#WhiteHispanic is trending, so let me break this down as someone who studies race and ethnicity and not a Hotep like Tariq Nasheed.

1) Latinidad is an ethnicity, not a race. So someone can be Black, Indigenous, white, Asian, etc. as their race and still ethnically be Latinx.

2) The existence of different races is foundational to Latinidad because racialization is foundational to colonization. There is no such thing as Latinx or Hispanic without Spanish conquest.

From the get go, you have the Casta paintings, which create a *racial* hierarchy based on blood purity even as ethnically the cultural exchange is forming the basis of Latinidad https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-americas/new-spain/viceroyalty-new-spain/v/clapera-casta-paintings

3) So yeah, of course there are "white Hispanics"- somebody did the colonizing. And often Latin countries invited in white immigrants to try to whiten and lighten the population, so there are "white Hispanics" from that too.

4) But some people "look" Hispanic! You might say.

You're probably saying they look "mestizo," or mixed Indigenous. This is generally what the media casts as Latinx. This erases a bunch of people's Latinx identity, especially Afro-Latinx folks.

In the case of Tariq Nasheed, he showed light skinned Latinx men who were referred to as white in police reports as evidence of "white Hispanics."

Idk about you, but I don't trust the cops to get things right about race.

Some police departments really only report race based on a Black/white binary. This hurts Black people the most for obvious reasons, but it also erases the identity and racial/ethnic biases present when policing non-Black Latinxs who are reported falsely as white.

5) Because the U.S. operates along a false Black/white binary, lots of Latinx folks are pressured either to join forces with non-Latinx Black people, attempt to assimilate into whiteness, or remain perpetual foreigners.

So you get someone like George Zimmerman, the man who murdered Trayvon Martin.

Was he acting out social whiteness, assimilation, and anti-Black violence? Yes. Is he a mixed race Latino man? Also yes.

Yet lots of media coverage treated Zimmerman as "white Hispanic," as if the shooting was simply Black vs. white. Naming that a non-white Latinx person was perpetuating white supremacy shows a fuller picture of what's going on, and the threats Black people face.

Words matter.

Tariq Nasheed purposely erases those complexities because he is a self described race-baiter. His understand of white Hispanic is that all Hispanics are white, which surprise surprise ends up hurting and erasing Black people.

6) A note on language- I've used the term Hispanic here because that was trending and the debated term.

Latino, Latina, Latinx, Latine, Latinidad- these are all much better words. Hispanic places the emphasis on Spain and the colonizer. Latinx puts the emphasis on the culture

Anyway follow @bad_dominicana for some Afrolatina realness