Yes, You Can Be Racist Against Puerto Ricans

Race isn’t real, so racism can be directed at any group.

Beach and coastline at Patillas, in southeast Puerto Rico, Image: Oquendo, CC

As most readers are probably aware, Trump hired insult comedian Tony Hinchcliffe to make “jokes” at his Madison Square Garden rally earlier this week. Hinchcliffe responded by vomiting out a series of ugly, racist screeds targeting Palestinians, Jews, Latinos, Black people, and others.

The most infamous moment of the evening, though, occurred when he declared (with no discernible punchline) that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”

Many people pointed out that this was incredibly racist. Inevitably, on social media, some MAGA dipshits responded by insisting that the statement could not be racist because “Puerto Rican is not a race.”

Needless to say, this is not a good faith argument made by people committed to fighting racism and bigotry. It’s a deflection meant not so much to convince as to confuse, and not so much to confuse as to annoy.

But bad faith bullshit is sometimes illuminating, if only because people often reveal just how unclever they are when they’re smirking at their own cleverness. In this case, the argument that “Puerto Rico isn’t a race” reveals the extent to which the core of racism is the unquestioned assumption that race is real, and that, therefore, racism has a logic connected to something other than hatred.

Race is made up

It’s not just bigotry directed at Puerto Rico which prompts ignorant assholes to sputter, “that’s not a race!” When racism is directed at Mexicans, you can be sure some genius will say, “That’s not racism; Mexico isn’t a race!” When racism is directed at Muslims or Jews, you’ll hear, “Muslims and Jews aren’t a race! They’re a religion!” And so forth.

And it’s true; Muslims are not a race; neither are Mexicans.

You know who else isn’t a race? White people. Also, Black people.

Race isn’t real. Humans are all a single species, period. We are not divided into races. Or, as a recent paper puts it, “socially constructed racial categories do not align with our biological understanding of genetic variation.”

(Some) Black people have darker skin than (some) white people, but that doesn’t mean there’s some sort of consistent scientific difference between white people and Black people any more than there’s a racial category of near-sighted people, or of left-handed people.

Genetic variation is ubiquitous across human beings. Some variations (Do you like beets? Do you have a cleft chin?) are seen as trivial; they’re just part of the fact that human beings are different from each other. And then, some variations (How dark is your skin? Do your eyes have epicanthal folds?) are seen as defining groups in some deep existential way.

But, again, these are not in fact existential differences. They’re just part of humans being different from each other. Skin color doesn’t define “race”. We do.

Race is made up out of hate

Race isn’t real, but that doesn’t mean its effects aren’t real. The fiction of race has been used to convince people to discriminate, enslave, and murder, or to justify people in discriminating, enslaving, and murdering as the case may be. If you want to take people’s stuff—their land, their labor, their houses, their art—race provides a good excuse. If you want to feel like you’re better than your neighbor, again, race is there to help.

Race isn’t a biological reality, but it’s a handy way to perpetuate injustice. And, crucially, because race isn’t real it can perpetuate injustice against anyone you define as a racial other. Which can be anyone.

So, yes, people in the US have generally used race most brutally and efficiently to define people with darker skin (Black people and indigenous people) as racial others. But there’s no reason racism has to be confined to differences of skin color.

You can racialize anyone; just find an ad hoc difference and treat it as a mark of (more or less biological) inferiority. you can racialize nationalities (Mexican, Puerto Rican.) You can racialize religions (Muslim, Jewish.) You can racialize people with education, as Mao and Pol Pot did, or racialize small supposed differences in social class, as Stalin did with the kulaks. You can racialize political opinions, as during the genocide against Communists in Indonesia—which notably also targeted children of Communists. You can racialize gender and sexual orientation; a lot of the right’s messaging is designed to stigmatize LGBT people as non-human, as eugenically inferior.

Of course, it’s easier to racialize people or groups who are already seen as a separate race; GOP messaging against Puerto Rico and Mexico riffs on the fact that the people who live there are mostly brown. But this doesn’t mean that Puerto Ricans and Mexicans are really a separate race. There’s no such thing as a separate race! It just means that racism is a long-term project, which builds on earlier conceptual work and longstanding stereotypes to target others for hate.

If you believe race is real, you’re probably a racist

When people say “Puerto Rican isn’t a race”, then, they’re being (deliberately) ignorant about how racism works. They’re arguing that racism only exists when it’s directed against someone who is really of another race. Which means they are arguing that races are real—that they have some connection to biological or physical reality. You can be racist against Black people because Black people really are a different race. You can’t be racist against Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, Democrats, trans people, because the differences there aren’t racial differences. To say that you can’t be racist against Puerto Ricans, you have to believe that race is a logical formal and true system that accurately sorts people by human difference.

But that is not what race is. Race is an ad hoc excuse for hate which targets particular characteristics or identities in order to denigrate them. Calling Puerto Rico an island of garbage is, and is meant as, a racist attack on the people of Puerto Rico. And when someone says, “It can’t be racist because Puerto Rico is not a race!” what they really mean is that they are racist against various groups—very much including Puerto Ricans.

Before you go

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