Author:

Professor Tanya Kateri Hernandez

Website:

https://www.professortkh.com/ 

X/TWITTER @ProfessorTKH  

BOOK REVIEWS

"A hard-hitting, tightly argued examination of present-day racial inequality in Latin America, the roots of that inequality in 19th- and 20th-century state policies, and current efforts to overcome that historical legacy. Hernández definitively lays to rest the notion that Latin American states played no role in the construction and maintenance of white racial privilege."

George Reid Andrews

Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of History

University of Pittsburgh

Tanya Kateri Hernandez traces the "myth of racial innocence" in which Latin America shrouds itself, and then she shatters it. This book is a crucial corrective for anyone interested in race in Latin America. Or in the United States, which increasingly proclaims its own mythical innocence.

Ian Haney Lopez

John H. Boalt Professor of Law

University of California, Berkeley

Finally we have a serious, comprehensive, and accessible book on racial

matters in Latin America. Professor Hernandez skillfully shows how

"customary law" has been used by states in the region to maintain racial order (i.e., white supremacy) since independence. This is a major

contribution and, from now on, no one can believe anymore that racism is not

part of the Latin American experience. Bravo Professor Hernandez for a job

well done!

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Professor of Sociology

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Duke University

"Racial Subordination in Latin America reveals the folly of post-racial thinking in the United States, where a legal system of segregation and classification are thought to underlie racial difference, inequality, discrimination and segregation. In the minds of post-racialists, such divisions have been presumably laid to rest with the civil rights revolution and the recent election of a black president.  By contrast, Latin American countries have rarely used explicit race-based laws to structure their societies. Thus, one could say that "postracial" societies existed south of the U.S. border long before they did in the U.S. However, racial discrimination and inequality have been rampant throughout that region. With this book, legal scholar Tanya K. Hernandez now compels us to rethink how apparently progressive national ideologies and cultural norms continue to structure deep-seated racism and inequality in modern societies, despite the absence of legal structures."

Edward E. Telles

Professor of Sociology

Princeton University