Racial Innocence by Tanya Katerí Hernández is a transformational gift to anyone interested in centering Blackness and challenging Latinidad for practicing solidarity within Latinx communities and beyond. Through poignant and heart-wrenching examples of discrimination against Black Latinos by other non-Black Latinos in housing, employment, and law enforcement, Hernández illuminates the injustices that fall under the radar when we assume Latinos are a racial monolith. Hernández’s sobering account painstakingly bursts the bubble of alleged “racial innocence” or mythologies based on the idea that since Latino people are racially mixed they could not possibly be implicated in anti-Black racism. Hernández reminds the reader of an inconvenient truth: “Unlike ethnicity, race is always about creating and maintaining a caste system” (5). This insightful onto-epistemological stance must be fully reckoned with. Or as critical race theorist Derrick Bell would ask: Who’s afraid of confronting anti-Blackness within Latino communities? In Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black...

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