Anti-Black Latino racism in an era of Trumpismo

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).…”

“…To extend the idea of theorizing more pragmatically toward research, we borrow from Villenas (2007) who suggested that education researchers need to ask “how Afro- and Indo-Latinos feel excluded from discourses that equate Latinidad to brownness and privilege whiteness” (p. 422). Nationalist assimilationist projects of erasure associated with monolithic Brownness have tangible implications relevant to the educational experiences of Afro-Latinx [and Indigenous Latinx] students and educators (Calderón & Urrieta, 2019; Haywood, 2017a, 2017b; Urrieta, 2017). Findings from Haywood’s (2017b) study of six Afro-Latinx college students illustrate that Afro-Latinxs often experience colorism, are confronted with White beauty norms, and “are uncomfortable, unwelcomed, and even subjected to emotional violence in Latino spaces” (p. 775).…”

“…We center these concerns to suggest that a singular Brown Latinx identity must be understood as a discursive descendant of mestizaje and Latin American colonial logics and thus problematized in U.S. educational discourses (Calderón & Urrieta, 2019; Dache, 2019; Haywood, 2017a, 2017b; Urrieta, 2003, 2017; Urrieta & Calderón, 2019). As Jonathan Rosa (2018) stated,The ethnoracial status of Latinx identity is widely debated in both scholarly and popular discourses, often from the perspective of spectrum-based racial logics that problematically imagine Latinxs as an intermediary “brown” population located between Blackness at one end and Whiteness at the other, or as a phenotypically heterogeneous group that is better understood ethnically (e.g., stereotypically defined culturally or nationally) than racially (i.e., stereotypically defined physically).…”

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

“…Violent White supremacy is being deployed through White-passing U.S. Latinx 1 bodies, evident in cases where the executioners passed for White but claimed a Latinx heritage. The killings of Trayvon Martin and Philando Castile and the presence of Latinx White supremacists in the Charlottesville protests (Garcia, 2015;Haywood, 2017a;Rosario, 2017) are examples of such cases. In response to this physical and deadly violence, as three Afro-Latina scholars, the authors respond with a conceptual study centered on Blackness within U.S. higher education Latinx scholarship.…”