Why Latinos Should be Supporting Black Lives Matter

One afternoon when I was about 15 my brother was late picking me up from school. He was furious because he’d been pulled over on the freeway and given a speeding ticket for going eight miles over the speed limit. Since I hadn’t yet learned to drive I couldn’t see his point. He was breaking the law after all. Once I started driving I realized how unlikely it is to get that ticket. But it look a lot longer for me to realize that my brother may have been stopped because of the color of his skin. As a Latino driving a construction truck perhaps the cop thought he could catch an “illegal” only to find out my brother was American born with the accent and name to prove it. We clearly will never know. But it wouldn’t be the only time someone was stopped for “driving while brown.” And that experience begins to highlight that while Latinos and Blacks in the U.S. do not experience discrimination in the same way, it is in our interest as Latinos to ardently support movements like Black Lives Matter.

Part of the reason my brother’s seemingly uneventful story has stuck with me is that I’ve devoted the last ten years of my life to studying, researching, and teaching about the psychology of race. I’ve kept coming back to what it may have meant as I learn more and more information that can help me in hindsight. I was the first in my family to go to college and as I learned about the countless ways that racial inequality can occur, even without outright hostility and hatred, the more I came to understand my own family’s experiences. After completing my undergraduate studies at UCLA I started a PhD program at Stanford University to continue learning how race works in America. I decided to get my PhD in social psychology — a field started in the 1930s when Jewish psychologists fled Europe as Hitler rose to power. Much of the research that has been conducted in social psychology’s short history has looked for the causes of social inequality and the psychology behind racism and discrimination. And the more I came to understand the different ways in which various groups, like Blacks and Latinos, are stereotyped and discriminated against the more I could see how they end up creating the same outcome: inequality in a country proud of its fundamental value of equality.

My PhD advisor, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt, published research showing that Blacks are implicitly associated with crime. When made to think of Blacks, without even being aware of it, research participants are more likely to think of crime related objects, like guns and knives. This includes police officers. She also helped conduct research with Dr. Phillip Goff, now president for the Center of Policing Equity, showing the association people have between Blacks and great apes, like chimps and gorillas. This association leads to less empathy when a Black suspect is treated brutally by the police. The recent shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile are a symptom of a national context ripe for these events to occur. The deaths of five Dallas police officers is not a reaction to those shootings but also a symptom of the same entrenched friction between Black Americans and the justice system. My advisor’s and others’ research findings help us understand why the issue of justice reform must go beyond simply firing “bad apples” or asking a few captains to resign. The violence we continue to see involving our justice system is a culmination of many causes and needs inventive solutions.

But when I was a graduate student I stumbled onto a similar, but different, animal association for Latinos. Latinos were often associated with rats and insects. On explicit questionnaires. Once I started digging into past research to try and explain this odd finding I realized it actually made complete sense. Research from psychology, linguistics, and even history pointed to a consistent portrayal of immigrants coming in “swarms” and “waves,” “invading” the U.S. with calls to “round them up,” like animals. My own findings are only part of a long history of research showing that immigrants and refugees are constantly dehumanized in media portrayals as disease-ridden and dirty. It therefore is no surprise that Latino immigrants, and therefore Latinos in general, are associated with vermin like rats and insects, the same representations the Nazis used to justify the extermination of millions of Jews. Politicians who use these representations in the current election are simply tapping into a purposefully alarming representation that already exists. It was with these findings that I could finally understand that the animals we are associated with may be different but both Blacks and Latinos must contend with dehumanizing stereotypes in order to be seen as fully American, and even as fully human.

I’m a passionate supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, one focused on repairing a long broken relationship between Black Americans and the justice system, because I’m a social psychologist who studies race but also because I’m a Latina. The struggles that the Black and Latino communities face are not the same; but the reason they aren’t is because of our unique histories and the specific ways in which we are portrayed as threats. But that’s also precisely where our experiences overlap — we’re often seen as deviations of what it means to be American. We are considered outsiders, criminals, and even animals. We should come together and support each others’ causes in order to move the country closer to the one that exists in our imaginations: one in which we are all treated fairly and considered as fully part of the American identity. Therefore, I ask that Latinos interested in seeking equality for ourselves forcefully and publicly state: Black lives matter.