José A. Cobas - How the United States Racializes Latinos

HOW THE UNITED STATES
RACIALIZES LATINOS

WHITE HEGEMONY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

First published 2009 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 2009, Taylor & Francis.

Copyright 2008(2009) Counting Latinos in the U.S. Census, by Clara E. Rodrguez.

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How the United States racializes Latinos : white hegemony and its consequences / edited by Jos A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59451-598-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-59451-599-6 (paperback : alk. paper)
1. Hispanic AmericansGovernment policyUnited States. 2. Hispanic AmericansSocial conditions. 3. United StatesRace relations. 4. RacismUnited States. I. Cobas, Jos A. II. Duany, Jorge. III. Feagin, Joe R.
E184.S75H74 2009
305.868073dc22
2008042253

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-598-9 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-599-6 (pbk)

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

To the late Bernard Farber and Joe Feagin
Eminent scholars, generous friends

Despite its scientific disrepute, the concept of race remains a powerful social determinant in the United States. The racialization of Latinos refers to their definition as a racial group and the denigration of their alleged physical and cultural characteristics, such as phenotype, language, or number of children. Their racialization also entails their incorporation into a white-created and white-imposed racial hierarchy and continuum, now centuries old, with white Americans at the very top and black Americans at the very bottom. Thus, one can speak about the intense racialization of daily life, including health, housing, education, work, friendship, and marriage patterns. In this introductory chapter, we trace the modern concept of race in Europe from its origin in the fifteenth century and the racialization of Latinos and Latin Americans in the United States since the nineteenth century. We also provide a brief overview of the main contributions of the individual chapters of this volume.

In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese became the first Europeans to travel to Africa and establish trading posts on its western coast. They initially exchanged such goods as metal pots and wine for Africans gold and spices. As the demand for enslaved Africans increased and made their transport more profitable than trade in nonhuman goods, enslaved Africans became the cargo of many Portuguese ships.

The Spanish nation-state was the first to colonize on a large scale indigenous societies in the Americas for their resources, but its growing wealth and military apparatus were soon countered by the imperial expansion of competing English, Dutch, and French nation-states. Early on, Spanish and English conquerors and enslavers in the Americas rationalized the oppression of indigenous and African peoples in both Christian religious terms (uncivilized, un-Christian) and physicalbiological terms (ugly, apelike). The massive enslavement of Africans awakened the interest of European and North American scholars. Some of the latter had even invested in the slave trade, and many others began to accent European superiority and African inferiority. By the last few decades of the 1600s, British and other European thinkers were laying the groundwork for a hierarchy of biologically distinctive races, which developed more fully over the eighteenth century. Englands Sir William Petty, a leading anatomist, portrayed enslaved blacks as physically and culturally inferior to whites. Drawing on European travelers accounts of the Americas and Africa, Petty advocated a ladder-like ranking of unchangeable human species or races characterized by physical and social differences. He insisted that natives of the southern tip of Africa were the most beastlike of all the souls of men with whom our travelers are well acquainted (quoted in Shore, 2000:87; see also Feagin, forthcoming).

In Germany, the Wests leading philosopher, Immanuel Kant, taught philosophy and what would later become social science. His treatise, On the Distinctiveness of the Races in General ([1775] 1950), laid out one of the first hierarchical models of human races. Kants work, which he claimed was based on science, conceived races as differences in the human genus shaped by different environments. Races varied in physical traits such as skin color, physiognomy, and body type, as well as in psychological temperament. Kant paid special attention to Negro traits. A physiological process ending with the evaporation of the acids of phosphorous, Kant asserted, makes Negroes stink. Although in his racist view blacks were well prepared for physical labor, they were also lazy, soft and dawdling ([1775] 1950:22). This early white racial framing of people of African descent influenced most subsequent models of the racial hierarchy in Western societies.

Shaped by English thinkers such as Petty in the late 1600s and early 1700s, the first conceptualizations of race in North America developed over the next century on the basis of a belief in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race, supposedly linked to superior Germanic groups (Horsman, 1981). Variations on this Anglo-Saxon myth were widely popular in North America. Thomas Jefferson, the most famous of the U.S. founders and a patrician slaveholder himself, was the first American intellectual to write extensively on racial matters. Jefferson led in creating self-satisfying rationalizations for the enslavement of African Americans. In a passage reminiscent of David Humes stereotyping of Africans (Morton, 2002) and of Kants overtly racist thinking ([1764] 1965), Jefferson argued that enslaved African Americans did not have any achievements that would demonstrate their human equality: But never yet could I find a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture (quoted in Gossett, 1997:43). A man with great influence over the next century, Jefferson read and was influenced by the earlier work of scientists such as Petty, including their negative views of black Americans. In Jeffersons only intellectual book, the influential