would be a more racially enlightened workplace were dissolved when her employer not only failed to investigate her allegations, but then retaliated against her profiling a discrimination claim. In fact, it was yet another Latino official, Chairman Ruben Franco, that discriminatorily retaliated against Maxine. He informed her that she would be transferred to another office where her material responsibilities were diminished and she was moved from a wealth furnace private office into a cubicle. You ever try to make a phone call home from a cubicle? It's not comfortable. This is yet another instance of retaliation for Maxine's exercise of her right to assert her claim of discrimination. Only when she filed its lawsuit in court was she able to reach a settlement agreement and receive some financial compensation. Now, why do I bring it up? Any number of concerns might have influenced Maxine and her attorney to decide to settle the case rather than move forward with it to go into a jury trial, but one contributing factor could very well have been the great significance the judge placed upon the office Latino racial diversity as mitigating any claim of discrimination. So for the judge, it was a material that when Chairman Franco transferred Maxine into her effectively lesser position in a cubicle, at the same time as two other African American female employees were all terminated as part of Franco's extensible reorganization plan, that this was not a pattern that warranted inquiry. Instead, the judge concluded that such facts fail to raise an inference of discrimination and hear his words are very important because the new director is a Hispanic woman. The remaining staff is comprised of 24 Hispanics, 23 African Americans, nine Caucasians, and one person categorizes other. Thus the judge accorded a Latino dominated workplace and the supervisor's Hispanic status great power to in of themselves circumvent racism. Here and then is the judicial presumption that Latino co workers cannot be bearers of racism. A corollary of this judicial presumption that Latino co workers cannot be bearers of racism is a judicial notion that all Latino places of origin are racial equivalents. The case of a Rocha versus CUNY gives a good example here. Jose Rocha, a self identified Afro Panamanian tutor of Spanish, sued his university employer for failure to renew his appointment as a adjunct instructor of Spanish. He alleged that the Latinos who directed the department where he worked discriminated against what he called Black Hispanics and that there was a disturbing culture of favoritism that favored the appointments of white Cubans, Spaniards, and white Hispanics from South America. Yet the court dismissed his claims because there was not an understanding of the ways in which a color hierarchy informs how Latinos experience racism and national origin bias from other Latinos who are not a harmonious, homogeneous pan ethnic grouping. The dismissal of the case was justified based on the fact that five of the eight adjunct instructors that were reappointed instead of Jose were natives of other South or Central American countries such as Argentina, Peru, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. The judge explicitly state in the opinion that quote diversity in an employer's staff undercuts an inference of discriminatory intent. That is not the actual law from statute or established case law. Instead, the judge intuited and inferred non-discrimination from the presumption that Latino ethnic subgroups are interchangeable and homogeneous. This, so Argentina, Argentina so Argentina is the same as somebody from Peru, the same for somebody from Mexico, etc. This perspective fails to appreciate the ways in which internal Latino national origin bias is rooted in a racialized hierarchy of Latin American countries where countries perceived or touted as European are viewed as more advanced than those more significantly populated with people of indigenous descent or African descent. So in the list where the judge found all these countries as equivalent indicating the absence of any bias, Latin American racial constructs would rank order Argentina as one a highly valued white country followed by Peru and Mexico with its indigenous population and most to write it would be the Dominican Republic and the plaintiff's own country of origin Panama because of their dominance by African descended peoples. For Latinos influenced by Latin American racial paradigms where each country has a racial identification a diverse workforce of Latinos is not the immediate equivalent of a bias context nor is a color preference divorced from a racialized ideology within the Latino context. It's also important to note though that Latino anti-black bias shows up not only as an expression of individual Latino racial attitudes of employers supervisors etc but also in systemic structures of intentional exclusion. So in a Chicago-based case of Hunt versus personnel staffing Latino employees of this Chicago-based nationwide job placement agency described how their Latino supervisors trained them to exclude African-American applicants from job placements in favor of Latino applicants. They were instructed to automatically reject black people because of the stereotype that they were not capable of working as hard as Latinos and that Latinos couldn't be black themselves. The loss of details of dispatchers who nevertheless sent African-American job seekers to a company would later be reprimanded by their Latino bosses for doing so and threatened with termination. The placement agency would start the day by separating out each of these applicants and labeling their file folders black Hispanic. So one of the agency dispatchers testified as follows if it was 10 Mexicans that would come in at 1.30 in the afternoon and 25 African-Americans that were there at 4.30 a.m and were waiting to be sent to work the agency would send the Mexicans first. This Latino run employment agency effectively ensured a secondary racial caste system of Latinos over blacks in the already segregated Chicago area labor market that privileges Anglo-whiteness. Now to wrap up I'd like to before I take questions because I will take questions or comments to wrap up to address a concern I often hear that people of color cannot be racist because they do not have power right now we may have prejudice but we can't be racist because we don't have systemic power. Let me observe that when Latinos or other people of color for that matter are active participants in the denial of access to an important life opportunity a home a job an unimpeded education fairness in the criminal justice system entrance into public spaces all based on race these Latinos are no longer just passive holders of a anti-black cultural prejudice they are part of the problem of racism certainly none of the victims of anti-black bias in the narratives of discrimination I examine in the book would be placated with the disclaimer your experience is not an example of racism because Latinos don't have the systemic power to be racist in white Anglo-created structures one can immediately envision such a victim replying oh yeah that's so called non-racist Latino is the one who oppressed me for being black a Latino claim of racial innocence in the racist world white Anglos created in the United States is a thin moral reed of superiority when a Latino hand is the one forcefully slamming the door to black inclusion so the book is more than just a call for recognizing that Latinos can be prejudiced to rather it's an entreaty for all future interventions into matters of racism to critically engage how Latinos and many others collaborate and sustain structures of racism by recognizing they are part of the problem interventions can also address them as part of the solution judges and juries can be taught to desist from being distracted by I can't be racist I'm Latino as a de sudo defense to accusations of discrimination in short dismantling racism in the US requires that every component of its structures be taken apart even the ones articulated in espanol in Spanish we do this by becoming racially literate about Latino anti-blackness and engaging in meaningful coalition work here are some slides to give you actual hope and examples of how this can be done by a nationwide one uh the Los Angeles Community Coalition an LA-based one and in guendro de asoafro a boston-based coalition agency and with that I'd like to open up the floor for comment to your questions let me stop the share so I can see your beautiful faces okay thank you that looks wonderful it was heavy and I recommend the book everyone when I read the book I knew like immediately we needed you to come and speak we needed to figure out how to get this book you know circulated more you mentioned about Chicago I'm born and raised in Chicago so I understand that you know that segregation you know very it's personal experience especially between the black community and the Latinx community can you talk a little bit more about the geography a good friend of mine is from New York and their experience is different and you talk a little bit about that in the book about how the the deeper collaboration could be more so in parts of New York versus in Chicago where everything is segregated and how that impacts the I guess the disunity between the two groups well you know here's what I think is important to keep in mind everything can be reduced down to the particularities right meaning being in one city is different than living in another city being in with one group of people from a particular ethnic subgroup is the different it's different being the same high school right there are lots of particularities at the same time the reason why I go across the entire country is supposed to like just oh this is a case study of white Cubans in Miami is because I wanted to disabuse people the reading public right of the idea that this is a problem that is only relevant to small segments of the of Latino populations right me even with all the distinct distinctions and experience right or context base specifics right now that can vary how one experiences anti-discrimination or not uh or experiences collaboration and coalition what is not irrelevant is how much anti-blackness is still part of the backdrop and the reason why I think it's important to sort of focus on the patterns of commonality right is because without actually addressing it we can't do anything about it meaning if we if we act as if this is irrelevant if we act as if um oh well our issues are not as big as the problems of white supremacy generally right if we miss our own sort of complicity as communities then we are disempowering ourselves from actually being able to be part of the solution as well and so I think it's important you know and that's why I wanted to be responsible and in the books sort of relate how you know collaborations in so let's say one example the young lords in New York City with the Black Panthers right it's sort of like this idealized vision of cross ethnic collaboration in social justice I mean that's beautiful at the same time there's plenty of anti-black bias and anti-sentiment going on within the young lords right that gets recounted in various memoirs about what it meant to be part of the young lords um you know no place is a rich utopia I guess is one way to put it that it's important to put it that way and you know there can be brotherhood and sisterhood at the very same time that there's are also problematic dynamics that need to be addressed you know just like in any family thank you for that those of you who are online please stop by we are giving away books while supplies last we can hold them to the side and if you come to the library and say hey I attended the webinar we'll hand you over a book we have around 100 books to give away um my name is Lenny I'm the branch manager here at the Excelsior branch library that's what we we have we'll have the physical books here we'll hold them for a few days and then we'll just set them out on our free books cart for people to take as they come and go I am looking in the Q&A I don't see any questions yet so I'm checking the chat as well well you know while you're looking Lenny let me just um describe the way in which um how I interpret the silence right me um because it's not unfamiliar to me um often what I have experienced you know in this past year of kind of you know sharing the insights from the book is that people are often having very emotional reactions right and then it can it has a it ranges right um some of the emotional ration is such a sense of identification with what I've described that it you know you know some people are moved to tears other people um are sort of like taken back to their own family dynamics um you know it's a lot to process and it's a lot to process because we often don't talk about this and we don't have a space so I thank the library for you know holding this space open for people um and so that silence is okay I mean I guess I just want to sort of endorse you know that um I don't my feelings are not hurt because you're not busy trying to like quiz me about the book I'm gonna questions are fine but I acknowledge that part of um really thinking about this and um taking it seriously is also sort of giving your space to kind of process it um another way in which I have seen um people react um to the book and it's harder because you know we're not in person so I wanted to kind of give you a little bit of that taste of you know what the impersonation you know we do have a program room and there are people physically here watching virtually as well so I'm just going to wait around to see if some will pop in a hand me a question but go ahead lovely lovely um the other thing is that for some folks it is familiar but it feels like an indictment right you're meaning that the sense of oh wait a minute you know um I don't identify as white but others may perceive me as such I'm a proud latin ex latin latina latino whatever your preferred suffix I'm cool with them all um but I'm proud about that but I feel um when you when you talk about this anti-blackness stuff it makes me uncomfortable it makes me uncomfortable because I don't know how I'm situated in all of this and I don't know if I'm implicated etc right um and certainly that is not an abnormal reaction because of how little we talk about sort of how our racial appearance let alone our racial identity within latinidad actually causes differential sort of rates of blood pressure access to socio-economic status and mobility um you know all of that is very real uh and my short response is simply to say you know guilt is a useless space to live within right meaning you know this is not about guilt right this is about if you care about the patterns and the exclusion do you want to be part of the solution it doesn't matter what your own personal racial identity is um and if you feel that you're getting unwanted sort of white privilege then use the white privilege to call out racism right you know there are lots of ways to be part of the solution um but I see now that that actually something is typed in as a q and a yeah yeah I have one I have three in a chat in one of the q and a I'd love to hear more about the of the the investments Dr. Hernandez sees and being not racist and why those might be there do they feel there are nuances related to social power that make there are many kinds of systemic racism that help explain the idea that racism can exist between different BIPOC groups certainly right I mean um it in other words what I understand from the question is isn't this sort of multi-layered a nuance yes right um and part of what makes it multi-layered nuance is that when you are a victim of discrimination meaning you may be a white appearing Latino right but your children have been stopped at the border right uh our immigration policy wants to put children in borders and has put children put put children in cages right at the border that is not an immigration policy that's racist right so meaning you can be very um cognizant right of how you and those you care about um are exposed to systemic biases against Latinos and that's very real um and think that that sort of encapsulates the importance of what exists in the world um and will and create this resistance to considering any other right and I I guess I want to sort of simply say you know these two things can both be true at the same time unfortunately right meaning that we can be victims uh and targets of systemic bias based on our latinidad our ethnicity while at the same time within lat within our ethnicity we have our own internalized hierarchies and also skin color discrimination by anglo whites against us based on our skin shade as well right the resistance to acknowledging um the intricacies of Latino anti-blackness um I think are also related right you know to these issues of being latinos who are discriminated against but I don't think that should stop us though from moving forward how does this play out in violence between prisoners and prisons and jails that's in a book too right meaning um because you can't talk about anti-blackness sort of on the streets uh in the united states without also sort of taking into account the ways in which the one of the most segregated spaces that we have are prisons right and even though segregation is against the law it violates the constitution right equality provisions the united states supreme court has articulated exceptions to having segregation when security issues are of concern with it or you know threats of violence but here's the thing within the jail system that is highly segregated right latinos right have a choice to make right are they on their own do they throw themselves in allegiance with the african-american inmates or do they throw themselves in allegiance with white inmates and time and time again they throw their allegiance to white inmates and enforce and issue edicts of anti-blackness and anti-black violence to people on the street meaning gang members who are affiliated with those who are on the inside influence those on the outside obviously this is a very uh huge morass a labyrinth of intricacy um that I also deal with in the book but yes um the prison context is quite relevant to how anti-blackness places itself out on the streets in in the united states I don't know how much time we have I know we're at the top of the hour but I do have a few questions you're okay does your research find truly significant differences in attitudes among latinos who are from nations with large populations originating from africa and those who don't and if so do they seem even more recalcitrant to inclusion that is quite fascinating yes in um not so much this book but in the one that that um preceded it I guess we wouldn't call it the sequel the pre-sequel uh to racial innocence which is the racial subordination in latin america book um I sort of survey all the literature right about anti-black attitudes in the various countries and what is really so fascinating is that regardless of demography meaning we have nation states in which the indigenous populations are more numerous where the african uh descended populations are more numerous or um or mestizo populations are more numerous so I mean so we have this variation across um the region and yet and oftentimes people say I mean these countries are too different for you to be making um a book about just all of it all at one time that's too much to take in in one book however the one through line across all these nations right regardless of the demography where they have a lot of black people or very few black people is the anti-black ideologies that sustain racial hierarchies and so while yes there are differences and I sort of attend to them um in the uh preceding book the racial subordination in latin america um I don't want anyone to get too comfortable uh I'm not thinking that there's one place that's sort of a better place of a black people than others right meaning you may like the music more in one place more than another but they all have some form of anti-blackness as well how much time do you have to spend I have maybe around five more questions is that okay with you I will do my best to address them okay and how does the latin-american context complicate race when the venue shifts to the U.S. there oh somebody gave a shout out for my Roberto Clemente post thank you um 21 uh anyway back to the question the um I saw the chat it could come come up on my screen the transfer over from latin america to looking at these attitudes within the united states in some respects makes it even that more more entrenched which is sort of seems counterintuitive right people think oh the united states along civil rights history isn't there some more sort of progressive space to come to terms with uh the inheritance of the cultural baggage of anti-blackness from latin america and caribbean regions but it's actually the contrary because uh the united states opens up this space of we too now are people of color regardless of whether we were treated as white in the place that we came from now we're all one big lump right here in the united states there's less inclination to deal with the anti-blackness and point of fact you know people often say to me where's this afro latino term come from why people now afro latino i never heard that before your audience is much too polite to say that to me but others have and so i have to explain to them the term afro latino actually comes from latin america meaning the social justice movements the black base uh equality uh groups are the ones that wanted a collective term to describe their collective plight and such you don't necessarily think you are like a black american in the united states to understand that your blackness implicates your life in latin america and so this language of afro latin that is actually starts in latin america and then slowly but surely in the united states latinos begin to understand it and pick it up right and that's another thing about the us dynamic often many latinos have a frozen static picture of what latin america means from a race perspective i mean they have their own past histories of familial histories and they are not up to date about the ways in which the race question is advancing and moving forward that affirmative action is in play etc that you know the always contemporary aspects of racial politics are you know being hotly advanced within latin america in ways that if you've been here for generations or you know however much time you don't actually have cognizance of thank you what solutions do you see for addressing anti-black sentiment among latinos well the very first thing is that we have to acknowledge that it exists and not be so reticent to actually address it right and so i viewed the book as sort of one small contribution to furthering that movement right and so while it's not a how-to book or people ask me how do i talk to my family about this what i say is that one way to do it is to uh not wave a finger right oh i will eat that you're so racist grandma you're so racist no instead to share information often we think that the racism or the anti-blackness that we are observing that these are all very individual instances and we're disempowered and don't have a language and a grammar for describing or articulating it the book gives you a community the book gives you a whole host of stories and patterns with which to be able to show that it's not just you alone who's seeing this or worrying about it and that you have company so that if you want to broach the conversation one way to broach the conversation so you know i've been reading this and it's very interesting to me to hear about these experiences people have been having when you invite someone in to learn with you they can be much more receptive than again i am talking as a educator um but that that's my perspective on it that seems like an answer two questions someone was talking about how they talk about it with their family and someone was asking about with their colleagues here's another question ma'am you mentioned in the book about in the book chapter about prisons that prosecutors successfully proved conspiracies that latino gangs targeted afro-americans for incitation i'm not sure what that says why then do you think the other side of law civil such as a struggle proven racial bias on part of latinos ah fascinating fascinating okay sounds like a lawyer in a room um here's what is fascinating here right when it comes to issues of um violence where the uh n word is utilized right um that fits a very narrow vision of what is discrimination so even if you don't have a background of knowing of you know the uh inheritance and ancestry of uh racial logics from latin america if you hear the n word utter at the same time that there is a sort of conspiracy to um enact violence upon afro-descendant peoples it fits the jim crow noose hanging from a tree vision of what is discrimination in contrast when you're looking at civil lawsuits right it's not necessarily so uh apparent meaning it doesn't fit the most extreme vision of what jim crow racial violence was and absent the violence and absent sort of someone waving a noose around the the workplace or screaming out um anti-black sentiment sure is are more reticent right to recognize that as discrimination uh and i think that's what kind of lays the boundary line between the civil and the criminal cases if you haven't addressed this already i think this is the last question what solutions do you see for addressing anti-black sentiment among what he knows we have to stop acting as if latinos themselves are all one homogeneous group i mean that i mean that i think that's part of the beginning right this idea that there can be a latino versus other group a perspective let me backtrack for a second often when i talk to people about the book or i just mentioned the title they'll say to me ah yes this thing with african americans i don't mention african americans in my title the book is not about african americans alone actually this brings up an issue i'm having the book right now translated into spanish right um and my uh translate because that's a skill set so i'm not doing that on my own i don't want to make any mistakes and so my translator says to me oh you know i think we should translate the book uh to include language about it being uh el prejuicio contra los negros right and i was like no no no no no this is not i don't want to understand it's only about african americans which is we use that language of negro in united states is being just about african americans um because this is bigger right than african americans it is about african ancestry it includes afro latinos when we think of the latino population as itself a race that enables a lot of our anti-blackness to stay unexamined because we're thinking of ourselves as sort of oh unable to have any kind of racial attitudes because we ourselves are a racial group that is discriminated against and i think part of the sort of beginnings of breaking that down is to acknowledge our own racial diversity at the existence of afro latinos and thus the recurrence of anti-black sentiment that happens against afro latinos and that'll then give us the space within which to kind of hold up um all the information and how to navigate moving forward to address issues of anti-blackness more broadly thank you what what do you think about the social or psychological impacts of people who sit with that and and carry in the latino you know community well you know the the racial trauma is really quite a significant one i um you know i'm law trained uh the book looks at first to collect stories from instances of discrimination being uh litigated in courts um at the same time that i then you know interview people i interview school teachers and principals in order to get a much bigger picture right of what's going on um but i thought it would be remiss of me not to bring in the family context because the story of racial trauma is such a significant one um and the and situating that as part of the conversation about racial politics right i thought you know it's not just the personal's political it's also that the inability to see this personal aspect of it is also what enables the color blindness right of our racial politics within the latino population thanks again tanya for being here that's all for today thanks for joining us online thanks for joining us in person and i hope you all stop by the excelsea branch library to come and pick up your book all right see you next time thank you