Book Review

Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality

by Tanya Katerí Hernández. Beacon, 2022. 216 pages, hardcover. $23.95.

“Profound and revelatory, Racial Innocence tackles head-on the insidious grip of white supremacy on our communities and how we all might free ourselves from its predation. Tanya Katerí Hernández is fearless and brilliant . . . What fire!”—Junot Díaz, who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and received a MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant" in 2012.

According to the publisher, this is "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."

The book documents that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Written by law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández, this exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. Because Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group, this is important to tackle to dismantle systemic racism. The author uses interviews, discrimination case files, and civil rights law, to show Latino anti-Black bias in the workplace, the housing market, schools, places of recreation, the criminal justice system, and Latino families. In the process, she reveals that many Afro-Latino and African Americans are victims of anti-Blackness at the hands of other people of color.