Ackerman’s Community Book Club selection for April is Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality by Tanya Katerí Hernández.
Racial Innocence is a book about anti-Black bias in the Latino community that will challenge our beliefs about racism and bias. As the family therapy community continues to discuss social justice and dismantling White supremacy, we notice that conversations tend to be between White Americans and Black Americans. There is merit in discussing race in this context, given the history of African enslavement in the United States. However, the history of Christopher Columbus’ arrival and subsequent exploitation of the land formerly known as Quisqueya, Hispaniola, now Haiti and Dominican Republic, and the Taíno people, is largely untold. This untold history of indigenous enslavement erases a large Black/African Diaspora from the larger conversations on race and White supremacy.
“Racial Innocence will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. As Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the US, this revelation is critical to dismantling systemic racism. Basing her work on interviews, discrimination case files, and civil rights law, Hernández reveals Latino anti-Black bias in the workplace, the housing market, schools, places of recreation, the criminal justice system, and Latino families.” —Beacon Press
Book club selection by Ana Hernandez, PhD, LMFT.
About Ackerman’s Community Book Club:
Ackerman’s Community Book Club is a monthly series of reading recommendations curated by our family therapy instructors. We invite you to read one book each month that explores diversity, equity, and inclusion and join us on a pathway to curiosity. The books on our list have been selected with the aim of increasing knowledge, empathy, willingness, and skill to confront xenophobia as therapists, educators, and lifelong learners, in the personal and professional spaces we occupy.