Columnist Speaks On Black Latinos

Black Latinos must learn to appreciate both sides of their cultural identity, Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Roberto Santiago told an audience of about 40 people last night at Boylston Auditorium.

Santiago decried what he called a lack of progress against racial discrimination even in the decade that Time magazine had proclaimed "The Decade of the Hispanics."

"We thought we'd usher in a new era where all this progress would be made," said Santiago in a speech titled "Black Skin, Latin Soul: Caught Between Two Cultures." "Now it's 1995. Que paso? What happened?"

In a speech sponsored by the W.E.B. DuBois Society and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, Santiago described his personal struggle for identity growing up in Spanish Harlem as the child of a white Puerto Rican father and a Black Puerto Rican mother.

Santiago said his childhood was filled with racial slurs and a feeling of exclusion from Black, Latino and white communities.

"If we don't belong to any of the set categories, we're a strange middle group, and we don't seem to belong to anyone," Santiago said. "I don't think I have to choose one or the other."

Santiago urged listeners to identify themselves by whatever nationalities they choose and to combat racism.

"Racist barriers were meant to be broken down," he said. "They must never stop us."

But external racism is secondary to a larger problem, Santiago said.

"There's a bigger problem--our internalization of racism," he said. "We wind up hating ourselves, degrading ourselves. Racial selfhatred is the most insidious from of racism because we've embraced the same racism that we claim to resist."