Latino Racism

So going back over the Latino factor in the Nevada vote, some problems are arising. It's weak to simply say Obama lost because Latinos hate black folks. But I think going forward, the racism we see in Latino communities is going to be a problem. TNR ran a revealing piece on this a few months back.

The essence:

Duke University's Paula McClain, working with nine other sociologists, found similar attitudes among Latinos living in Durham, North Carolina. According to McClain et al., "Latino immigrants hold negative stereotypical views of blacks and feel that they have more in common with whites than with blacks." For instance, 58.9 percent of Latino immigrants, but only 9.3 percent of whites, reported feeling that "few or almost no blacks are hard-working."

These attitudes were not confined to working-class Latinos. Yolanda Flores Niemann of Washington State University and four other sociologists discovered among Latino college students the same kind of stereotypes that Mindiola found in Houston. Among the top ten traits that Latino college students ascribed to black males were "antagonistic," "speak loudly," "muscular," "criminal," "dark skin," and "unmannerly."

We should be careful about generalizing Latino prejudices the way some others generalize about black homophobia or anti-semitism. Furthermore, I bet the data you'd get amongst, say, Latinos in New York would be different. This isn't about any special animus that brown people have for blacks. In fact it's just the opposite. The attitudes of Latinos--I'm willing to bet--closely mirror the attitudes of other immigrants, and ethnic whites. I would think that Mexican-Americans in Houston have about as much love for blacks as Polish-Americans do in Chicago. That's unfortunate. But in a way it proves the essential American-ness of many Latinos. Hating niggers is always a good first step toward citizenship.