Anti-Blackness in the 'Latino' Community

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Jay Balvin win Afro Latino artist of the year 2021 which incensed many Latin folk them .

Not only because let's be real , man .

Looked like he been doin son from birth .

Not only because he white enough to glow in the dark that he whiter than burd that he out here looking like the last Arctic monkey .

No , it's also because the very year he was awarded Afro Latino artist of the year .

He dropped the music video for now .

Trickle one and four misogynoir sexism and reggaeton .

So watered down that they could play it in Sam's club .

That was a few therapy sessions later .

You ain't gonna believe this , right ?

But even though this came out in the year of our Lord 2021 because if this came out in 2012 , I wouldn't even blink .

I ain't gonna lie .

Even though Jay Balvin bigger than bad bunny Balvin , even though he is one of the largest Latin American artists with the propellant of an entire music machinery behind him yet .

No one person could have pulled birch tree .

Balvin Blanco Bleach Balvin just tell him that hey , you know , maybe walking women , let alone historically marginalized black women , walking them on a leash .

Ain't a good idea .

You know , the optics of it a little off .

I mean , they just had the whole B L M march , you know , B L M George Floyd and them , the market is having a moment .

Put this one in the vault , put , put this song in the vault .

No , nobody told him that despite all of that , what I am most intrigued by is how this happened with an Afro Latina on the song , play the song , play the song you literally translates to I am a and he now I know adjacency to whiteness is the fat of internalized bigotry .

It is increasingly addicting and foundation fatal .

I understand this , right ?

But I can't help but admire the mountain of multiple systemic failures that facilitate a hiccup like this .

A lot of Dominicans will say they're not black .

It's obviously a lack of education and um anti-black .

No , I'm Latino .

I'm this , I'm not black , right ?

Um I don't want to be seen as those people or maybe it wasn't a hiccup after all .

But instead a sustained breath that has yet to be addressed to the point where the Latin folks then that are darker than blue would insult their own hu if it means they gain some access to proximity to whiteness , guarantee safety , right ?

When you think about the Dominican Republic , it's a negotiation between a lot of different regions from Haiti to the United States to Europe , its identity has been molded by white supremacy .

And I say that to say it , the are the ones that suffer the most .

How can you tell a story that's been deprived of its origins and denied the ability to be told ?

This is the question posed by many Afro Latinos to their own communities where their ancestral narratives and cultural impact have been erased , minimized or absolutely forgotten .

Even the legitimacy of their presence and claim to their homelands are being questioned .

They're being impugned .

I'm gonna amid something right here .

Right now , most of my friends , they will exclude me .

And then there were times they would even think I was lying about my parents' background .

And I'm like , why would I lie about that ?

Don't get me wrong when I was , there was a point like especially in middle school .

I used to lie about my parents' background cause I always hate it .

Explain to people why I'm black .

But my parents are from Honduras .

I'm like , yo , but yeah , so I used to not , I used to be like , oh I was um Haitian , I was um Jamaican .

I would make up it's a , a black country I would just mention , I mean like , oh I'm actually from Haiti , I'm actually from Jamaica .

Most non black Latinos when they think of someone who is um Afro Latino .

They think someone who is mixed race over time .

Black heritage has been pushed to the margin of Latino discourse .

But many Afro Latinos have reclaimed their culture and emphatically risen to be a formidable collective .

In 2005 , the Southern Poverty Law center headlined tensions mounting between blacks and Latinos nationwide .

They chronicled the growing violence between teenagers in Cali Chicago and even Nevada in that year alone .

In one case where hundreds of Black and Latino students got into separate battles in the streets around Wilma , Amina Cara High School in rail .

Two days later , there was another fight and then four days after that , another unfortunately left 57 kids seriously injured .

This article is only a speck in the sea of research papers , blogs , posts articles and tweets on the tensions and controversies between these two communities .

So how can we resolve this ?

However , before we brainstorm solutions , there's an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed .

Like what's a Latin person ?

Right ?

That's the , that's one of my first responses .

If you look at how anti-black forms in Mexico , it's very different from how it forms in D R .

It's very different from Argentina , Argentina uh and in Brazil and in Colombia , Colombia is like the wildest , like separated , separated place all over like people think of Colombians and think of Jay Balvin and it's like what like there's tons of indigenous groups in Colombia , right ?

The reason why sometimes I struggle with being Latina though I'll say it is because it encapsulates all of South America , Central America , Mexico and the Caribbean , like most of these people have nothing to do with each other except for like maybe a language .

And even then it differs so much per like regions .

Kind of one of those things that it's like , it's complicated because there's so much difference between all of these history and all the lived experiences of all these people in these regions .

So it's like even that , like , what does that mean ?

Sometimes I'll just say Caribbean because it's like , I think the region is very specific and I think the Dominican Republic shares more culturally with other Caribbean Islands than it does .

Chile .

For example , I , I culturally , I share nothing with people from Chile , like , you know , aside from Spanish and even then I kind of don't understand , we don't understand each other very well .

There's people that aren't , don't have a lot of melanin , but people through the lens of black and white want to identify as white .

And it's like this person is not white , only white passing if you pass around white people , we love to have people that look as way usually JB or um kind of mess but they , you know , they could lead to whiteness A K A bad bunny uh Yankee E V I think they were a bunch of people .

So it's like , what exactly is the Latin community actually ?

No .

Who is the Latin community ?

Because it definitely isn't r of course , when we think about Latinos and what they look like , we typically think of mestizos a colonial term from the era of Spanish that describe people with a mix of white European and indigenous ancestry terms such as and mestizo are a remnant from slavery of both Africans and indigenous people in Latin America and the Caribbean .

Well , trigger warning rape and subsequent classification of the resulting Children were necessary to establish a racial hierarchy .

This gas system had an elaborate taxonomy , including espanoles , creoles , indios , mulatto , Zambo and Negros where NAOS outnumbered all groups and eventually became the core of many countries national identity .

Now being used as a signifier for a color blind society .

But Latin simply means someone of Latin descent or a person who speaks one of the Latin languages in the Americas , Asians , Japanese Colombians and Afro Brazilians are still Latin .

Even if they don't fit the narrow white supremacist box they're shoved into there in lies the primary problem .

The Latino community embodies several different forms of in betweens at once .

I'm Dominican .

I got Chino all the time .

Sometimes I've got Rubio which literally means blonde , but there's actually just like a kind of way we say white boy .

I don't really outwardly identify myself as anything anymore .

I let people identify me .

Now .

I'm just kind of like , dude , I don't like , I really don't know at this point .

I subscribe to the idea that it's like if you have the question is someone black , you're not black .

But at the same time as a Dominican person , people want to tell you , hey , by the way , just so , you know , you're black .

But it's like , but also I think I'm mixed .

But also my parents literally grew up on the same block and my mom is that very light skinned and my dad's very dark skinned .

So I am , but they're also both mixed .

Everything is viewed through the lens of American identity politics and the language of that .

Um And then in other places around the world , this these conversations are very limited and underdeveloped because of where they are in their own history .

So then it's not like you have like uh a different language or a different framework to like replace the conversation with , you're constantly having to mediate it through like the American like language .

When in reality , it doesn't fit in because it's a very different history and every island has its own , every region has its own different history in relation to color , to texture , to hair .

Um And it's very , it's a lot more complicated than people realize the term isn't racial , though it may conjure up ideas of a phenotype , but it's ethnic , which academics know gives off a softer mode of difference associated with earlier generations of immigrants from Europe and classified as whites .

The classification or desire to associate with the in group of whiteness can easily be seen in or which is a socioeconomic and political practice of upward social mobility by marrying lighter or white Latinos to literally whiten their race .

However , the endless framing of Latinos versus blacks perpetuate the exclusion of Afro Latinos from Latin and Whiteness as the idea , middle school was a nightmare .

I'm telling you right now , like middle school hands down the worst years of my life , Afro Latinos that were at that at this specific school , they were mixed race .

So they would switch up and basically like side with the non black Latinos .

There were times where certain non black Latinos would like treat me like crap like um there were , there were instances where they would bully me because of me being black .

They would uh talk bad about me in a negative way in Spanish as I could understand what they say about me .

This colonial sign off is a strategy used by the white class and every day everywhere to prevent racial and ethnic solidarity .

So for the sake of this video , I'll use black and Latino to describe the two communities .

But you all know we're talking about black and mestizo relations which also force Afro Latinos to pick a side scholar Tanya Hernandez delves into the anti blackness in the Latino community .

As one answer to this framing , citing that her mother suffered violence , exclusion and mistreatment by her family members , which is part of a much larger insidious pattern .

Of colorism that affects family guys , access to resources , educational opportunities , employment , and even the criminal justice system , like the idea of you being of a higher class is parallel very much with , like the idea of you being farther from blackness .

It's not , it's not wearing Jordans , it's not wearing chains , it's not listening to this kind of music .

It's not talking this kind of way .

And that's all aside from like , it's not your phenotype as a , as a person racially or it's not like , you know , where you come from , things like that .

It's very much a thing of like the blackness is like a construct socially that represents a type of low class , that people will be very discriminatory to uh Dominicans are very cool being black , but they're not cool being Haitian .

Um They're very cool being black in a way .

That's , that's cool in New York and that's cool in Miami and Cali , they'll be very cool with Snoop Dogg and they'll be very cool with like a lot of hip hop movements .

It doesn't threaten them , it doesn't signify anything too crazy to them because it's detached and it's from the US .

So it's like , you know , it's still like this class based import almost .

But Haitian is , uh you know , Haitians is everything from like low class to like anti patriotic because our country is founded on hating Haitian people in a lot of ways semantically politically governmentally , like , based off of like census to be black is to be Haitian and Dominican Republic .

Literally on the census like black is imperial .

This he Haitian old um I DS like my parents still have their I DS from when they lived there in the nineties .

My mom says white and my dad says in Indian , um it's to say , and he's darker complexion .

So it's to say he is of a darker complexion but he's not black because he's not Haitian .

And I think a lot of people don't understand , it's not like the people themselves started saying like we're not black .

It's like , like the entire country's history is , is AAA movement towards a separation from Haiti because when you look at Haiti being the like for it to defeat the world's most powerful army at the time , the French army for a small slave nation to do that was such like a shock that everybody obviously , you know , did not want to trade with Haiti .

Haiti to this day suffers from that .

And it's really , it really sucks because a lot of like , for example , Dominicans and a lot of people around the world will say things just like , oh you know , these Haitian and they don't want to let go of like voodoo .

They don't wanna , they don't wanna make money .

They love being savages , they love being this .

And it's a complete lack of like education over how all of the world powers came forward to squash Haiti to the point where I think what was it like towards the late 18 hundreds , 80% of um Haiti's uh like national income was going back to France for the reparations until the sixties .

Yeah , the Dominican Republic as soon as Haiti got its independence was infiltrated by the United States .

Um And they were thinking , how can we profit off of the resources there in general ?

Always number one , number two , how can we prevent what happened in Haiti from happening in the US and in the other colonies ?

Because it's not only that they didn't uh that they got their freedom .

It's also that they were just like we are not doing plantation stuff anymore .

Like we are literally like there are no , no more plantations like we are so over this .

Um So they were made to pay and there's literal like a docu , there's literal text , written quotes from this time period from like the founding fathers like Juan Pablo Duarte , who's one of the founding fathers of like the Dominican Republic , literally talking about how the Dominican Republic will be .

It was like a national project to have it be the whitest and most Catholic island in the Caribbean .

So that was a huge part of its foundation of broadcasting and , and branding the Dominican Republic as white and Catholic .

Many people may think that the idea of anti-black in their own community is paradoxical .

I mean , how can Latinos , which despite being an ethnic identifier known as people of color , be racist or prejudice against black people .

It's impossible , right .

However , Tanya posits that Latinos claim that their racially mixed culture immunize them from being racist .

A term that she's dubbed Latino racial innocence .

Colorism in the community is interwoven with the perception of phenotype hair , texture , the shape and size of your lips and nose and even your family's socio-economic standing .

There is even terminology for people that are white skinned but how uh uh more African features , people dark skinned but have like straight hair or something .

And it's to say that there is this understanding of how color , not only color but also texture of hair and also futurism are all the things that you're negotiating .

So it kind of becomes this sort of like list of variables where it's like , OK , I was born with really kinky hair and I have a darker complexion , but my eyes are green and I could just realistically go to the salon and through that I moved forward .

But for those in Hispanola , however , the anti blackness and anti Haitian sentiment runs deep in the Dominican Republic .

Dominican relation to anti blackness is not the same as any other like relation of other countries to anti blackness .

We want to talk about this .

We should talk about why people end up this way .

And for me , what I see is that ultimately , there's , it's , it's just people's negotiation with oppression .

It's , it's people's negotiation of exploitation and oppression and what side they want to be on .

Um And if you want to be not oppressed anymore and not our world , we present that the only option is to then become the oppressor .

So people are going to take on whatever unsavory characteristics that they will because if humans objective is to survive and to make their people survive and that's what's going to make you and your family survive , then nothing else matters .

Dominicans have a complicated relationship with race and that's primarily due to the 30 year hate filled reign of General Rafael Trujillo who propagandize the association of Blackness with illegal immigration , criminality , primitivism and s rather than Dominicans .

In fact , the militarization of the current Dominican Haitian border is specifically due to the US public dictator Trujillo and its anti Haitian is racism .

The US occupation with um the they appointed Trujillo who's the , who was a dictator in the Dominican Republic during the 19 hundreds .

If you know any elders that grew up during the Trujillo era , I think he was like assassinated like in 1960 I would say maybe 19 , late 19 fifties .

I don't remember the specific date if you like if your parents or your grandparents grew up during that time .

Like , right , uh my , one of our home attendants grew up during the Trujillo era .

She literally like , oh my God , I'm getting too tan , I'm getting too dark was such intense , like genocide literal , it was a dictatorship .

So it was like so much of that was rooted in whiteness .

So it was literally , it wasn't um it was about life or death , like legitimately life or death that paired with intense heavy corruption .

It being one of the lowest educated countries in the world .

Um being it being extremely Catholic , it's the only country that has the Bible on its flag .

It's an extremely patriarchal country .

It's very conservative .

It has , I think one of the highest rates of ex femicide , killing of women in the Caribbean , it's pretty easy to get away with killing your wife if she cheats on you there or whatever .

Like it's a very specific country and that's why I say sometimes when Americans have a conversation around um the Dominican Republic being anti-black , I understand it with having it with other , like New York , Dominican people .

They're just being , you know , assholes about it .

That's fine .

But like when you're talking , thinking about the people that live through that experience that like deal with the literal consequences of anti-black from not being able to get certain jobs unless their hair is straight or not being able to work in the front of an establishment .

If they're darker skinned , they have to work in the back .

It's like they are the ones living through this .

They just don't have the language to communicate this experience because this is their normal , these negative stereotypes and anti blackness rife in the Black and Latino communities have only been furthered by state sanctioned mass murders like the Parsley massacre , Northwest Dominican Republic and the sole orders of Trujillo proximity to whiteness is another reason for anti blackness by those interested in upward social mobility at the expense of Afro Latinos and other Black people .

The White Cuban diaspora has repeatedly been charged with racial discrimination after successfully assimilating in a similar fashion to their Irish and Italian counterparts .

Similarly , Tanya Hernandez argues in her book , that the way South American Latinos racially bar Afro Latinos from businesses and clubs distinctly mirror those of white people in the United States in Puerto Rico Hector Bau Zon and his friends made headlines when they filed a discrimination claim due to being denied entrance to a San Juan restaurant while white patrons were right there immediately being seated and served .

According to our research , Afro Latino Children are also given similar if not harsher treatment to remind them of their place .

On the rac total pole professors at a public school in N Y C with a predominantly Dominican population reportedly treated darker skinned students as less intelligent and more aggressive , thereby contributing to the school to prison pipeline across the United States .

Black and Latino students face expulsion and discipline more often than white ones .

With this knowledge in mind and the history of anti blackness in the Latino community .

Why are we still fighting Black Latinos and their cultural contributions ?

Are constantly erased in favor of mestizo artists , musicians and actors who very rarely credit ancestors who paved the way and crafted these art forms .

Because little did many know the came from a historically Jamaican genre .

Let that sink in for a second .

The very foundational rhythm that Jay Baldwin's misogynoir music is boasted by is block in origin Dembo , which in itself is our adaptation of reggaeton and our adaptation of uh Jamaican uh you know , reggae and dance hall and our adaptation of hip hop .

A lot of anti Haitian is like the , the flavor that you get in D R reggaeton starts in Panama .

It starts because of Caribbean immigrants in Panama , Jamaican immigrants in Panama that bring reggae there .

And uh what emerges is this , this type of dance hall music that's , that's set in Spanish .

And from there it comes to Puerto Rico uh in this kind of nebulous way because there's some influence there .

But there's also just a lot of influence in general of reggae and hip hop .

Hip hop is used in the US .

And you get people that come back and forth between the US that are able to sort of like merge these things and bring the hot hip hop records and then you get this thing and then , then Bo shows up um gets used over and over again in freestyles and becomes this thing through which poor people in Puerto Rico , a lot of whom were , you know , mestizo .

A lot of them were light skin like Daddy Yankee , you know , he's , he becomes his face and there's a , there's a whole thing , Daddy Yankee and Reggaeton is kind of like if he took Drake and he was also care as one at the same time .

I it's a really weird thing .

Reggaeton is this very uh political thing in Puerto Rico too .

It was a rebellious music that often like anti cop messages , leftist messages in it .

You know , Daddy Yankee was saying all that shit .

Like there was a lot of artists that were just like , like because police officers were the ones shutting down these parties .

And and there was this huge antagonism in Puerto Rico between the police and the poor .

The casual disrespect involved in placing the only black people in such a position is just one example of a phenomenon we see again and again in the tension between black folks and other P O C .

That tension being the reality that though not at the top of the totem pole , other people of color can feel secure in the fact that they are at least not at the bottom , at least they're not black .

Hence the contrast marginalization of blackness and the heavy veneration of whiteness , you see the pernicious project of white supremacy has successfully generated a buffer between those at the top and those at the bottom .

This manifests in ways overt and covert .

And if it sounds familiar it's because it is , it's a very similar situation like in My Asia Phobia in the Black Community series with Olivia son that I highly recommend you watch .

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