‘People Of Color’: Does Latinos’ Historic Support For Trump Undermine Black And Brown Allyship?
A Latinos for Trump campaign sign is photographed on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, in Houston, Texas. | Source: Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers / Getty
The unifying term “people of color” is coming under heavy scrutiny after a historic number of Latino voters surprisingly joined the expected majority of white voters in supporting Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy over Kamala Harris.
While “people of color” has typically referred in the U.S. to the collective Black and Brown racial minorities of African Americans and Latin Americans, the two groups voted in polar opposite directions on Tuesday, with the latter being readily credited for helping secure Trump’s victory.
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Exit polling broken down granularly and reported by NBC News showed that a whopping 85% of all Black voters cast their ballots for Vice President Kamala Harris, whose racial identity was notably and disingenuously questioned by Trump. That number pales in comparison to 52% of Latinos, who Trump and his surrogates have repeatedly villainized and described in stereotypically racist terms.
Conversely, 46% of Latinos voted for Trump compared to just 13% of all Black voters doing the same. Fifty-two percent of Latinos voted for Harris, but that was “tied for the worst performance by a Democrat since John Kerry in 2004, and well below the 64% share that Democratic candidates typically have needed in the past half-century to win the presidency,” Axios reported.
When broken down along gender lines, 60% of Latino women voted for Trump compared to 7% of Black women.
Taken together, the numbers debunk the narrative of political allyship between Black Americans and Latinos, both of whom are in the crosshairs of another Trump presidency and his administration’s presumed racist policies.
It is specifically because of those gaping discrepancies that growing discourse on social media is calling for Black people to no longer be included in the “people of color” equation.
“That’s why there’s a difference between Black people and people of color,” social media influencer Jerome Trammel posted on X, formerly Twitter.
The unprecedented support for Trump from Latinos marked “the biggest share of the national Latino vote by a Republican presidential contender in modern times,” according to Axios.
Author Lawrence Ross suggested that “Rejecting a Black woman candidate and having Latino men and women, along with a majority of white women rejecting her, is going to destroy any trust.”
Another post claimed they were “actively going to correct anyone who refers to me as a person of color from now on, do not lump me in with all non-white people. Call me Black because these people are not like us.”
One post wrote, “i don’t want to hear the term ‘person of color’ ever again. Black people should never be grouped with the term ‘people of color’.”
Democratic strategist Ameisha Cross pointed out the irony of mainstream media embracing and running with the narrative of Black men supporting Trump when “it was Latinos the whole time who deserved that spotlight.”
Film and TV producer Franklin Leonard urged his followers to “stop using the aggregate ‘voters of color.’ It’s valueless as a category unless the entire point is defining people relative to whiteness, which… well… yeah, please don’t.”
Journalist Elie Mystal pointed out that the exit polling data causes concern “that the ‘solidarity’ between ‘people of color’ has been significantly damaged. Watching Latinos chase model minority status has never sat *well* with black people, but this is a wound the Black community won’t soon forget.”
The issue of Black-Latino relations and politics collided in scandalous fashion in 2022 when then-Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez begrudgingly resigned after a secret recording revealed her racist attitude toward Black people, including referring to a Black child as a “monkey.”
That instance revealed a political rift between the Black and Latino communities in Los Angeles in a prelude of sorts to where we are today nationally in the wake of the 2024 election.
Even before that, the term “people of color” was a point of contention in some pockets of Black culture.
In 2018, writer and educator Joshua Adams wrote for the Level website that he understood why the term “people of color” was embraced by the masses: “It allows for a kind of political solidarity between non-White citizens of the country and the rest of the world. It acknowledges how racism and White supremacy affect people from several groups, not just Black people, and is a platform for their collective shared experiences and concerns.”
But, Adams reasoned, “it has its limits.”
It would appear that the 2024 election results, and what – and who – fueled them, those “limits” have been reached.
This is America.
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