National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP)
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Board of Directors
José R. Sánchez
   Chair
Edgar DeJesus
   Secretary
Israel Colon
   Treasurer
Maria Rivera
   Development Chair

Hector Figueroa

Tanya K. Hernandez
 Angelo Falcón
   President


 

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Beyond "Moving Beyond
the Black-White Binary"?
 
NiLP Note: In his June 8th op-ed in Creative Times Report, "Moving Beyond the Black-White Binary," (see below) activist-scholar disruptor Roberto Lovato presents a useful reintroduction to the persistent problem Latinos face with the United States' usual framing of racial and social issues in Black-White terms. He presents a compelling overview of how this binary approach to social policy and politics marginalizes the Latino experience in this country.
 
However, this is not a new problem and it is not clear how the ascendency of an Obama-Clinton politics presents new opportunities to overcome this dilemma, as Lovato seems to imply. In fact, while Latino scholars and community leaders have been consistently critical of this bi-racial approach, a more usefully detailed examination of its origins and nature has not been forthcoming. While these criticisms imply the need for an alternative conceptual framework that would allow us to "move beyond" moving beyond the Black-White binary, there has been a consistent failure to provide one that is compelling and, at least, provocative enough to promote a more serious debate of what it should consist.
 
One problem is that this problem appears posed in either specific and/or overly broad terms. It is largely defined as a problem generated by the wider American society and the Latino community's role in contributing to it is not sufficiently addressed. As Lovato writes about the need for a "(b)etter understanding and representing the Latino history of the United States," he doesn't explain why Latinos have not done so as effectively as he would like. Does this problem, in part, reflect a failure of the many Latino studies programs and scholars existing at universities and colleges throughout the United States? Is it perhaps due to the inability to adequately develop a comprehensive pan-Latino approach to this history, as Lovato reveals by his largely Mexican-centered and marginally Central American approach that leaves out the Caribbean and South American experiences?
 
Lovato accurately discusses the politically distorting role that the immigration issue and the "frenzied pursuit of the 'Hispanic vote'" have had on a broader and deeper Latino agenda. But the question is, What are the sources of these distortions? This brings us immediately to the role of the Latino political and civil rights leadership. Why has this leadership allowed this current state of affairs? Are our political leaders more loyal to the country's two major political parties than to their own community? Are our civil rights organizations too overwhelmed and too dependent on government, corporate and foundation funding with conflicting agendas?
 
As we decry the limitations imposed on Latinos (and Asians) by this Black-White racial binary, it is as important to recognize the inability of many Latino leaders to coherently address racial issues within the Latino community. We have Afro-descendant Latinos who deny that light-skinned Latinos are racially discriminated against, there are thosewho see themselves primarily as indigenous, and there are those who have no problem with seeing themselves as being racially White. Is this a healthy racial pluralism, the basis of a post-racial Latino consciousness, a mass racial confusion, or something else? How can this lack of a racial consensus be the basis for an alternative to the Black-White binary?
 
Finally, it appears that by the 2020 Census, the Census Bureau will be blurring the distinction between Hispanic ethnic and racial identifications. It appears that they are set to propose soon to the Congress that the Hispanic and race questions they currently use be combined into one question. This would mean that the only nationally-recognized indicator we have of how Latinos relate to the standard U.S. racial categories will be gone. These Census data have been perhaps the most authoritative evidence of the limitations of talking in Black-White terms for Latinos, and  whose absence will weaken attempts to overcome the problems of this racial dichotomy. Despite the importance of the consequences of this issue, the debate on this question has been quite muted within the Latino community, largely confined to narrow bureaucratic Census terms.
 
Lovato has done a great job at describing the problem. The issue now before us is how to resolve it, if it is resolvable.
 
---Angelo Falcón  

Moving Beyond
the Black-White Binary
The black-white binary keeps
Latino voices out of public
discourse and erases important
stories from our history-and
it's time to move on.
By Roberto Lovato
Creative Time Reports (June 8, 2016)
 
Black Lives Matters mobilizations in the United States include brown bodies, brown bodies marching, brown bodies protesting and brown bodies bearing witness. This solidarity makes sense, especially as blacks and Latinos in the United States also have a shared past-from the mid-1800s through the 1920s, mobs in the West and Southwest murdered thousands of Mexicans, many of whom were hung from the same trees as African-Americans. And today Latinos often live in the same neighborhoods as black people-like Ramsey Orta, the 24-year-old Puerto Rican man who filmed the chokehold arrest that resulted in the death of his friend Eric Garner. Many who identify as Latino see firsthand-and identify with-the epidemic of police violence that disproportionately beats, bruises and kills black bodies.
 
And yet at a national level the black-white binary-the widespread idea that race relations in the United States involve only these two groups-reduces the country's 55 million Latinos to nonentities, left out of national conversations about anything except immigration and the frenzied pursuit of the "Hispanic vote." Little national attention is paid to police shootings of unarmed Latinos, even though police in the United States kill Latinos at a higher rate than they kill whites-and the tallies are growing. Many in the nation rightfully mourn the loss of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner but have never heard of Alex Nieto, a 28-year-old security guard killed by police while eating in a park in the rapidly gentrifying San Francisco neighborhood where he grew up.
 
The problem of unacknowledged police violence and the deaths of brown bodies is only the most immediate and violent effect of the black-white binary. Latino lives do not register in most of the nation's majority institutions-including the media, which systematically erase Latinos from both Saturday Night Live and the Sunday political shows; philanthropic entities, which allocate about 1 percent of their collective giving to Latino organizations; and major literary prizes can't seem to see Latino literary brilliance west of the Appalachians.
 
By focusing on Latinos only in the context of immigration, the media reinforce the deeply held notion that Latinos are foreign and hostile.
 
You'd never know it from the news media, which consistently equate "Latino" with "immigrant"-even though most people called Latinos are U.S.-born. By focusing on Latinos only in the context of immigration, the media reinforce the deeply held notion that Latinos are foreign and hostile. I write a lot about immigration, partly because of my immigrant family but also because editors operating within the black-white binary won't pay me to write about much else. The possibility that we might have something important to say about race, climate change, war or class conflict remains just that, a possibility.
 
But frustration is beginning to turn into action. The tireless efforts of Refugio and Elvira Nieto, Alex Nieto's parents, are one example. After a mostly white, suburban jury found four officers not guilty of using excessive force when they shot the unarmed young man 59 times, the Nietos led a crowded vigil, protesting their son's murder and the twisted class and racial dynamics unleashed by Silicon Valley-led gentrification.
 
At the core of these digitized dynamics is the necessary (for gentrifiers, that is) erasure of Latino history, which enables gentrification and national amnesia, even in the massive part of the United States that was once Mexico. During the war in El Salvador, I learned that it's easier for human beings to kill other human beings if they can first turn those human beings into "others," if they can first take away their humanity. Growing up in pre-Silicon Valley San Francisco, I learned a similar lesson: you can't displace an entire community without first dehumanizing and then erasing the memory of that community, for to remember would be to acknowledge the tragedy of living in a space that's been ethnically cleansed for profit and hipster fun.
 
The need to give Latinos their rightful place in our history of struggles for equality could not be more clear.
 
But fighting the injustices of the present isn't enough. We also need to complicate our country's history. A new, more accurate historical narrative is being unearthed in the greater Southwest, where most Latinos live. Scholars are studying, for example, the myth of racially neutral "frontier justice," revealing that in sunny California, from the Gold Rush into the 1930s, hundreds of Latinos were lynched in violent public spectacles chillingly similar to the lynchings of African Americans in the South. Tejano scholars are confirming stories told by elders in small towns in south Texas about the "Matanza," the killing of up to 5,000 Mexicans by the Texas Rangers during the 1910s, stories of headless bodies floating in rivers and skulls found in the brush with holes in the backs of their heads.
 
The great brown hope of this research is that Mexicans and other Latinos will no longer simply play the role of foreign bad guys at the Alamo or tropical sidekicks in the civil rights stories told on plaques along roadsides and in historical exhibits and documentaries-the stories that shape our national identity. The need to give Latinos their rightful place in our history of struggles for equality could not be more clear, especially at a moment when Latino voters are offered this "choice": a candidate who has openly supported jailing and deporting small children (possibly sending them to their deaths) who are fleeing a coup to which, according to leaked memos, she gave tacit support, and a candidate who launched his campaign with rhetoric that has already inspired violence against Latinos.
 
Better understanding and representing the Latino history of the United States not only gives more value to those lives by confirming their existence but also reorganizes our sense of national history, race and media so that the deaths and lives of the Alex Nietos of the world are given their appropriate weight in the national conversation.
 
Today, on the same coastal plains that hold the mass graves of victims of the Matanza, the remains of Central American and other immigrants are being buried in new mass graves. Latinos-as well as non-Latinos-who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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The NiLP Report on Latino Policy & Politics is an online information service provided by the National Institute for Latino Policy. For further information, visit www.latinopolicy. org. Send comments to [email protected].