Why White America Would Rather Learn Spanish Than EbonicsMinority Report
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 14 - 20, 2003
&hellip For African Americans, the Latino explosion has no particular significance, except that the mere suggestion of a black-Latino rivalry deflects attention from the most entrenched conflict in American history-the one between blacks and whites. Better yet, Anglos prefer that blacks and Latinos fight it out, allowing them to sidestep race, and black people, altogether.
Last January, when the U.S. Census Bureau announced that Latinos had become the country's largest minority, you'd have thought all of black America had lost a marathon. The south Florida Sun-Sentinel announced we'd been "surpassed"; The Washington Post said Hispanics were "outpacing" us; and The Charlotte Observer cast us in a "slow eclipse." Earl Ofari Hutchinson peered into his scrying pool for the Los Angeles Daily News and divined the headline "Latinos' New Clout Threatening to Blacks."
Hutchinson was not alone. "African-Americans and the African-American leadership community are about to enter an identity crisis, the extent of which we've not begun to imagine," Henry Louis Gates Jr. predicted in a New York Times article. "Our privileged status is about to be disrupted in profound ways." Gates didn't specify how we'd ever been "privileged" or how that status would be "disrupted." Now that there are more Latinos in this country than blacks, would the government start dismantling affirmative action? Would the police start profiling us? Would high-ranking elected officials suddenly start making racist remarks? Oh, wait. . . .
… Still, experts are auguring a national power struggle between blacks and Latinos. Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, told the San Francisco Chronicle that Latino growth "comes at the expense of other minority groups, especially black people, who have worked for 200 years to get a level playing field, a fair shot."
Even if such a claim were true, don't expect much to come of it, if only for geographical reasons. When the 10 states with the largest percentage of Latinos is cross-referenced with the 10 states with the largest percentage of African Americans, there is not a single match.
… It's kind of hard to go to war with the guy next door when, well, he doesn't live next door.
… Like all people, white Americans enjoy talking about themselves-as long as the conversation makes a hero out of them. When forced to deal with black issues, whites prefer to focus on whatever positive role they have in the story, no matter how minor. This is why in any film about black struggle, one sympathetic white person is essential-it's not a story unless they are the story. [p6: see
Amistad, the movie. Rarely have I seen more disappointed Black folks in one place as I did leaving the theater I saw it in]
… If there must be a conversation on race, whites would rather have it with a group that doesn't weigh on their conscience the way African Americans do. Latinos fill in just fine. That 40 percent of them already think of themselves as white is pure bonus.
&hellip As for us, dethroned though we may be, you can trust that black America isn't sweating finishing second. Between "House Slave" and "Head Nigger," we've learned our lesson about dubious honorifics like "Number One Minority." Even so, there is a perception that we want the discussion of race to remain a primarily black-white affair. Hogwash. What we want is a final, honest consideration of our place in this country. Then we can gracefully shed our role as the primary articulator of racial injustice, and get down to doing what we've always wanted to do-get rich and join the Republican Party.
