How the United States racializes Latinos: White hegemony and its consequences
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How t he United States racializes Latinos: W h i t e he ge m o ny a n d i t s c o n s e q u e n c e s Jose´ A. Cobas, Jorge Duany and Joe R. Feagin (eds.) Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO, USA, 2009, 254pp., $95.00 (hardcover), $29.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1594515989 Latino Studies (2010) 8, 292–294. doi:10.1057/lst.2010.15
For scholars in Latino/a Studies who are working on the historical and social construction of racializations and race, this collection is indispensible. Featuring both established and emerging scholars in the social sciences, the book features as its central analytical framework, Feagin’s “white racial frame,” defined as: “An organized set of racialized ideas, stereotypes, emotions, and inclinations to discriminate y Critical to the white racial frame is an interrelated set of cognitive notions, understandings, and metaphors that whites have used to rationalize and legitimate systemic racism” (Feagin, 2006, 25, 28; Cobas, Duany, and Feagin, p. 3, op.cit.). Couched in this understanding, substantive chapters focus on Census (mis)-categorizations of Latinos, urban locales and racial dynamics, linguistic racism, transnational dimensions of white racial frames, Latino interracial relations with Blacks and Haitians, racial violence, articulations with panethnicity, and the specter of Sam Huntington. The book chapters focus primarily on Latino racializations of Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Chileans, Central Americans, and Puerto Ricans. A key unifying thread to the collection is the principle that race is a process, not a thing, and
thus the verb “racialize” is consistently deployed throughout. In the editors’ introduction, the authors make a point of the pervasive naturalization of race and oppression (often by invoking the West’s greatest and racist thinkers – Kant, Hume, Jefferson and Spencer). Yet, they do not amass equivalent examples on the specificities of Latino racializations (other than Calhoun’s infamous statements during the USMexico War) and, albeit quite unintentionally, their introduction can potentially be read as legitimating white racial frames with their attempt at claiming the all-pervasiveness of race. The substantive chapters are much more effective in directly countering white supremacist logics and practices (for example, Gomez’s discussion of mestizaje v. hypodescent, Carrigan and Webb’s lost history of lynched Mexican Americans, and Purcell’s analysis of Chileans subjected to racial violence and nativist laws, such as California’s Foreign Miner’s Tax). White over Latino is most often the main racialized relations analyzed in the book but attempts by Bada and Cardenas to discuss BlackLatino relations in Los Angeles and Chicago, Perez’s comparison of Cuban racializations on
r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies Vol. 8, 2, 292–294 www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
Book Review
the island and in the diaspora, Duany’s comparisons of Haitians in the DR and Dominicans in PR, and Roth’s analysis of countering/absorbing US racializations in the DR and PR point
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