Afro Latinx workers face inequalities in U.S. labor market
A new report examines how the United States’ legacy of anti-Black racism affects Afro Latinx in the workplace and reveals that anti-Black racism continues to affect the lives of varied people of African descent.
“The Labor Market Experiences of Working-Age Afro Latinxs,” published by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute (UCLA LPPI), found that Afro Latino men experience higher rates of unemployment than non-Black Latino men. Although occasionally hired more than African-American men, they are not employed as often as other Latino men. Similarly to African-American men, Afro Latino men endure below-average labor force participation rates.
Afro-Latina women can face the same range of high unemployment rates as other Black women, and their jobs are often vulnerable to economic downturns. In general, Afro Latinx workers face the same racial and ethnic discrimination as other Black people in the U.S., which means they face the same prospect of having to work harder than others to succeed financially in the U.S. labor market.
“You see the way that anti-Blackness impacts the entire African diaspora,” University of New Mexico sociology professor Dr. Nancy López, who co-authored the UCLA report with a team of researchers, told the AmNews in reference to the report. “It’s almost like we’re mirroring each other,” she said.
The report examines data covering the 12 years from 2010 to 2022. It includes information about the employment of 25- to 54-year-old Afro Latinx after the Great Recession (2007 to 2009) and both during and after COVID-19.
“Afro Latinxs are more likely to reside in the Northeast, more likely to be born in the U.S., less likely to be married, and younger,” authors of the report note. “Regardless of gender, Afro Latinxs are less likely to be immigrants when compared to non-Black Latinos. About 46% of Afro Latino men were born outside the U.S., compared to about 55% of non-Black Latino men. Similarly, just 42% of Afro Latinas were immigrants compared to 52% of non-Black Latinas.”
Afro Latinxs also tend to have higher educational levels than non-Black Latinos, yet they still don’t receive the same number of job offers, according to the report.
“The pandemic … significantly affected Black women and Latinas’ labor force participation,” the UCLA report states: “From 2019 to 2020, Black women and non-Black Latinas experienced the greatest one-year decreases in labor force participation rates of the groups of women we examined (about 2 percentage points each). For Black women and non-Black Latinas, this was accompanied by 2.6% and 2% reduction in the number of workers, respectively. Labor force participation for prime-age Afro Latinas — who experienced the highest unemployment levels among women in 2020 — also decreased 0.7 percentage points from 2019 to 2020. Together, these findings suggest that downturns affect Black, non-Black Latina, and Afro Latina workers similarly.”
Afro Latino men had higher job rates than African American men, but the numbers were lower in comparison to non-Black Latinos. “While no group experienced unemployment parity with white men, Black and Afro Latino workers were much more likely to be jobless in comparison,” the study found. “On average, Black men were 2.2 times more likely to be unemployed when compared to white men from 2010 to 2022, while Afro Latino men were 1.6 times more likely to be unemployed than white men.”
The UCLA report findings show that Afro Latinx and African American employees experience similar levels of job discrimination. It underscores the need to examine the intersectional challenges that different Black groups face in the U.S., López said.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) instructed the Census Bureau to no longer allow Latinos to specify their racial background. That could mean that data about the lives of white Latinx and Black Latinx won’t be seen.
“We definitely need to make visible the anti-Blackness we’re experiencing,” said López. “Whether we’re African American, Afro Latina, et cetera, because there are white Panamanians — we know this, right? There are white Dominican women, right? There are people … from all over the globe — [you] could be from wherever [but] that does not have anything to do with how you’re racialized.”
López has written extensively about how Latinos understand themselves is one thing, but how they are perceived by others — their “street race,” or the race a stranger might think they are –– often affects how they are treated.
“The most important thing is to remember that we have an ethical obligation, and that we should be clear about [the data] we’re collecting, because if we don’t know what we’re collecting, any question is going to be fine,” López said. “That’s a quote that I include in a lot of my PowerPoints from one of my colleagues, Howard Hogan, who just retired from the Census Bureau after 40 years or so. He’s not Latino, he’s not African American, he’s not a person of color: He’s a white man who’s worked [on] the census and has done the analysis to show that poverty rates for Black Latinos versus non-Black Latinos are totally different.”
López added that “you can do the right thing and collect this data in a way that’s meaningful and can illuminate inequities, or you can pretend that all Latinos are the same race and contribute to the reproduction of racial inequality. I hope that we would choose to do the ethical thing, to do no harm, and that we’ll have flexible solidarity in the Latino community that recognizes that if we are pretending that all of our folks are a Brown monolith, then we’re erasing a whole experience in history.”
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