Posted this earlier directly to the person I was talking to but wanted to post separately because I think it’s important. We know the anti-Blackness and anti-indigineity that cripples our Latinx community.

Our own people make comments about “mejorando la raza” and beauty or betterment being equated to more prevalent european features and skin tone.

When we don’t address that disparity in our community and racism being on a scale of anti-Blackness first and foremost - we erase the pain of our Afro-Latinx community.

Not acknowledging the racism that to this day keeps Black and Indigenous people subjegated means WE play a role in that as mixed or European descendent people.

It does not mean there is no oppression and pain for other Latinx people. It does mean that for every part of the discrimination we feel, it exists in even larger ways for our Afro-Latinx and Indigenous communities.

We often play the role of whites women in our community. Like when a white woman tries to equate her experience to a Latinx woman. It is not the same.

And when WE as mixed heritage and/or primarily European descended Latinx folks say it is the same, that we know the pain, we disregard the way our community has been impacted by colonization and how much that impact falls disproportionately on Black and Indigenous people.

How many times have you been in a room with a white person and had someone say “but I’m a good person, you don’t know me”. We all carry the vestiges of our upbringings both in the US and specifically in our Latinx community but we use that defense too much. Ya basta.

I find part of the work we desperately NEED to do as non-Black Latinx people is unpack how our erasure from the American narrative fuels both unconscious and conscious anti-Black bias. It is not the root of anti-Blackness in our community but it is certainly the kindling.

And for all that erasure, whenever an article or movement for Latinx people starts, we have consistently left Afro-Latinx people as a secondary or after thought. That is also erasure. And when folks are trying to get us to hear that, many of us go “but I’m erased too”

Instead of cop to our complicity in erasing our Black sisters and brothers. And when sisters do us the kindness of trying to tell us this and we shut down and shut them down before moving to curiousity and learning with a Black leader.

I’ve seen and appreciated the threads of Afro-Latinx actors that done been here. But one thing I wanna make sure doesn’t get left out of that story is how difficult getting work is for THEM. And RARE to non-existent to get work as Latinx people.

I’ve heard some wack reactions about those actors getting work as Black people because they are Black-passing. They are not Black-passing, they are Black! There is no passing. They playing characters in their expansive Black culture.

Folks should be able to play characters in other parts of their expansive Latinx culture. But Hollywood has a limited imagination when it comes to both communities and their intersection. And that is not the Black communities fault, that is the fault of white people in power.

Don’t know about you but I’ve been in hella rooms where folks have read my hurt and frustration as an attack rather than as a plea. And if we really want collective liberation, we will HAVE to start listening to hurt and frustration as a plea. That is what folks are calling for.

As a light-skinned Latinx woman I am willing to walk you through this in a non-public forum. So please feel free to reach out. It is my job to not make this labor another place where we leech of the work of Black people.

And as a person who is focused on Black and Latinx liberation, I am begging you to listen to the hurt and frustration as an alarm bell that there is something to learn here. A community wide learning of the crippling nature of our anti-Blackness for everyone.

Uno poco más, the gains the Black community have gotten from entertainment to justice to politics to tech to you name it have been HARD fought. They have come with lives lost and personal economic futures risked. Those gains have pulled the rest of us along.

And then we have the nerve to resent the community for the doors they risked everything to open being open to them. That is some shit y’all. Black people are not at fault for Latinx erasure.

And every time we show our ass for not having done the homework we break bonds of solidarity we quite frankly shouldn’t get back without a shit ton of work.