Whiteness of a Different Color?

A series in the New York Times titled “How Race Is Lived in America” focused on two Cubans, one white and one black. They were best friends as boys in Cuba, but their lives took a disconcerting turn when they each emigrated separately to the United States. ¹ Their experience illustrates the difficulty of “living on the hyphen” in this country and the powerful pressures to conform to the black-white imperative of racial management. For Latinos, it also points toward a less visible but potentially more viable path over this racialized terrain — through a pan-ethnic Hispanic/Latino identity that would challenge not just the racial borders themselves but the underlying systems of wealth and power that the racial border patrol currently protects.