Latinx: From Looking Black to Being Black
Mural "Tres Razas - Una Cultura Puertorriqueña", San Germán, P.R.
By Rev. José Humphreys III
I did not know I was Black.
Not at least until I was about twenty two. It was during the winter of 1996 sitting in my therapist’s dimly lit office, on a cozy chenille sofa. My therapist was a tallish Black man in his late thirties, with long dreads over his shoulders. Keith had a killer style of dress, along with an unassuming way of filling up space in the room.
He had all the marks of a good therapist; weekly excavations beneath the surface levels of my soul; I’d be reflecting for days on after. But this session was different than the rest. On this day he would probe with a question that would puncture a hole in my universe.
“José, you’re Black… Have you not considered this?” Tilting his head forward, with his hands neatly wrapped on his lap chiding forth a response.
“What do you mean I’m Black? I’m…well…Puerto Rican.”
I was not simply entering a moment but embarking on one. I realized it was more than just a moment of question-response, but an invitation through a portal into Blackness. And while I had known about the term Afro-Latino my fuller embrace of Blackness was still somewhat of an exploration.
Growing up in Lower Manhattan during the times of early hip-hop, Puerto Ricans and African-Americans weaved culture and community seamlessly. Below symmetrical housing project roof tops, lived a people with a sancocho of identity and experience. In the air, a reverberation of the sounds of the radio going boom-bap — pulsating in our veins, rhythmically infusing our gait through hood sidewalks. We African-American and Puerto Ricans were stitched together through chance and communion through the sacrament of place.
To be Nuyorican and de color Negro was to essentially to be a part of diasporic Blackness. And Hip Hop was the midwifery of this expression. Black and Latinx identity with its threads led me back to Bomba beats from Loiza, echoing back to primordial West African rhythms.
Arturo Schomburg is considered one of the fathers of Black history. He was a Black Puerto Rican
At the time (and even today) there weren’t many spaces affirming the experience of Blackness in Latinx spaces. Consequently wearing one’s dark-skin could feel like a liability — a thinly lined overcoat — unable to buffer the racial chafing of this world.
Somehow both collective and individual identity in our world can be a complex maze at the intersection where unity, divergence and departure all happen. For many of us being Black in North America and of mixed heritage, conjured a false sense of escape from Blackness as well. But what we find is we can never get too far.
Ways Out of Blackness & Back Again
Living in an AfroLatinx body there was one way we could prove to separate ourselves from Blackness, even if for a moment. The primary pathway was language. Speaking Spanish/glish in some ways created some separation when needed. A reality not available to Black people in other parts of the diaspora, like Mexico, Cuba or the Dominican Republic.
But here in Loisaida, Spanish was a demarcation. Language formed boundaries that could mitigate rejection in Puerto Rican circles. Just in case one was trying to be well, too Black…Speaking Spanish ensured one could still feel tethered to family and culture.
Spanish was the shorthand for managing the organized confusion of the Spanish bakery. Not unlike the noisy trading floor of the stock market with no semblance of organization…amidst the chaos, ordering in Spanish meant you were attended first. While English-speaking Black people were often ignored and left frustrated.
There were divisive categories that were adopted around what is considered more beautiful. Those times when I traveled to the island some held a nostalgia about my hair, how it used to be thin like my mom’s, but as I grew up it had become more coarse. I heard “Que paso? Tu tienes pelo malo.” Namely, “you have bad hair.”
Spanish was my first language so I found racialized language in my native tongue could impute a particular sting. The white gaze carries a haunting power over Puerto Rican culture shaping over the centuries our judgements about what is beautiful.
One somewhat recent manifestation of this happened during the 2019 Miss Universe competition. Zozibini Tunzi of South Africa gracefully won beating out Madison Anderson Berrios, a white woman representing Puerto Rico. Not long after, there was an ugly backlash of colorism and racism in the post contest commentary. With one “analyst” calling Tunzi “La prima de Shaka Zulu,” (“the cousin of Shaka Zulu,” a South African military leader, though she is of no relation).” This only makes salient the prevailing narrative of Euro-centric ideals of beauty, where daily Black and Brown women wrestle with this reality in ways men can’t imagine.
Photo Credit: Fox
Toni Morrison once described how whiteness imagines itself as everything that is true, good and beautiful. Whiteness feigns interest and effort in seeking cultural and ethnic nuance. In the world of whiteness, it doesn’t matter if you’re Black, Puerto Rican, or a Black person with a complex ethnic story.
From Black Appearing To Black Like Me
Puerto Ricans hold a multi-racial story within their bodies. Ironically, many do not see themselves as multi-racial people, as say, people in America who have a white mother and a Mexican dad. Most of us were taught (or caught) a one, maybe two-dimensional aspect of Rican-ness. We shared stories with beaming pride about our connection to Spain, or our indigenous roots through the story of the first inhabitants of Puerto Rico, the Tainos. But the African dimensions of identity continue to be held at a distance, suppressed like a muted djembe beat.
I didn’t have the language to describe the fault line that created separation anxiety as if something primordial and essential was missing. Yet mystically as if through some genetic morse code, My 2nd great grandma Caroline Johannes, a free Black woman from St. Croix was summoning me forth to dig deeper into her story. Her marriage to the son of an Irish overseer in the sugar plantations of St. Croix, and their eventual migration 40 miles away to Vieques, began a part of my story. Caroline lived into her late 90s if not hundreds. And while I never met Grandma Caroline - a part of her resilience lives through her eight Afro-Latinx grandchildren today.
Today I carry this same resilience as well, as decentering whiteness in my own life has been a sustained spiritual practice. If three geographic stories are coded through my DNA, the European story cannot remain the conquistastador or gain supremacy in a world that easily affirms it forth. Therefore a racial exorcism is what is needed to displace and decenter whiteness.
If you’re Brown, Latinx, you have most likely been shaped by a culture that says white is beautiful and Blackness is not. Or Blackness should be considered an exotic form of beauty at best.
And as Brown folks we are often in a betwixt-between place in this race conversation…So this means we’re neutral in this racism thing, right?
No. We’re either anti-racist or participating in systems and stories that uphold it. Or as my wife says, “We cannot settle for being secondary white people.” Wasn’t that the story of people coming into this country before us? Italians, Irish etc.…who were not considered white people when they got here. But for many groups, even today, being white remains an aspiration.
If we are Latinx, we can begin by renouncing this story and developing new eyes with a new imagination for beauty and cultural brilliance. Let’s start by decentering and decoupling, the image of whiteness from the image of God. We do not have to look far… We are Afro-Descendientes.
Meanwhile back in my therapist’s office it took another Black soul to curate me as a living artifact of diasporic Blackness. In a world of mail-order DNA identity, what my therapist helped excavate didn’t require a cheek swab to confirm. It was not until I received this truth within my innards, that the scales of my eyes were removed to see the brilliance and beauty of the God-given darker palette. And for the first time I felt my Black life truly mattered. I began to uncover beauty in all of its darker hues, as I was reconstituted through self-love, and a new imagination for beauty.
I once showed up in the world as a Black-appearing man. Yet now, I am simply a Black man who embraces beauty in multiple variations: Kinky. Wide. Melanated. Soulful. Ebony. Brilliant. Griot. Earthy. As loud as, “I’m Black and I’m proud.” As subtle as the dark matter that holds our galaxy together.
Rev. José Humphreys III is a faith organizer, and pastor of Metro Hope Covenant Church, a multi-ethinic church movement in East Harlem, NYC. José remains committed to shalom-making in NYC, through facilitating conversation across social, economic, cultural and theological boundaries.
