Hate Can Come in Black and Brown
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
New America Media Commentary
Aug 27, 2010
The recent wave of attacks on Hispanics by African-Americans in New
York’s Staten Island and East Baltimore, Md., has torn open an ugly and
very painful secret. Latinos and blacks can—and do—commit hate crimes
against each other. And the violence can be just as deadly as the worst
attacks by the Aryan Nation or the KKK.
The Latino victims in New York and Baltimore were beaten, robbed, and
in one case, killed. These attacks are no aberration. Two years ago,
federal prosecutors in Los Angeles slapped charges against Latino gang
members who committed or were suspected of complicity in 20 killings in
the area. Their targets were black residents. The arrests came several
months after the slaying of three black students in Newark, N.J., by
illegal Latino immigrants, some with alleged gang ties.
Two years before the Newark killings, Latino men were robbed, beaten
and even murdered in Plainfield, N.J.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and
Annapolis, Md. Meanwhile, seven members of a Latino family were slain in
Indianapolis. The attackers in all cases were young black males. Police
speculated that they regarded the victims—mostly undocumented workers—as
easy prey for robbery since they would be reluctant to report the
attacks to police.
The Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission recently found that
a growing number of the hate attacks in the region over the past five
years have been committed by Latinos and blacks. Latinos and blacks also
committed the bulk of the racially motivated attacks against each other.
Nationally, blacks and Latinos commit about one in five hate crimes. The
racially tinged violence in Los Angeles, Staten Island, and east
Baltimore is not the norm—yet.
The overwhelming majority of assaults and murders of blacks are by
blacks, and most attacks on Latinos are by Latinos. But the ethnically
motivated attacks, no matter how infrequent, stir fear, rage and panic,
while deepening racial divisions. This is especially true given the
increasingly open unease and hostility many blacks express toward
illegal immigration—anger no doubt stoked by Arizona’s draconian law SB
1070— coupled with the astronomical levels of joblessness among young
blacks.
The simple explanation for the hate violence in Los Angeles is that
the perpetrators are bored, restless, disaffected, jobless, untutored or
violence-prone gang members engaging in bloody turf battles to control
the drug trade. But the assaults are also a twisted response to racism
and deprivation. The attacks no doubt are deliberately designed by t
gang members to send the message to blacks that “this is our turf, and
you’re an interloper.”
The vehemence of the racial hate should also surprise no one. Many
Latinos continue to blame blacks for their own poverty or stereotype
them as clowns, buffoons and crooks. Some routinely repeat the same
vicious anti-black epithets spewn by racist whites. A 1998 poll found
that Latinos were three times more likely than whites to believe that
blacks were incapable of getting ahead. Black activists have protested
the racially skewed depictions of blacks on some Spanish-language TV
shows. These myths and stereotypes bolster the notion that blacks are a
racial and competitive threat.
Some blacks feed on the same myths and negative images of Latinos as
anti-black, violence-prone gangsters who pose a menace and who are their
ethnic and economic competitors. The same 1998 poll found that as many
blacks as whites believed that Latinos breed big families that they are
unable to support .
The misconceptions and fears that both groups have about each other
drown out genuine efforts to lessen tensions. It’s clear that those
efforts are needed now more than ever.
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