As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids sweep Los Angeles, Fordham Law Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández’s 2022 book, which examines Latino anti-Black racism, is resurfaced in this Word In Black article on identity and racial solidarity.
Afro Latina civil rights lawyer Tanya Katerí Hernández, a Fordham Law professor, explored this dynamic in her 2022 book “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias.” She argues that Latinos are often seen as racially diverse and welcoming, but they hide anti-Black attitudes.
Latinos, she wrote in the book, are “entangled with denigrating Blackness as a device for performing Whiteness.”
But Hernández also warned African Americans against withdrawing from the fight.
“The ICE racial profiling of Latinos as inherently undocumented includes many AfroLatinos,” Hernández says in an email. More than 90% of enslaved Africans who survived the Middle Passage, she says, were taken not to the American South, but to Latin America and the Caribbean.
A Black Issue
That means ICE raids “can just as easily ensnare African Americans as the AfroLatinos who share a common appearance,” Hernández says. Black safety is endangered when “the machinery of racial profiling” runs unchecked.
“Accepting the denial of due process against Latinos won’t keep Black people safe,” she says. “Whether we like it or not, the assault on the humanity of those presumed undocumented, is a Black issue too.”
Read “Justice vs. ‘Just Us’: Should Black People Care About ICE?” on Word in Black.