We Don’t Talk About <s>Bruno</s> Colorism.
Disney movies repeatedly ignore the issue.
A friend of mine recently commented that the most unrealistic part of Disney’s Encanto is that the matriarchal grandmother didn’t object to Pepa marrying Felix, an Afro-Latino (this friend is a musician; check him out).
Ouch, but true. Pepa is fairly light-skinned, and I know that in a non-Disney world, she would have been pressured to find a white husband by her abuela.
This is almost always a surprise for well-meaning white liberals, who have a tendency to lump all POC together like we don’t struggle with racism (external and internal), colorism, and societal pressure.
A Black person is not a Latino is not an Afro-Latino. All face unique situations and racism and colorism and micro-aggressions. Don’t lump us together or assume we don’t have problematic relatives.
Ask a few Trump-supporting Latinos their views, and you’ll hear a lot of things like, “Well, I came here legally, unlike those Mexicans!” I once encountered a light-skinned Mexican who refused to speak in Spanish to a darker-skinned Mexican as some kind of strange show of education and status. Imagine meeting someone from your home country and refusing to speak your native language!
