Ignored Racism

Abstract

This book is about how White Americans uniquely express racial-ethnic animus toward Latinos and how this often-ignored form of racial-ethnic hostility shapes their support for policies that adversely impact Latino communities. Its key argument is that the racialization of Latinos has created a belief system among some Whites that mixes attributes of race-ethnicity with race-neutral behaviors. This allows Whites to express animus toward Latinos in a race-neutral manner by blurring the lines between dislike toward the group and dislike toward certain behaviors. This form of racial animus directed at Latinos has been reiterated across time so frequently that these expressions have become a normal and accepted part of American political discourse. This book connects this too-frequently ignored form of animus toward Latinos with a range of political preferences of importance in contemporary politics. There is little doubt that life for Latino Americans, and people of Latino descent living within the United States, has been replete with difficulty and discrimination. Latinos have been subjected to many of the same forms of social marginalization, segregation, violence, property loss, and violations of civil rights and liberties that other racial and ethnic groups have experienced. These forms of discrimination can be rooted in the same set of ideologies and group dominance orientations regularly used to justify discriminatory behavior (e.g., racism à la ingroup favoritism and out-group hostility). But racism toward Latinos takes on an additional unique and more common form exhibited in debates over linguistic preferences, country of origin, American national identity, and immigration. Because it mixes conceptions of race with hostility toward Latino culture, it can be labeled as racism and ethnicism. 1 Perhaps the most notable example of how people that potentially harbor racism-ethnicism toward Latinos express their beliefs in statements

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