Black and Brown: The Invisibility of Afro-Latinos

Dennis Sanders

Dennis is the pastor of a small Protestant congregation outside St. Paul, MN and also a part-time communications consultant. A native of Michigan, you can check out his writings over on Medium and subscribe to his Substack newsletter on religion and politics called Polite Company.  Dennis lives in Minneapolis with his husband Daniel.

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10 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    The LMM thing in the Warshington Post struck me as both funny and unfair.

    Funny because LMM is the Hamilton guy and, jeez louise, was *THAT* play hyped to the moon and back. I saw a bunch of thinkpieces about how great it was and I want to say that 4 out of 5 of them all talked about how much the play pisses off Racists. The only white person is KING GEORGE! AND THEY MAKE HIM A PONCE! TAKE THAT!

    We had the soundtrack in the car for a while. My opinion was “It’s no Chorus Line!”

    I mean, the songs were okay? I guess? Clever? But they weren’t get-stuck-in-your-head-forever awesome.

    I think that it was yet another GO TEAM thing where it became culturally important to like it or to not like it. A proxy for everything else about you. Oh, you didn’t like it? You probably voted for Trump! Oh, you liked it? Were you a Bernie liked it or a Clinton liked it?

    In The Heights was the play from before that, from back in *2005*(!!!). It was pre-Broadway back in 2007 and Broadway back in 2008.

    And when the time came to make a movie in the current year based on the musical he did back when Dumbya was still president, he did it the same way that he did it in 2007.

    I want to say that it was “uncontroversial” back in 2007 but there’s this small bit nagging in the back of my mind telling me that I should hold out some space for there being “controversy” about how “the racists” didn’t like a hip-hop version of Rent.

    Well, now it’s the current year and what was uncontroversial (and even celebrated!) back in 2007 is now Deeply Problematic.

    Hey, sometimes it’s like that. People can be problematic and not know it and only realize it 14 years later.

    That said, the WaPo op-ed struck me as more of a “calling him out” rather than “calling him in” and that makes it feel like crab bucketing.Report

    • North in reply to Jaybird says:

      YMMV I guess because I had Hamilton songs stuck in my head for easily half a year. I thought it was a remarkable piece of work and a spectacular Broadway musical. LMM deserved every dime and accolade he got showered with.

      And yes, it also came out during the shock of HRC fishing up the 2016 election so a lot of people glommed onto it to console themselves and/or vent so a lot of crude go team crap glommed on with it.

      I think the controversy about representation of afro latinos in LMM’s latest film is an excellent example of why the crude twitter style of CRT/Wokeism simple isn’t the threat to liberalism or society as a whole that the right and various centrist liberals fear it to be. It is too nebulous and infinitely too easily used by internet twits to try and steer attention to themselves at the cost of its own greater credibility. It’s too prone to turning inward in a destructive spiral of purity exhibitions.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to North says:

        the crude twitter style of CRT/Wokeism

        It is now the crude twitter/WaPo style of CRT/Wokeism.Report

        • North in reply to Jaybird says:

          Oh yes, but it always sources back to twitter culture. It sometimes blooms or flowers in other venues but when you follow the stem down into the ground and track the roots back it always, always, always ends up being germinated from the seed of some posturing twit on twitter.Report

          • Brandon Berg in reply to North says:

            Twitter culture came from Tumblr, Tumblr culture came via blogs from rigor-free fields in academia. That’s where the rot started.Report

  2. InMD says:

    The sooner we can all agree that the people who gripe about this kind of thing suck and should be ignored the better off we will all be. Of course it does show that the intersectional beast is never satiated. If I were LMM I would’ve just waived around my numerous awards and said f— off. He’s an artist in the business of making people happy. Why waste time with those grasping for any excuse no matter how obscure to be sad?Report

    • North in reply to InMD says:

      Unfortunately part of his brand is inclusion and the soft approachable elements of Woke/CRT so he has to genuflect to these themes when they’re trumpeted even when they’re absolute drek. It’s simply easier to burn the pinch of incence on the altar of a screeching woke twidiot and have it blow over in five minues than it is to defy them and endure months of screeching.Report

      • InMD in reply to North says:

        I get it. It just drives me crazy that you’ve got this talented guy who has moved the bar on inclusion in ways his critics never could being forced to issue some dumb public apology. We should all celebrate people like him. And yet.

        As an aside Moana is one of my son’s favorite movies and I just recently found out LMM wrote the lyrics for his favorite song from it (performed by Jemaine Clement). Dude does good stuff he isn’t even known for.Report