In her op-ed published in Latino Rebels, Professor Tanya K. Hernández discusses the increased prevalence of white Latino people choosing to identify with multiple additional racial categories, and how that may hinder the measurement of important facets of racial discrimination.
When the Census Bureau released the 2020 survey data this year, much was made of the increasing number of people checking multiple racial categories. Latinos were a significant driver of that increase, and the reasons for it reveal a great deal about our current racial moment.
White Latinos are uncomfortable with acknowledging their Whiteness, and the Census Bureau facilitates the flight from that discomfort. Unfortunately, the results will likely make it harder to address the racism that dark-skinned Latinos face, and the new Census director confirmed last month by the Senate, himself a Latino, appears committed to doubling down on new Census policies that are exacerbating this problem.
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By electing to group themselves within the amorphous census category of “Two or More Races,” white Latinos hinder the ability to use the census data to make comparisons that reveal the existence of disturbing racial disparities amongst Latinos. This is a problem because as the Pew Research Center and other researchers have long noted, there are distinct social outcomes based on labor market access, housing segregation, educational attainment, and prison sentencing that vary for Latinos if they are dark-skinned and especially if they are visibly Afro-Latino. This is not an insignificant population, given the fact that approximately 90 percent of the enslaved Africans who survived the Middle Passage voyage were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean.
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Whiteness and Blackness make a real difference in the lives of Latinos, and we need census data that helps to measure that for social justice intervention.