Reimagining the Latinx Experience in America | Professor Tanya Hernández

The Reimagining the Latinx Experience in America Book Talk Series hosts Professor Tanya Hernández to discuss her book, Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (Beacon Press, 2022) with Professor Enid Trucios-Haynes as commentator.

Zoom webinar information will be sent to those who register.

The first comprehensive book about anti-Black bias in the Latino community that unpacks the misconception that Latinos are “exempt” from racism due to their ethnicity and multicultural background

Racial Innocence will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. As Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the US, this revelation is critical to dismantling systemic racism. Basing her work on interviews, discrimination case files, and civil rights law, Hernández reveals Latino anti-Black bias in the workplace, the housing market, schools, places of recreation, the criminal justice system, and Latino families.

By focusing on racism perpetrated by communities outside those of White non-Latino people, Racial Innocence brings to light the many Afro-Latino and African American victims of anti-Blackness at the hands of other people of color. Through exploring the interwoven fabric of discrimination and examining the cause of these issues, we can begin to move toward a more egalitarian society.

Tanya Katerí Hernández is an internationally recognized comparative race law expert and a professor of law at Fordham University School of Law, where she teaches anti-discrimination law, comparative employment discrimination, and critical race theory. A Fulbright scholar, Princeton and Rutgers fellow, and former scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, she specializes in comparative race relations and anti-discrimination law. Hernández is the author of multiple books, including Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination.

Professor Enid Trucios-Haynes joined the faculty at the Brandeis School of Law in 1993. She is a nationally recognized scholar in immigration law and she has been in the field for more than 30 years. Professor Trucios-Haynes teaches constitutional law, immigration law, international law and race and the law. Her research and scholarship focuses on immigration law, constitutional law and race and the law with an emphasis on issues affecting Latinos.