A Badge of Honor not Shame: An AfroLatina Theory of Black-imiento for U.S Higher Education Research

Abstract

The ways in which U.S. scholars and researchers of higher education conceptualize "race" shapes inquiry and ultimately knowledge creation and dissemination of scholarship, research, and policy contributing to the U.S. Latinx education pipeline.This conceptual study addresses the symbolic violence of what "passing for White" as Latinxs mean for studies of colleges and universities, and how centering our African and Black identities calls these manifestations into question. The focus of this study is to juxtapose themes in the U.S. higher education literature, to the experiences of AfroLatina scholars demonstrating shortcomings of "passin' for Latinx," which they construct as the under-theorization of the role U.S. anti-Blackness and Blackness plays in the construct of U.S. Latinidad. Therefore, a conceptual framework of Black-imiento is provided that can help expand the Latinx construct, future research, policy, and practice. Disciplines DisciplinesEducation 130 ________________________ 1 The term Latinx is used instead of Latino, Latina/o, and Latin@ within the literature. We employ Latinx in solidarity with making visible the spectrum of gender identities within this U.S. ethnic community.

“Cops Only See the Brown Skin, They Could Care Less Where It Originated”: Afro-Latinx Perceptions of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

“…Their triple oppression and the inadequacy of existing racial and ethnic categories to articulate their identity play a role in the ruptures that respondents display as it relates to diasporic consciousness (Flores and Román 2009). Attentive to this embodied dislocation, Dache et al (2019) argues, "[o]ne ever feels [her] three-ness-a Latina, a Negra, an American" (137).…”

Troubling the Essentialist Discourse of Brown in Education: The Anti-Black Sociopolitical and Sociohistorical Etymology of Latinxs as a Brown Monolith

“…mutated as they cross from one America to the other America, with their different racial logics” (Hooker, 2017, p. 156). Although anti-Blackness in tandem with Latinidad has largely gone untroubled in U.S. education research (Dache, 2019; Dache et al, 2019; García-Louis, 2020; Haywood, 2017a, 2017b), our argument is not a novel concept as Indigenous Latinx education researchers have advanced discussions of mestizaje and transnational Latinx racial formation (see Calderón & Urrieta, 2019; Urrieta, 2003, 2017; Urrieta & Calderón, 2019). For example, Urrieta (2003) argued that “.…”

“…Hence, it is imperative that U.S. education researchers concerned with matters of Latinx identity are more attentive to colonial logics threaded in South–North linkages that have shaped U.S. Latinx and Latin American racial formations. Moreover, the U.S. education research community must move to conceptualize Latinidades as multiple while also recognizing the various ways that the politics of U.S. Latinidad has multiethnoracial implications (Dache et al, 2019; Haywood, 2017a, 2017b).…”

“…Political and social inclusivity is often relative to how ideologies of mestizaje, racial democracy, and racial egalitarianism are situated within regional and nation-state–specific racial identity politics (Hooker, 2005a, 2005b, 2014, 2017; Paschel, 2016; Telles & Paschel, 2014). A transnational lens is thus necessary for understanding how the multidirectional movement of these ideas and logics are central to the construction of Latinidad and, more specifically, the U.S. Latinx subject as Brown or mestizx in racialized discursive practices in U.S. education research (Blackwell et al, 2017; Chacón, 2017; Dache et al, 2019; Hooker, 2017; Milian, 2013; Rivera-Rideau et al, 2016; Urrieta & Calderón, 2019). Moreover, situating anti-Black colonial logics, mestizaje, and racial democracy within this transnational frame reveals the underbelly of our racialized discursive practices in U.S. education research.…”

Allies, Antagonists, or Ambivalent? Exploring Latino Attitudes about the Black Lives Matter Movement

“…Scholars in the field of education recommend centering the concept of Black-imiento which embraces “U.S. Black liberation politics within a Latinx identity” (Dache et al, 2019, p. 132) in order to resist the tendency toward blanqueamiento (whitening), the dominant anti-Black ideology throughout Latin America.…”