Latinos: Let’s Talk About Whiteness

The phrase “we’re all Black, white, Indian” is often used within Latino communities to describe a romanticized idea of racial mixture, or mestizaje. While it may appear inclusive at first glance, this saying glosses over the complexity of race, ethnicity, culture, and language among Latinos. It reinforces a flattening of identity that erases the lived realities of Afro-Latinos, Indigenous peoples, and those who don’t fit neatly into the mestizo mold. More dangerously, it often functions as a tool to silence conversations around anti-Blackness, systemic racism, and the need for racial justice within and beyond Latin American and U.S. Latino contexts.

Latinidad is not a race. It is not even a singular ethnicity or culture. Rather, it is a constructed identity that groups together people from more than 20 countries and territories across the Americas and the Caribbean who share the experience of colonization by Spain or Portugal. Many Latinos speak Spanish, but not all do; Brazil speaks Portuguese, while parts of the Caribbean and Indigenous communities across the hemisphere speak dozens of non-European languages. To say “we’re all Black, white, Indian” disregards the specific histories, oppressions, and identities of those who exist outside the dominant narrative of mestizaje—especially Afro-Latinos and Indigenous peoples.

The United States government played a significant role in shaping how Latinos are identified. In the 1970s, during the Nixon administration, the federal government introduced the term Hispanic as a census category. This was done not at the behest of grassroots Latino communities, but largely through bureaucratic processes. The Office of Management and Budget adopted the term in 1977, seeking a uniform way to collect data on people of Latin American or Spanish-speaking origin. The term Hispanic emphasized linguistic and colonial ties to Spain, thereby centering whiteness and marginalizing Indigenous and African cultural legacies. This definition benefitted those who sought assimilation, upward mobility, and proximity to whiteness—while invisibilizing those whose identities fell outside that framework.

Organizations like the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929, were instrumental in shaping this early Latino identity. LULAC was formed largely by Mexican Americans who were U.S. citizens and who, in their pursuit of civil rights, often distanced themselves from Black Americans. In the mid-20th century, LULAC famously rejected affiliations with Black civil rights organizations, with some members asserting that aligning with Black struggles would hurt their chances of acceptance into white American society. Rather than challenge white supremacy, early iterations of Latinidad in the U.S. were constructed in ways that replicated it.

This form of racial distancing isn’t unique to Latinos in the U.S.—anti-Blackness is deeply rooted across Latin America. From Argentina’s historical campaign to whiten its population by incentivizing European immigration and erasing its African heritage, to the Dominican Republic’s longstanding denial of its African roots and anti-Haitian policies, the continent is rife with examples of how systemic anti-Blackness has been institutionalized. In Mexico, Afro-Mexicans were only officially recognized in the national census in 2020. Across the region, Blackness is often associated with poverty, criminality, and backwardness, while whiteness is equated with progress and civilization. The mestizo ideal, often portrayed as the harmonious blending of races, masks the violence, dispossession, and erasure of Black and Indigenous peoples.

Take for example, the snafu at the red carpet with actress Gina Torres—an Afro-Cuban woman born in New York—was approached by a reporter who spoke to her in English rather than Spanish, despite the event’s Spanish-speaking context. The reporter’s assumption was rooted not in cultural knowledge, but in the outdated and racialized belief that a visibly Black woman could not possibly be Latina. Torres, who is proudly Cuban and fluent in Spanish, later spoke out about how moments like these reflect broader societal blind spots that erase the existence and identities of Black Latinos. This incident wasn’t about language—it was about who is allowed to look Latino and who is automatically seen as an outsider within their own culture.

Gina Torres’s experience is not unique. Across the globe, Black Latinos face a double invisibility: marginalized in mainstream Latin American narratives that idealize mestizaje and whiteness, and misread in U.S. contexts that equate Blackness solely with African American identity. These racial assumptions have real consequences—social exclusion, limited representation, and daily microaggressions that question the legitimacy of their cultural belonging. Whether in media, politics, or daily life, the experiences of Black Latinos continue to be shaped by the global failure to recognize that Latinidad is not a race, and Blackness is not a contradiction within it.

The Dominican Republic is often named the poster child for anti-Blackness in Latin America, largely due to its fraught relationship with Haiti and deeply entrenched policies that deny African heritage. However, singling out the Dominican Republic overlooks the widespread and systemic nature of anti-Blackness throughout the entire region. From Mexico’s erasure of its Afro-descendant populations to Argentina’s historical campaign to “whiten” its society through European immigration, every Latin American country has participated in the marginalization and denial of Black identity. Anti-Blackness is not isolated—it’s embedded in the colonial foundations of Latin America, shaping education systems, beauty standards, media representation, and national identity across borders. Recognizing this broader pattern is essential to dismantling the myth of racial harmony and confronting the legacy of racism in all its forms throughout Latinidad.

When U.S. Latinos repeat phrases like “we’re all mixed” or “we’re all Black, white, Indian,” they often invoke a nationalist myth exported from their countries of origin—one that implies racial harmony while reinforcing racial hierarchy. This myth serves as a buffer against discussions of privilege and anti-Blackness within the community. It’s a way of saying: “We don’t have racism here. We’re all one people.” But this is categorically false. Latin America was one of the largest sites of the transatlantic slave trade. Brazil alone received more than ten times the number of enslaved Africans than the U.S. did. The legacy of this history lives on in social structures, media representation, educational access, and policing throughout the region and among diasporic communities.

The work of dismantling anti-Blackness within Latinidad requires acknowledging that not all Latinos are treated equally, and that proximity to whiteness still confers power and privilege. It also requires questioning who gets to define what it means to be Latino or Hispanic in the first place—and what histories and voices are being left out. Afro-Latinos, Indigenous Latinos, Asian Latinos, and those of mixed descent all deserve the right to self-identify and to have their lived experiences recognized without being flattened into an abstract idea of unity.

Only by confronting the roots of anti-Blackness and rejecting the romanticized myth of racial democracy can we begin to build a more inclusive, honest, and liberatory understanding of Latinidad—one that centers the experiences of those historically erased by it.