Yeah. Trump and Republican racism made younger Latinos not want to identify as white anymore.
Op-Ed: Why did so few Latinos identify themselves as white in the 2020 census?
Strikingly, the share of Latinos who identified their race as white in the 2020 census fell from about 53% in 2010 to about 20% in 2020; the share who identified as “other” rose from 37% to 42%, and the share identifying as two or more races jumped from 6% to 33%. These are big changes — ones that cannot be explained just by intermarriage and ones that challenge a narrative that Latinos will eventually assimilate into whiteness.....
Yet another part of the census story may be explained by the numbers of Latino millennials who are developing an identity as “people of color” often in alliance with Black, Asian American and Indigenous groups. The “BIPOC” label has been adopted and supported by young people of many ethnic and racial groups since the racial justice protests prompted by the May 2020 police murder of George Floyd.....
We should ask ourselves, is Latino identity the same today as it was when the shift in South-Central’s population first began? It turns out that the Mexican and Central American immigrants who moved to South L.A. in the late 1980s did see themselves as distinct from the homegrown Black population. Monolingualism, anti-Black prejudices brought from their countries of origin and the street violence of the 1980s and 1990s led this first generation to shut in and shut out, largely keeping their distance from African American neighbors.....
Not so their children, second-generation Latinos who grew up with Black friends, listened to hip-hop and were inspired by Black teachers, mentors and social justice advocates. Their lives were not free of Black-brown tensions — they sometimes even experienced so-called race riots at their schools — but the upshot is this: They developed a sense of self and home defined by place-based identity, one articulated as a strong affinity with Black people, Black culture and the struggle for racial equity.
Indeed, many Latinos raised in South L.A. feel distinct from friends and relatives in East L.A. whom they perceive as sometimes racist and often too nationalistic. For this generation, raised “in an aura of Blackness,” as one of our respondents said, Black-brown solidarity is the name of the political game, and this is reflected in a set of vibrant organizations — such as
Community Coalition, a group founded by Rep. Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) — that organize in South L.A. based on a sense of shared fate.
