Bianca Laureano (@BiancaLaureano) has started culling contributions by blatinos (my word for Latinegros) in a Tumblr blog. Here's the description:

As the formal US focus on Black History Month (February 1-28/9) is upon us we seek to celebrate all of the peoples who have influence and history via the African Diasporas. Expanding the inclusively of Black History Month is a goal for several of us, self-identified LatiNeg@s, Afro-Latinos and Afro-Caribeños. As people who recognize and claim the African heritage and history, we have often been excluded from US History, whether it be Black history or Latino history (Septermber 15-October 15). Join us in honoring and recognizing LatiNegr@s this year during Black and Latino History Month. We are Black, Latino and from the Caribbean. We REPRESENT!

Please share any images, videos, quotes, websites, links etc. you'd like to include on this page. Go to http://lati-negros.tumblr.com/submit to submit what you'd like to contribute.

Am more than happy to oblige with samples from 6 of the almost 10 years I have been blogging. This is not all of it, follow the keyword links at the bottom of each post to find more artciles in the archives:

Condoleezza Rice, a Sally Hemmings for the 21st Century
My claim to infamy.

Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell are proof Race is a side-show on the road to Empire
BushCo's dexterity at race sock puppetry.

A little piece of history in my braids
Of course, it's about hair.

Black mother, white child
Miscegenation FTMFW!

Happy birthday to me!
A thank you to my mother's little black power revolution.

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Sorry to do this, but this bears repeating, even though I posted this a few moments ago at A hungry man is an angry man; a hungry mob is an angry mob | culturekitchen:

we need more black and brown people in medicine, in nursing, in media, in relief and advocacy work. We need more French and Creole and Spanish speaking people in positions of power in the United States. We need to look at how bad immigration laws have cheated this country of the best and brightest of African Diaspora from it's universities, its businesses, it's technology, it's science.

We need to look at the fear-mongering in Haiti coupled with the average demograpics of the relief workers hitting it's ground as a prime example of the systemic racism that is so entrenched and yet so subtle in the United States culture that cannot but help seeing in starving black man or woman with hand out but machete in hand as a big black monster waiting to attack them. We could do better as a country. We could be better as people. We could be building a better multiracial, multiethnic and multilanguage future today if only, if just only, we'd be more weary and aware of the prejudices that holds us back.

Having more blacks and latinos in college cannot just be about upward mobility. Honestly, we have not had upward mobility in years what with wages being stagnant in the US for what some believe has been specific to the last 25 years. We need to see more black and brown faces who are multi-ethnic and polyglot because we need a cultural revolution. Not just in the United States, mind you, but in all of The Americas.

Education doesn't cure people of bigotry but it does minimize it; especially when your teachers, one of the most primary positions of authority in our culture, are black and brown and multilingual. We don't just need them in urban or inner city school, by the way. We need them in suburb and and rural schools. And we most certainly need them in more university departments; especially in more technology and science and research centers.

This doesn't mean though that I propose this as the only answer. Honestly, I believe it is ultimately the wrong one.


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I can't even wrap my head around this piece of news via Gabo Pagán. I mean, seriously, how stupid does the GOP think Latinos? Absurdly Premature 2012 Watch, Vol. 2: The Governor of Puerto Rico ... for President? - The Gaggle Blog - Newsweek.com

A party whose base is animated in part by its opposition to illegal immigration is probably not going to "import" someone, as it were, for the biggest job in the land. But in the age of Obama, the GOP is suffering from a serious dearth of credible minority leaders—people who can speak with authority to an increasingly multiethnic electorate. And the shortfall is especially glaring in regard to Latinos, who are the country's fastest-growing minority group (they represented 7.4 percent of the electorate in 2008, up from 6 percent in 2004 and 5.4 percent in 2000) but are trending heavily Democratic, despite their religious, family-first leanings (George W. Bush took 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2004 versus only 31 percent for John McCain in 2008).

This is where Fortuño comes in. For Republicans, using Fortuño to fuel the eternal flame of 2012 speculation serves to make the GOP seem, at least, like a more welcoming place for Latinos—however whimsical his chances of reaching the White House currently are.

The stupidity ... it burns.

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Whether he likes it or not, Choire has become enough of a fixture of the post-Gawker online publishing world to be considered part of the New York City media elite. And he's white. So it's no surprise I hurt my eyes rolling them after reading what is obviously intended to be a clever little throw-away post for him in What Were Black People Talking About on Twitter Last Night? | The Awl:
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As we noted before, 64 Democrats voted against women's right to health insurance funded abortion procedures. Many of these Democrats have claimed the ultimate fallacy: That proponents of forced pregnancy shouldn't "pay with their tax money" for abortions because it infringes on their civil liberties. As if anti-war activists and pacifists could claim the same when it comes to funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and any other wars they oppose.

Yet I'd like to focus on the "hispanics" that voted against women's rights. Long-time readers now that even though I am a proud  Puerto Rican and blatina, I've never been one to shy away from writing about the ugliness and even atrocities perpetrated by Latin Americans. It should come as no surprise my willingness to call out these so-called Hispanics and Latinos of dubiosity. Particularly since in Latin America and the US Latino community we have to still wrangle with the social and political consequences of the machismo and marianismo myths that permeate the cultures of Latin America.

Am listing all seven members of the Congressional Hispanics Caucus for a variety of reasons: If you are not looking closely, some of these votes do not make sense given the previous voting record of people like Costa ad Rodriguez. After all, wasn't Ciro Rodriguez a darling of the netroots? And yet when you look closely at their lists of donors, their votes actually become not just sinister but cynical as well (as in the case of John Salazar). So we can't just blame it on the fact that all of these guys happen to be Roman Catholics or members of the Blue Dog Coalition. It's those donors lists for 2008 and 2010 that really paint a clearer picture of their "conservatism".

Last but not least, compared to the Congressional Black Caucus, the CHC delegation voted atrociously : Artur Davis was the lone member of the CBC who voted for Stupak. Why couldn't the CHC conjure such discipline when voting a measure that would basically kill women's right to an abortion? Or are their votes exactly correlated to the 2007 "whore" scandal that rocked the CHC thanks to John Baca's leadership in disrespecting the women of the caucus?

Let's take a quick look at the faces of Los Siete Infames (the infamous 7) :
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"I’m saying ‘You need to send someone to fix my lock.’ All of a sudden, there was a policeman on my porch. And I thought, ‘This is strange.’ So I went over to the front porch still holding the phone, and I said ‘Officer, can I help you?’ And he said, ‘Would you step outside onto the porch.’ And the way he said it, I knew he wasn’t canvassing for the police benevolent association. All the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I realized that I was in danger. And I said to him no, out of instinct. I said, ‘No, I will not.’

My lawyers later told me that that was a good move and had I walked out onto the porch he could have arrested me for breaking and entering. He said ‘I’m here to investigate a 911 call for breaking and entering into this house.’ And I said ‘That’s ridiculous because this happens to be my house. And I’m a Harvard professor.’ He says ‘Can you prove that you’re a Harvard professor?’ I said yes, I turned and closed the front door to the kitchen where I’d left my wallet, and I got out my Harvard ID and my Massachusetts driver’s license which includes my address and I handed them to him. And he’s sitting there looking at them.

Now it’s clear that he had a narrative in his head: A black man was inside someone’s house, probably a white person’s house, and this black man had broken and entered, and this black man was me.

So he’s looking at my ID, he asked me another question, which I refused to answer. And I said I want your name and your badge number because I want to file a complaint because of the way he had treated me at the front door. He didn’t say, ‘Excuse me, sir, is there a disturbance here, is this your house?’—he demanded that I step out on the porch, and I don’t think he would have done that if I was a white person.

But at that point, I realized that I was in danger. And so I said to him that I want your name, and I want your badge number and I said it repeatedly."
Skip Gates Speaks

By now you have heard about the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr, who was arrested in his house not under the original suspicion of breaking and entering his own home but because he dared to ask the white police officer for his ID and police badge.

I can't tell you how many times, even when I was pregnant, I was harassed by a cop who wouldn't identify himself nor show me his badge. When did this happen? When did it become OK for police officers to cover their badges and refuse to identify themselves when they come into any contact with a civilian? Especially when a person of color asked them to identify themselves? When the WHITE MAN who happens to be the father of my children has asked the same, the police officers have obliged.

And people who tell me that if we will things, they will become true are shocked when call it all a crock of shit; especially when the "power of positive thinking" involves describing the United States as a "post-racial" America.

It didn't matter that Cambridge has a black mayor. It didn't matter Massachusets has a black governor. It didn't even matter that we have a black man in the white house. We haven't willed a post-racial America by thinking about "Hope" and "Change".

A senior police officer who had a Latino as his rookie, made the decision to arrest a black man in his own home because he asked him for his ID and badge after said policeman not only invaded the man's home but refused to accept as true the Harvard ID he gave him to prove he was Henry Louis Gates Jr.

I have tons to say about what happened between Skip and the white officer (a James Crowley, if you need to know). Yet am more interested in the power dynamics created by the report of the Latino officer, Carlos Figueroa.
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