Ahead of National Hispanic American Heritage Month, Fordham Law Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández participated in a Q&A with El País English about the new Spanish translation of her book, Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality, originally published in English in 2022 by Beacon Press. She says she hopes Inocencia racial: Desenmascarando la antinegritud de los latinos y la lucha por la igualdad—now available in paperback, e-book, and audiobook—will help Latinx families confronting bias.
But for many Latinos, whose skin is lighter, their hair straighter, their noses and lips smaller, racism is a subject that has always been taboo. Anti-Blackness is considered, according to Hernández, to be someone else’s problem — specifically, a United States problem — because the myth persists that the Latino community is a mestizo community and, therefore, that mixed race makes it impossible for a Latino to be racist. In order to debunk this myth and many others, Hernández publishes on August 6 the Spanish translation of her book Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality, originally published in English in 2022 by Beacon Press.
In this work, the researcher analyzes an array of court cases in which Latino anti-Blackness discrimination has taken place to demonstrate how racial discrimination against Afro-Latinos permeates the Latino community. Hernández explains that she decided to use this narrative framework “because the fact that these are court cases makes the reader better positioned to believe that this is a real problem, because they see that it has reached the courts, as opposed to just being a personal story.” But she recognizes that in the end a case is also a story, as is her own.
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