1	In the News From politics to art, the headlines of Hispanidad. read more...
2	Up Front Columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr., looks at tensions between Hispanics and African Americans. read more...
3	Up Front Dr. Eduardo Padrón discusses the growing educational gap between the upper and lower income brackets. read more...
4	Media mun2 KICKS OFF PRODUCTION FROM BRAND NEW STUDIOS IN THE HEART OF CITYWALK AT UNIVERSAL STUDIOS HOLLYWOOD read more...

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up front

Culture Clash

Growing tensions between Hispanics and
African Americans are driving a wedge
between the nation’s largest minorities.

Not long ago, I found myself in a friendly but testy e-mail exchange with a friend and African American media personality who wanted to know why some Latinos–myself included–are so hung up on being the nation’s largest minority.
I had written a column tweaking my colleagues in the media for droning on about whether America is ready to elect a woman or black president while largely ignoring the candidacy of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and the related question of whether the country is ready to elect a Latino. I asked, what good does it do for the country’s more than 40 million Latinos to have become the largest minority if the media is going to continue to apply a 19th century paradigm where diversity doesn’t extend beyond women and African Americans?
My friend wanted to know–after reading my piece–why it mattered that Latinos were America’s largest minority, having surpassed African Americans in population a few years ago.
“At some point I’d like to understand why being the ‘largest minority’ is so meaningful,” she wrote. “I can see it in consumer terms (it’s about marketing), but in political terms, why?”
She insisted the justice claims that African Americans have made over the generations were never about numbers, but rather because the promise of America was legally and institutionally and by force of arms denied to this group of citizens, by virtue of their race and skin color.
And she said, every time I mention that phrase ‘the largest minority’ “you make it sound like a competition.” So she wanted to know, “Whom are you competing against?”
I’ve been here before. In 1994, I had the chance to co-host a radio show in Los Angeles with an African American partner, the gifted Tavis Smiley. With this black-brown pairing, we found ourselves with a substantial number of black and brown listeners who—on issues ranging from immigration to education to the economy—didn’t exactly see the world in the same way. There were sparks and sometimes fireworks. And most of the tension did sound as though it was steeped in competition. Latinos were competing for attention with African Americans, and African Americans were competing for respect–the kind that comes with the rest of society acknowledging that its business with you is still unfinished and that no group of relatively new immigrants is going to cut in front of you in line.
So what if there have been Hispanics in the United States since before there was a United States or before the first slave ships landed? There’s no denying it: African Americans have a unique narrative in this country, and it has helped define notions of racial justice and equal opportunity for more than 200 years. No one can change that.
Still, the tension remains—between America’s largest minority and the minority group formerly now as such—and, by many accounts, it’s been made worse by the immigration debate.
Wasn’t that what New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was talking about when he told a business group, after Katrina, that his city was being “overrun by Mexican workers?”
It is not just economics, the concern that African Americans are falling behind economically as jobs that used to go to black workers now go to Latinos. And it is not just proximity; the fact that Latinos often move into urban centers and some of the same neighborhoods that are home to African Americans. And it’s not just clashing cultures; the concern among many African Americans that Hispanic immigrants don’t want to learn English or otherwise assimilate.
It’s also about primacy; about who was here first and who come to mind first when the rest of America thinks about things like diversity, equal opportunity or racial and ethnic equality.
It’s a silly contest that serves as a wedge between two groups that have just enough empathy for what the other is going through that they could and should be natural allies.
Which is what I tried to tell my media friend, in so many words. She had said that, when African Americans fought and marched for justice all those years, it wasn’t about numbers. The heck it wasn’t. A big part of the argument—and one of the persuasive elements of it, in fact—was about proportional representation. It was this idea that the American South shouldn’t operate like South Africa, that it wasn’t right or defensible–in mostly black cities and towns in Alabama, Mississippi or Georgia—for a minority to rule over the majority. And before you can even make that argument, you had to acknowledge that African Americans were the statistical majority.
Now that this is, in America as a whole, no longer the case, shouldn’t that also be acknowledged along with acknowledging that Latinos are now the nation’s largest minority? It’s not a competition. It’s simply a clarification.

Ruben Navarrette, Jr. is an editorial board member of the San Diego Union-Tribune, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group and a regular contributor of commentary to USA TODAY and CNN.com.