Our Patrias Cannot Liberate Us from Anti-Blackness

Abstract

I became a US citizen in the summer of 2013. It was the year before I started graduate school. I was 26 and couldn’t afford the near thousand-dollar application fee for the citizenship application. The charges were waived for me by a program operating from my mother’s Catholic church in Queens. They paid the application fee and assisted me and many other immigrants with the application process. I remember looking over the shoulder of the application officer who filled out my application. She completed most of my information for me, including my name, age, address, marital status, and sex. When she arrived at the race box. She marked “white” without looking at me. I walked out of the church’s office into the hot New York City heat and boarded the Brooklyn-bound J train. My brain rattled with unanswered questions as the train tracked homeward. All I could think about was the race box. I, a clearly non-white, multiracial Dominican man, white? Why did the application officer, a Latinx person with a similar skin tone as mine, see me as white? Why didn’t I call it out? And why did it matter? It wasn’t until I moved away from Brooklyn into a predominantly white space in Ohio for grad school that some of these questions began to click. Latinidad and the myth of mestizaje, I realized, were linked in ways that too often leaned into whiteness, and silence surrounding this linkage can be a form of violence. Fast forward to today’s critical moment of anti-racist protests stemming from the killings of Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. It is critical for us in Latinx communities to come to terms with our histories of anti-blackness and Black denial, which is the history of how Latinidad often fails to see and serve us equally. The question of race among us Latinx immigrants is political, cultural, and social. This question is deeply embedded in long histories of colonialism, immigration, mestizaje, blancamiento (whitewashing), and what, in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois called the US American color line. As Latinx immigrants, our subjectivities, what we call ourselves and how we see each other, intersect with Black–white dichotomies in the US and the colorism and pigmentocracies contrived in our natal countries. We are re-racialized in the diaspora, forced to check a box that we don’t understand, and contribute to the machinery of anti-blackness. The racial hierarchies that emerged from our natal lands are a product of the legacy of colonialism, the institution of slavery, and racist discourses. The truth is that we have inherited a racist and limited discourse to conceptualize our racial complexity. The white box felt like I was leaning into whiteness for self-preservation. Even if I did not check it myself in that Catholic church office in Queens, I did not stop it or didn’t know that I could. The Catholic church, in some ways, was trying to make me white when all I wanted was US citizenship.