ABSTRACT
Curious about my presence in his math class at Southwest High School (SHS), a large public high school in New Mexico, Randy, a brown-skinned Latino young man in Ms. Anaya’s ninth grade special education class, queried me: “Miss, are you a psychologist? Are you here to see how stupid we are?” 1 As a bilingual Afro-Dominicana who was born in the Lower East Side and raised in New York City public housing projects during the 1970s, I was pained by Randy’s question; it echoed the profound sense of race-gender stigma felt by Latinos, particularly the microagressions those of us who are dark-skinned experience regularly across a variety of social institutions in the United States (López, 2003). Randy’s questions also allude to the presence of a double consciousness among Latino boys, whereby one is always looking at oneself through the eyes of a critical other (Du Bois, 1903). Donning baggy pants, a short crew cut, two large white faux diamond earring studs, and an oversized shirt, Randy physically embodied what I describe as one of the “racially” stigmatized masculinities that is disdained in contemporary society in the United States.
