Posted April 16, 2008
Slayings of blacks in Los Angeles by Latino gang members in recent years have exposed an undercurrent of conflict between African Americans and Hispanics, but this year's presidential campaign squarely brought the issue of a brown-black divide to the attention of journalists nationwide.
The headlines speak: "Hispanic vote aids Clinton" (Newsday); "Obama Confronts Ethnic Tensions in Bid for Vote" (Washington Post); "Uneasy Black-Latino Ties a Factor in Calif. Primary" (NPR).
Hillary Clinton pollster Sergio Bendixen's statement in a January New Yorker article that Latinos have "not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates" was used by talking heads as a starting point to explore the question of a divide, just as crucial primaries in heavily Hispanic California and Texas approached.
At one campaign debate, an audience member confronted the Democratic contenders with an assertion often invoked as a source of racial-ethnic tension:
"How do you propose to address the high unemployment rates and the declining wages in the African-American community that are related to the flood of immigrant labor?"
Some Hispanic and black journalists see a more complex picture.
"There are genuine reasons for friction, competition and conflict. There are also examples of cooperation and community between these two groups," said Roberto Suro, a veteran print journalist and founder of the Pew Hispanic Center, which studies Latino issues.
Suro says today's conversation about black and Latino relations needs to be framed within a larger picture of tremendous economic change over the past 40 years.
The boom of the 1990s attracted a different population of Hispanics than those who lived through the civil rights era. Changes in globalization, job locations, public spending, and "the way white racism plays itself out" have affected living and working conditions for blacks and Latinos, Suro said.
"The problem with the media coverage is that it portrays them as just two actors on a blank stage, working out their relationship like they were a married couple in the bedroom and all that exists was the emotional energy between these two people," Suro said. "It's just unrealistic."
Iván Román, executive director of National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), says part of the problem is how the term "Latino" is used to describe Hispanics.
Román says the blanket term often fails to consider historic cooperation between Puerto Ricans and blacks in the Northeast; the unique experiences of Mexican-Americans in distinct locales such as California, Texas and Arizona; ethnic rivalries between Chicanos and Central American immigrants; and generational, educational and class differences within and among any of these groups.
"We look at Latinos as a monolith, which then leads to these oversweeping cases," Román said.
One incident seized upon as an example of conflict has been the killing of a 14-year-old African American girl, Cheryl Green, by members of a Latino gang in Los Angeles in 2006. The incident was just one in a series of ethnically motivated shootings of blacks by Hispanics in recent years, but L.A.-based columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson says most media only tell one side of that story.
"What wasn't seen was the aftermath, where you have black and Latino residents in the area march against gang violence together," said Hutchinson, an African American and author of The Latino Challenge to Black America.
"Every time, whether it's locally or nationally, you see a tragedy or some point of a conflict, be it in schools or on the streets, what's not seen is where people come together and try to do some problem-solving and some bridge-building," he said. "So I think that's the balance we always have to bring."
Many pundits and news accounts have failed to do just that in the past year. Problems in Los Angeles have been universalized, often failing to wrestle with a historical reality: A number of black and Latino politicians have enjoyed especially widespread inter-ethnic support in their political campaigns over the years.
Chicago's Harold Washington, New York's David Dinkins and Dallas' Ron Kirk all rode into the mayor's office with strong majorities of Hispanic voters. Denver's first Hispanic mayor, Federico Peña, was bolstered by the black vote in 1983, as have been local and state leaders such as Carmen Arroyo in the New York State Assembly and former Boston City Councilman Felix Arroyo (no relation).
But sociologist Nicolás Vaca says the success of these campaigns involved more than a "rainbow" coalition, which he considers a myth. He says clashes between the two largest minority groups in the United States are historic and very real.
In politics, Vaca says the failure of African American political leaders to get behind Fernando Ferrer early in New York City's 2005 mayoral race helped produce a decisive victory for Michael Bloomberg.
And in his book, Presumed Alliance: The Unspoken Conflict Between Latinos and Blacks What it Means for America, Vaca cites examples of black-Latino political rivalry in Los Angeles going back to the Tom Bradley era.
In the 2005 Los Angeles mayoral race, Antonio Villaraigosa enjoyed widespread African American support, a dramatic turnaround from his failed 2001 bid, when black leaders supported a white candidate, James Hahn.
"African Americans realized Antonio Villaraigosa was going to be mayor whether they supported him or not because Latino voters were coming out in such numbers that they were going to be able to put him into office on there own," Vaca said.
"There's tension from what I call the 'zero sum game,' where if there's only X amount, and two or three groups are vying for it, you're going to have conflict."
On the issue of a rancorous divide, two recent studies reveal nuances in the relationship between the two groups.
A January report by the Pew Hispanic Center portrayed a somewhat polarized inter-ethnic dynamic. The survey found 70 percent of blacks said they get along with Latinos, while 57 percent of Latinos said they get along with blacks.
On the flip side, the two groups disagreed dramatically on the degree of inter-ethnic strife: 30 percent of Hispanics said relations between Latinos and blacks are not good, while just 18 percent of African Americans responded in the same way.
A New America Media poll of Asians, blacks and Latinos also showed that the media may be part of the problem. A majority of blacks interviewed said that ethnic media have exacerbated tensions, and that mainstream media were irresponsible in their coverage of racial and ethnic tensions.
In the multilingual poll, 53 percent of Latino respondents disagreed that ethnic media are a source of friction, but 32 percent agreed. Hispanics were split on the role of the mainstream media in furthering ethnic tensions.
"What we see in the coverage of the campaign just reflects the lack of sophistication that the media has about this problem," NAHJ's Román said.
Román, who is a black Puerto Rican, says Afro-Latinos especially may not adhere to strict boxes of racial allegiance that often define identity in this country.
"It's much more complex than some of the discussion that I've been seeing in some places...For many of us, outside of the U.S., this wouldn't be an issue, because nobody would ask us to pick one [race] or another. And this country asks us to pick one or the other all of the time."
"We've been asking black women which is more important for you," race or gender, in choosing between Clinton and Barack Obama, Román notes. "For Afro-Latinos, many times we're asked to do the same thing, and I am of the thinking that we shouldn't have to."
Reggie Royston writes about race, culture and media.
to top of page