How can white Democratic and Independent candidates have black people’s humanity in mind on a policy level when they themselves exhibit or condone racism with whatever apologetic language comes to mind? A 2019 example would be Joe Biden’s invocation of two white segregationists as an example of his ability to work across the aisle.
I know that “simply to be white is to be racist” is the catchphrase some liberals use these days, but when will they begin hearing what supposedly they know? When will knowledge matter to practice? “The landscape of your word is the world’s landscape,” wrote the Martinican writer, poet, and philosopher Édouard Glissant.
It’s no wonder that in the race to whiteness certain Asian and Latinx and black people have been, in my fantasy of them, breathless to distance themselves from blackness.2 Claire Jean Kim argues that this is intentionally constructed by whites in her article “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans”: “Racial triangulation occurs by means of two types of simultaneous, linked processes: (1) processes of ‘relative valorization,’ whereby dominant group A (Whites) valorizes subordinate group B (Asian Americans) relative to subordinate group C (Blacks) on cultural and/or racial grounds in order to dominate both groups, but especially the latter, and (2) processes of ‘civic ostracism,’ whereby dominant group A (Whites) constructs subordinate group B (Asian Americans) as immutably foreign and assimilable with Whites on cultural and/or racial grounds in order to ostracize them from the body politic and civic membership.” This model in any case would be specific to Asian Americans and does not apply in the same way to our Latinx population.
But to return to our systems of government, an ineffective justice system points to deep-seated antiblack racism across the branches of our government. This is not disrupted because we have senators of color. Ted Cruz, formerly known as Rafael Edward Cruz, who is Irish-Cuban American, is my case in point of an unreliable anti-racist at a dinner party of mostly black and brown people. An artist at the party says Cruz doesn’t represent her or Latinx people. She points out that there are many black-identified Latinx people whose views aren’t represented anywhere in our discussion, not that being identified as black determines anything.
Later, the artist sends everyone who attended the party a video link to a presentation by Miriam Jiménez Román, who makes the point that the census manipulates the Latinx population into racial identities because of its predetermined racial categories. “Latinx” is the gender-neutral term that replaces the previously used “Latino” and “Latina.” Jiménez Román also points out that statistically a high percentage of Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico identify as white. Though assimilation into whiteness is very possible for some who identify as Latinx, many who self-identify as white are not treated or seen as white.3 And those who self-identify as Afro-Latinx are ignored by blacks and erased by whites. Indigenous communities from places such as Mexico and the Central American countries are hardly accounted for.4
Sitting at home replaying our conversation in my head, I consider calling the artist to continue our dinner-party conversation. The rain blurs the trees beyond my windows, and I wonder if this woman is as appalled by my ignorance as I sometimes feel in the company of whites. In some ways, I understand her to be the kind of interlocutor whom I need to engage, I want to engage. Alongside her willingness to challenge, I imagine there exists the desire to know and be known. I understand she’ll ask for accountability in ways not meant to obfuscate but rather clarify. The clarity she demands makes apparent my own blind spots. I decide to call her.
On the phone she reiterates that she believes the Latinx assimilationist narrative is one constructed by whiteness itself. There’s pressure for Latinx people to assimilate, she says. The pressure begins inside the national census, in the limits of its categories. The culture, when it talks about black excellence, rarely if ever includes examples of black Latinx. No one talks about the interchange of culture between African Americans and Afro-Cubans in the development of jazz, for example, she says. With only 18 percent of Afro-Latinx people identifying as black, many Latinx don’t see themselves in either American whiteness or American blackness because they have cultures with specific histories and historical figures who aren’t included in the American narrative.5
I tell her I had a conversation with a Puerto Rican American man that I found amusing because I kept saying as “people of color” we need to organize around DACA, border issues, and proposed new immigration policies, and he kept saying as a “white man” he feels helpless under the current administration.
Ironically, “people of color” came from the term “women of color,” which black women activists used as a term of solidarity with other non-white women until it eventually represented anyone who was not white identified. But people of color to him means black, she points out.
For me, people of color means “not structurally white,” as in not a part of the structural power across institutions that want others dead or disenfranchised or deported or made invisible to white lives through voter suppression or passive or aggressive legislative defunding and criminalizing of certain segments of the population based both on race and ethnicity. But if, for example, as Jiménez Román said, 75.8 percent of Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico see themselves as white and as part of the general group of white people, even as others don’t see them that way, I see our conundrum.
My new friend, the artist, asks me, Did you know the Smithsonian, until its Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art exhibit in 2013, had never done a major show focused on the work of Latinos? No, I didn’t know that.
What do you know about José Martí? Very little. He’s a poet.
He’s more than a poet. He’s a poet is all anybody knows. OK.
Have you read Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America? No.
So even as I understand the American stereotypes of Latinx people as gardeners and nannies to be intentionally devaluing, I also need to understand that our national cultural imagination, made up of celebrities and politicians (Sonia Sotomayor, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, J.Lo, and all the artists, writers, journalists, and other public figures in the mainstream), isn’t an appropriate representation of the Latinx population at every level of American society, and with roots in countries all over the Americas and the Caribbean.
Chris Rock
There ain’t a white man in this room that would change places with me, none of you, none of you would change places with me and I’m rich.
Sometimes in our conversation I forget to say Latinx, and use the term Latino or Hispanic when I want to refer to people of the Americas or Cubans like Cruz and Rubio, who have referred to themselves as Hispanics. This manages to bring our conversation to a halt. Hispanic is a racist term, the artist tells me. It refers back to Spain, serving to insert a European hierarchical lineage. I am reminded of dinner-party conversations when Jews heatedly distance themselves from those who cling to the label of German Jews. OK, I say, as I understand it’s important what you call people, since Latinx is an ethnic identity, not a racial one.
I am becoming contrite, given my apparent monolithic focus on black-white relations in the United States, even though I believe antiblack racism is foundational to all of our problems, regardless of our ethnicity. It’s this disconnect that keeps me saying the wrong thing. But I still have questions, and the way to get answers is to bear her corrections. I slow down so as not to make the same mistakes. If I am to get things wrong, I want them to be different from before. A part of me wonders if white-identifying Latinx in power (is this an oxymoron?) aren’t in collusion with the white establishment to distance Americans from the particularities of the ethnicities of various Latinx? Am I being defensive, or is this a fair question? Are intersectional alliances with a segment of the population that is often multiracial and that assimilates quickly through interracial marriage really possible? I remember my own surprise when I learned the infamous Louis C.K. was of Irish, Mexican, and Hungarian Jewish descent. While exposing so
me things, he seemed reticent to expose others. His multiracial identity isn’t a recurring part of his routine, unlike fellow comedian James Patrick Connolly, who is also part Mexican.
I wonder if my new friend sees our developing friendship as a burden, given that, to share herself, she has to give me the tools to know her. How do I account for my own ignorance?
On the one hand, I have a friend who, as an Afro-Pessimist, argues that Latinx and Asian people are the “junior partners” in a white nationalist administration, and on the other, I know true solidarity has personally been an oversight on my part as my gaze has been focused on the dead and targeted black people unable just to live, though this limited and targeted existence is also true for many Latinx people.
I know these things, but it’s phrases like “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row,” stated by US senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi while campaigning in a runoff election against Democratic challenger and African American Mike Espy, and Laura Ingraham’s “shut up and dribble” targeted at LeBron James, and, and, and, that come to mind as I try to meet this friend where she stands. Maybe I should be thinking about ICE, or threats of repealing DACA, or concentration camps passing themselves off as detention centers, or “shithole countries” comments, or historical moments like the lynchings of Mexicans by white supremacist mobs in California or the constant humiliations and the intense psychic damage that would lead someone like Sammy Sosa to lighten his skin: “It’s a bleaching cream that I apply before going to bed and [it] whitens my skin some.” It’s hard to separate his words from our culture’s deep hatred of blackness.
Do I honestly feel the same level of distress toward Latinx people as I do toward white people given that all people of color live under the thumb of white supremacy and legislative power remains predominantly in the hands of white people? Obviously not, but …
I hear both exasperation and patience in my new friend’s voice as I say all this. She reminds me no one said much of anything when the president called Mexicans rapists. I beg to differ as to private conversations, but in the public writing I do, I can’t argue. Later she reminds me of the growing population of Latinx communities in the United States, a claim supported by Antonio Flores. His Pew report, “How the U.S. Hispanic Population Is Changing,” states that “the Latino population in the United States has reached nearly 58 million in 2016 and has been the principal driver of U.S. demographic growth, accounting for half of national population growth since 2000…. In 2016, Hispanics accounted for 18% of the nation’s population and were the second-largest racial or ethnic group behind whites…. They are also the nation’s second-fastest-growing racial or ethnic group, with a 2.0% growth rate between 2015 and 2016 compared with a 3.0% rate for Asians.”
Also, Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign slogan Yes, We Can! finds its roots in ¡Sí Se Puede!, the trademarked motto of the United Farm Workers of America, founded by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, Larry Itliong, and Philip Vera Cruz—a fact Obama no doubt calculated and a voting bloc he surely depended on in his intersectional campaign strategies.6
Nonetheless, what the artist and I want, whether or not we agree, has little to do with our individual persons and everything to do with our longings for our life possibilities.
I send what I have written to yet another friend who is multiracial. She asks if I have read Wendy Trevino’s Brazilian Is Not a Race. Yes, I say, as I quote her lines: “We are who we are / To them, even when we don’t know who we / Are to each other & culture is a / Record of us figuring that out.” This other friend, a Mexican and Persian Muslim woman, doesn’t see herself so much in the conversation I’ve had with the artist. She says:
So after reading your conversation with this artist, I find myself thinking about my own positionality, as a woman of color who is not black and who studies black culture. I am also thinking about the conversations that I have had with other graduate students in my department. Some of these people are white, some are black, and some are interracial like me. These conversations can be so fraught even in academic communities when talking about what also happens to us (who is us? what us?), without being caught up in what we understand to be “oppression olympics.”
I think about the many conversations I have had with a friend who like me is a Muslim of color who is not black and who studies black history, and our own experiences with prejudice and racism—how do those experiences fit in the work that we do? In a very deep way those experiences have brought us to our work—there is an obligation we feel to that work that is about what this country we are in is predicated on.
One thing we have talked about is the number of times Islamophobia has taken us so off-guard—including among those in our field, who are black and otherwise. Sometimes this happens when people do not realize exactly who we are, and it always feels like a disappointment. I don’t know what to do with this feeling, or how to always talk about it openly without sounding like I am playing oppression olympics—I get anxious because this is not what I want to do, and do not always know to what degree I should expect a reciprocation of understanding. Or: to what degree I should be as patient as I try to be.
I do think there is an extent to which our Americanness makes it possible for us to think about these things as though they are abstractions. To people in other countries, at the end of the day, to be an American citizen means such an immense privilege.
When I wake in the middle of the night, I sit at my desk and my friend’s phrase “reciprocation of understanding” comes back to me. Is that what we are after? Are conversations pathways to the exchange of understandings? When I am on my own in the dark, the stakes seem lower and perhaps more achievable than say something like “entangled empathy,” which a philosopher friend of mine argues for. For her entangled empathy is not a feeling but a perspective where you recognize yourself inside a complicated set of relations. But what happens when “reciprocate” is a command. I have understood, therefore you must. The defensiveness that brings forward is only human, but is there a moment or a sentence after any reaction of vulnerability that would give us time to realign? Maybe our social work becomes our attempt to be in relation. Conversations could be redefined as such.
What does it mean to want a thing to change but then feel bullied by that change? Is understanding change? I am not sure. The playwright and poet Samuel Beckett once said that writing Waiting for Godot was a way of finding “a form that accommodates the mess.” Are conversations accommodations?
Perhaps words are like rooms; they have to make room for people. Dude, I am here. We are here.
You are here. She is here. They are here. He is here. We live here too. He eats here too. She walks here too. He waits here too. They shop here too. Dude! Come on. Come on.
NOTES
1. Text Brooklyn. She worries that her son will be killed. Killed by whom? My fantasy or her fantasy? Have you been to Brooklyn lately?
Notes and Sources Crime rates in general in New York City are at the lowest levels in decades—see coverage from the New York Times: “Crime in New York City Plunges to a Level Not Seen Since the 1950s.” There has been a slight uptick in Brooklyn very recently but in the broader picture the numbers are still low. The New York Times on the recent situation in Brooklyn: “There have been 21 killings so far in the Brooklyn North precincts, compared to 12 at this time last year [2018]. Many of those killings have been clustered in neighborhoods like East New York and Brownsville. Others have occurred on the edges of rapidly gentrifying areas like Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, where there were four murders within a five-block radius earlier this year,” but “the violence in Brooklyn is still a far cry from the crest of the murder wave of the early 1990s. By April in 1993, for instance, the same 10 precincts in Brooklyn North already had more than 80 killings.” There is a significant racial disparity in crime victimization in New York, in that whites are killed and accosted at a lower rate than other groups. See the Wall Street Journal c
overage of that aspect of the situation.
An NYC-wide report from the NYPD breaks down the race of crime victims. These are the most recent data available and refer to 2018. Key highlights (there are more categories available, and note also that “suspect” may have a specific meaning in this context): Murder: “Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter victims are most frequently Black (62.6%) or Hispanic (24.9%). White victims account for (9.6%) of all Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter victims while Asian/Pacific Islanders account for (2.8%) of all Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter victims. The race/ethnicity of known Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter suspects mirrors the victim population with Black (61.9%) and Hispanic (31.0%) suspects accounting for the majority of suspects. White suspects account for (5.4%) of all Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter suspects while Asian/ Pacific Islanders accounted for (1.7%) of the known Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter suspects.” Robbery: “Robbery victims are most frequently Hispanic (38.7%) or Black (30.6%). Asian/Pacific Islander victims account for (15.8%) of all Robbery victims while Whites account for (13.9%) of all Robbery victims. The race/ethnicity of known Robbery suspects is primarily Black (65.8%). Hispanic suspects account for an additional (27.1%) of the suspect population. White suspects account for (4.6%) of all Robbery suspects while Asian/Pacific Islanders accounted for (2.4%) of known Robbery suspects.”
Just Us Page 12
