Troubling the Essentialist Discourse of Brown in Education: The Anti-Black Sociopolitical and Sociohistorical Etymology of Latinxs as a Brown Monolith

Abstract

US-based scholars often colloquially employ Brown as a monolithic reference to Latinidad in education research without attention to its racialized and anti-Black underpinnings. In this conceptual essay, we apprehend the currents of hemispheric racial formation within a South–North orientation to problematize the essentialist ethos of US Latinxs as monolithically Brown. To do so, we briefly trace the anti-Black sociohistorical and sociopolitical etymology of a uniform Brown Latinx identity as a byproduct of colonial logics and homogenizing political philosophies in Latin America such as mestizaje and racial democracy. In conclusion, we offer implications for theorizing Latinidades in educational research that moves beyond mestizaje and colonial logics to consider Afro-Latinx, Afro-Latin American, and Indigenous Latinx subjectivities.

Keywords

Afro-Latin America Afro-Latinx anti-Blackness Black education cross-cultural studies cultural analysis ethnicity Hispanic Latin America Latino/a Latinx politics race racialization

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