Page 3 - Metro Record April 2021 filea

THE METRO RECORD - APRIL 2021 3
There is Always More to a Story! NEWS

‘Racialization works differently here in

Puerto Rico, do not bring your U.S.-centric

ideas about race here!’

By Dr. Hilda Lloréns

negra (Black mother). My parents’ “races,” acceptable; and 3. being light-skin and/or
as well as their 30+ age difference was a white means privilege and access.
topic of discussion and discord. Growing up
in Puerto Rico, I often heard my mother To race scholars, as well as to lay people, it
retell tales of the racism she suffered at the is an open secret that Puerto Rico is a
hands of la familia blanca de tu papá (your society obsessed with racial classification
father’s white family). She said they were and the policing of race because it is
relentlessly racist towards her, taking invested in anti-Blackness. It is a society
advantage that she was just una muchacha that acculturates its people to understand
negra ignorante (ignorant young Black the advantages that come with denying
woman). Because she was so young and one’s Blackness and instead to claim any
inexperienced and not yet able to speak trace whatsoever of whiteness to fit in, to be
back, whenever they visited, she would Puerto Rican. In my family, people who are
cower when they treated her como una white Latinx-presenting tend to lead white
sirvienta (like a servant), ordering her Latinx lives, both on the archipelago and
around and examining the surfaces to see stateside, reaping the benefits of the
whether she kept the house clean. privileges afforded by their light or white-
adjacent “epidermal schema.”
Born with darker skin than my three older
siblings, looking more like my mother than The Puerto Rican Diaspora tends to use
my father, his family doubted that I had any cultural nationalist signifiers to affirm their
of their “sangre blanca” (white blood). It ethnic belonging and pride. But like
became my mother’s obsession to show American nationalism, Puerto Rican
This title is a variation of a statement I have “race mixture” anti-Black racism. The them that I was indeed my father’s child. To cultural nationalism is also used to exclude.
heard during the last two decades as a invisibility of Puerto Rico’s Black prove it she would send them my It has historically excluded Black-Puerto
professional anthropologist. I was population in statistics and policies confirm elementary school photographs depicting Ricans, often assuming that Black
reminded of it again recently, when a the myth of racial equality. For instance, my long, thick, straight hair. In fifth grade individuals in Puerto Rico are Dominican or
Puerto Rico-based colleague mentioned though the U.S. Census, with its stark when I was allowed to go to a neighborhood belong to another racialized nation-state.
that it is common in the archipelago to Black-White racial categories offers Puerto hair salon by myself to get a haircut, I asked
think about the race research produced by Ricans less racial options than are the hairstylist to cut all my hair off; I came The claim that U.S.-centric views of race do
U.S.-based Puerto Rican researchers as commonly used on the archipelago, we home with a pixie cut much to my mother’s not apply in Puerto Rico, an archipelago
being tainted by U.S.-centric ideas about must remember that these multiple dismay. which has been a U.S. colony for 120 years,
race. At its base, this assertion has the categories work to “lighten people away” during which migration routes between the
effect, and maybe even the goal from the from Blackness. It is true that in Puerto It is true that in the Puerto Rican and Latinx island and continent have been well
outset, of discrediting the race research Rico people perceive racial belonging on a U.S. racial universe I am often regarded as established, is a myopic view denying
produced by those of us living in the spectrum, but that spectrum still works an India (i.e. brown skin straight hair) or cultural transmission. Not only do migrants
Diaspora. But I believe there is more going within a White-Black phenotypic binary alternately as non-Black. For me, claiming carry cultural practices and beliefs with
on than just marking our research as (i.e. how white versus how Black you look?). an Afro-descendant identity does not stem them back and forth, but in recent years
suspect. from my time spent in the U.S. where the social media has also become a powerful
In a 2017 survey about “perceptions of “one drop rule” predominates; it stems source of cultural transmission. Puerto
Because at this point I have heard racism in Puerto Rico,” we found that from having been born and raised in a Rico’s white cultural nationalism praises
variations of this opinion dozens of times, among respondents who defined culturally Black family from Puerto Rico’s white-American trends, celebrities, and star
and particularly so by a subset of the themselves as evidently Black (i.e. they are southeast, who later moved stateside. What academics, but shuns and dismisses their
archipelago’s intelligentsia, it is time to labeled as Black by self and others), 71% we learned when we moved to the African American equals. This is the same
explore the ideological work this claim reported to have experienced racism in continental U.S. was the broadness of the cultural nationalism that has long been an
does. This brief analysis is less a defense of Puerto Rico. The results of our various Black Diaspora. In Hartford our Black agent of prejudice against the Puerto Rican
the validity of research like mine, and analyses with experiences of racism neighbors were African American, Diaspora, shunning its poorest, as well as
instead exposes how as a cultural unanimously also showed that, the darker Jamaican, Dominican, Cape Verdean, its Black members above all others.
construction in itself, this hegemonic the self-reported skin color, the more likely Panamanian, Colombian, and Brazilian. My
statement is an example of how cultural respondents were to report experiencing cousin, who moved from Puerto Rico at the What I have learned from living stateside is
nationalism and anti-Black racism warps racism. This pattern is consistent with what same time as I did and became a known that there is no such thing as a “less violent”
even the brightest minds. While it is true would be expected in a society where racial basketball player in Hartford, was form of anti-Black racism. And until we
that anti-Black racism takes on specific and ethnicity is not determined via a rule of nicknamed Shaq, as much for his basketball begin to understand anti-Black racism as a
locally contextual qualities, it is also true hypodescent, but where racism skills as for his Afro looks. My older cousin, hemispheric social problem, we will
that the anti-Black racism experienced by nevertheless affects those with darker or who had migrated from Puerto Rico in the continue to fall prey to nationalism’s divide
evidently Black individuals throughout the most evident Black phenotypes. In other early 1980s to join the army, married an and conquer tactics disallowing for the
American hemisphere has strikingly similar words, defining racial/color categories African American woman with whom he emergence of Black and anti-racist cross-
consequences: poverty and along a continuum from Black to White had two-children and who, because both of national solidarity. Aside from experiencing
marginalization; lack of access to quality does not preclude people from experiencing their parents are Black, now choose to racialization and racism, a commonality
education, health care, employment, and a racism. To the best of our knowledge, ours identity as African American. My uncle shared by the Black Diaspora in the
clean environment; police profiling and was the first survey to ask about racism and Juan was believed to be Haitian when he Americas is being made to feel as perpetual
brutality; spatial segregation and territorial place, asking participants “in your opinion, lived in Puerto Rico, and when he moved to outsiders, as foreigners in the nation-states
dispossession; denial of entry into where does anti-Black racism occur most the U.S. people often assumed, he was of our birth. Perhaps it is time to coalesce
restaurants, night clubs, stores, and country frequently?” The three top answers were in Senegalese. My mother and I are often around post-national Black solidarity on a
clubs; social marginalization and political 1. employment; 2. media; and 3. school. asked whether we are Dominican or hemispheric scale to demand racial justice.
exclusion; and the attempt to silence the These results are concerning because anti- Panamanian. In short, in my family, the
voices of those who dare speak out against Black discrimination in school and people who are unambiguously Black live Hilda Lloréns
on-going racial violence and terror. employment cause harm to the life chances, Black lives, and experience anti-Black
trajectory, and well-being of Black racism, whether in Puerto Rico or stateside. Hilda Lloréns is a cultural anthropologist
In Puerto Rico, much like in the rest of individuals. Similarly, the media which acts Evidently Black Puerto Ricans do not live and a decolonial scholar. The thread that
Latin America, anti-Black racism is as an ideological arm of society is the same life experiences as “harmoniously binds Dr. Lloréns’ scholarship is
embedded in the very denial of its existence responsible for reproducing anti-Black mixed” Puerto Ricans do. understanding how racial and gender
by the state and society. Additionally, the racism. inequality manifest itself in cultural
taken-for-granted notion that “we are all My family was thoroughly racialized long production, nation building, access to
mixed,” works as a strategy to invisibilize I first learned about anti-Black racism as a before we moved out of Puerto Rico. I environmental resources, and exposure to
Black people and their demands for justice child in Puerto Rico suppose when one grows up in a Black environmental degradation. Dr. Lloréns’
all the while upholding lightness (off-white family designated as such by history, research has been centrally concerned with
skin) and whiteness as an “unmarked,” I must have been 4-years old when racial economics, society, and experiences of critiquing structural inequalities and
“normal,” and universal social category. descriptions such as negra, blanca, racism, along with the embodied trauma it dismantling taken for granted notions of
The party line goes something like this: trigueña, and jaba’ entered my produces, as much as by one’s cultural power. At URI, she teaches core courses in
“Puerto Ricans are all mixed (i.e. light skin), consciousness, as well as my visual field practices, one is likely, in the context of the anthropology, such as Anthropological
‘real’ Blacks compose a tiny fraction of the (how I saw myself and other people) and archipelago, to also thoroughly understand Theory, Language & Culture,
population and they were never/ are never vocabulary (how I described myself and that: 1. being evidently Black is a Anthropological Approaches to the Study of
treated violently like in the U.S.” This line others). In part this is because I was born to disadvantage; 2. that being mixed-race Latinas/Latinos/Latinxs, and Gender &
attempts to subsume within the rubric of a padre blanco (a white father) and a madre while publicly aspiring to be white is Culture, among others.