An October 22, 2022, recording of a strategizing meeting to discuss redistricting captured Nury Martinez (the first Latina president of Los Angeles’ city council), Ron Herrera (president of the LA County Federation of Labor), and two other Latinx councilmen making racist and disparaging remarks about African Americans, Indigenous people, and others (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23404926/los-angeles-city-council-racist-recording-scandal-explained). This was just the latest reminder that we need to seriously grapple with anti-Black and anti-indigenous sentiment in the Latinx community.

To create a truly inclusive community that embraces all of us, we must acknowledge and respect those we tend to exclude when we reference the “Latinx community” in our work and in conversations with our family and friends. Afro-Latinx and Indigenous people are often missing from our history books, mainstream media, popular culture, and our imaginations. What’s more, we often disavow our Afro-Latinx and Indigenous familia and actively discriminate against them. Anti-Black and anti-Indigenous bias are a product of both our Latin American heritage and the deeply embedded white supremacy of US society.

Although some believe the myth that racial harmony reigns in Latin America, the truth is the region harbors a long legacy of anti-Black and anti-indigenous ideology. For centuries, the status quo across the Americas has been a racial hierarchy, with whites at the top and Blacks and Indigenous communities at the bottom. Because many Latin Americans have ancestry that includes the blending of African, Indigenous, and European heritage, an ideology of mestizaje, or racial mixing, often masks the racial discrimination that has occurred historically and continues to this day. Latin American racist attitudes coalesce with US-style racism and together sustain white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and anti-indigeneity.

Because of this sordid history, it is imperative that we commit to understanding how Latinxs are complicit in promoting white supremacy. As many articles in this journal attest, Latinxs actively sustain structures of racism. If you need further evidence, read Tanya Katerí Hernández’s recently published book, Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality. Hernández reviews numerous contemporary cases of anti-Blackness enacted by Latinxs across contexts, including in public spaces, the workplace, educational institutions, and housing. She forcefully refutes the oft-repeated idea that Latinxs, as people of color, can’t be racist because we don’t hold structural power. Hernández documents how, in fact, Latinxs can and do actively promote white supremacy and engage in racist practices, denying Afro-Latinxs and African Americans job opportunities and places to live, targeting them violently, and using dehumanizing epithets against them, among many other examples. Hernández provides a path for us to understand Latinx anti-Blackness at all levels of personal, interpersonal, cultural, political, and economic life.

Likewise, we must be conscious of the way our understanding of Latinidad tends to obscure both Indigenous histories and current Indigenous realities across the Americas. The ugly remarks spewed by the cited LA Latinx leaders about Oaxacan immigrants, one of the largest Indigenous populations in LA, made clear that Indigenous Oaxacans are not among their imagined Latinx constituents. This type of blatant discrimination, coupled with folkloric interpretations of indigeneity and unexamined claims of Indigenous ancestry, are serious obstacles to creating a robust, inclusive Latinidad. Mestizo narratives that privilege whiteness perpetuate enduring colonialities that erase Indigenous histories, knowledges, and lived realities. A good place to learn about these challenges is in our recent special issue, Critical Latinx Indigeneities (volume 15, issue 2).

If we believe ourselves committed to social justice, we need to unlearn our own racism and work toward solidarity among marginalized peoples. White-presenting Latinxs in our communities must recognize their privilege and investigate the ways they are upholding white supremacy consciously or unconsciously. Essential is an approach that analyzes how different oppressions support and strengthen each other. As we know, white supremacy and our capitalist system depend on a strategy of divide and conquer to subjugate marginalized people and keep us fighting each other instead of identifying and challenging the root causes of our oppression. An intersectional framework, in contrast, allows us to build strong coalitions and collective power. As Natalia Molina and colleagues remind us, it is constructive to think about race and ethnicity relationally, through a shared context of meaning and power.Footnote 1 Making connections among subordinated groups helps us dismantle the co-constituted systems of domination that lead to the marginalization and dispossession that people of color face. This approach requires us to pay close attention to intersections in our histories and experiences.

Deconstructing intertwined legacies of colonialism helps us work toward a more unified future. Fortunately, there are plenty of examples of activists and scholars developing such analyses and organizing on that basis. We see this type of multiracial, multicultural community building, for example, in the activism of two Chicago-based organizations, Organized Communities against Deportations (https://www.organizedcommunities.org/campaigns) and the Chicago Torture Justice Center (https://www.chicagotorturejustice.org). In their political analysis, these activists draw connections between state violence and the criminalization of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. They denounce mass incarceration in all its forms (including immigration, deportations, and detentions) and point out its origins, as well as its historical and present-day manifestations, particularly in terms of how they condition Black, Indigenous, and Latinx lives. Their organizing across communities stresses the importance of building trust and solidarity to successfully dismantle systemic inequality and create meaningful social change. As the LA situation confirms, in our increasingly multicultural context, a politics built around the experiences and priorities of isolated racialized groups (or imagined subsections of these) can lead us only to a dead end.