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there are puerto ricans that will be darker than your husband. they speak spanish and are rican 100%. there is no racism against black at the island.
I thing there is more racism from ricans who live in NYC. but as far as on the island. you will be fine. but you better pick up spanish language. it is only the right thing to do.
dont be like those who come to america and dont want to learn english. there are surely terms of enearment. el negro, flaco, gordo, loco, baja panties, etc....
Technically it is..but she asked a good question because the citizens their for the most part don't consider themselves Americans or even like Americans.
PR's from the island are actually more outright with there prejudice than the ones from NYC.
Disagree, actually the opposite. You will find that most people from PR will disagree with your statement... because it isn't true. If you have had negative experiences in Puerto Rico maybe it was for reasons other than race.
Before responding to this thread, I offer you the following article (it's in Spanish) about an African-American baseball player who went to Puerto Rico once. . .and never left.
IMHO, there are two things you should consider if you feel compelled to ask this questions:
1. You need to do some serious research about Puerto Rico's African (not African-American) heritage. Puerto Rico may possibly be the only place on Earth where "Africanness" is truly celebrated and admired. Matter of fact, In Puerto Rico, the word "Negro" is a term of endearment. Unlike one the U.S. mainland, the term "Negro" carries a POSITIVE connotation. It's a good thing! In other words, calling someone "Negro" is one of the nicest compliments you can bestow upon a person, regardless of that person's race or color. That alone should clue you into the answer to your question.
2. The only way you'll be able to answer your question is by visiting the island for a week or two and drawing your own conclusions. Of course, if you're gonna go there to throw your "African-American" weight around and expect for people run in fear of you, then you're gonna be in for a gigantic surprise. I'll just leave it at that, and I hope you don't try to find out "what I mean."
It would be fair to say that most Puerto Rican's feel a particular appreciation towards Black people no matter where they're from. There's a certain kindredness felt in our veins towards most anyone who shares a connection with Africa.
I'd love to read the opinion of other poster's.
Interesting post. I had an Africology course a few years ago, taught by a light skinned Haitian that is a Voodoo priest, holds a doctoral degree, is a U.S. Army veteran, and speaks 3 languages. He's was one of the most respect Africology professors in the world I read once. I know he's gone more than once to Brazil to give lectures.
Anyways... he touched on Puerto Rico in our course study. It was not the focus of the course but he touched on it. We had to watch some film about Puerto Rico and Salsa. I think it might even had touched on that Black-American baseball player that went to Puerto Rico, because that sounds familiar and seems to ring a bell in my head.
I'll have to read more of this thread. Puerto Rico seems to have an attractive landscape and climate. And I love warm weather.
Don't do it. With all due respect to most answers you've received in this post, I beg to totally disagree. African Americans in the U.S. have a group of likes, and have struggled and achieved things together. Best example is Obama in the White House. There's just so much more opportunity for African Americans in the U.S.
I was taught in an Africology course at UW-Milwaukee that Obama is not "African-American" (I personally prefer the term Black-American).
Like Obama I'm racially mulatto with a white mother. However, unlike him the black side of my family are real ethnic Black-Americans with antecedents in black slavery.
Obama did not become President because he was reared Black-American. Had he been that he would be an angry man like his former pastor Reverend Wright (regarded as white in Brazil) or like Tupac the slain rapper of my generation.
He was reared in Hawaii as well, by his white family. To contrast this I was reared among Black-Americans in a predominately Black-American neighborhood. But given I was from Milwaukee just about every black Marine in the Marine Corps from the East and West Coast would tell me--in all seriousness--"There are no black people in Milwaukee."
Now all of a sudden Obama is "Black-American" raised off of peach cobbler, chitlins, and eats pigs feet. Mind you, I do think he is ethnically Black-American today through adaptation and adoption through his Black-American wife and interacting with other Black-Americans.
In my opinion what has most helped Black-America over the long term was the creation of the HBCU's (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) financed by the U.S. Federal Government during the period of "Reconstruction." This was something I've never heard or read about being done throughout Latin America when slavery was abolished.
This is not to take anything away from Black-Americans achievements. It is to say superiority complexes needs to be tempered. Case in point being the largest black city in the United States: Detroit.
The decline of Detroit's economy shows blacks in Detroit can no more be "supermen" than the dark skinned underclasses of Latin America when their nations and cities economies don't support much upward mobility and middle-class jobs.
My point is a city has to have middle-class wage jobs available for many first before the dark skinned underclass can "leap" from nowhere into the middle-class ranks.
Obama is also a product of Harvard University. Had he only went to Howard University or UW-Milwaukee odds are he never would have become President of the United States. U.S. President's come a few elite universities and you have to travel in certain social circles to become a U.S. President.
Obama is no rise Lincoln-like rise like that of Hugo Chavez or Lula of Brazil. I've read biographies on both those latter gentlemen. I've never read a biographical book on Evo Morales of Bolivia but I would hazard a guess his rise to presidency of Bolivia was far more dramatic and astonishing than Obama's.
Obama was not even raised in the ghettos of Compton or the South side of Chicago. Had he came from off of 19th and Clark in Milwaukee--the black, violent, poor area--I'd be much more impressed.
His attitude towards White-Americans is more reflective of black African immigrants to the U.S. earning graduate degrees. Meaning his attitude is one of politeness, accommodation, and "we can all get along." You sure didn't hear that coming from Tupac in his songs. Arguably the most beloved black man of my generation. That's one crucial ingredient why Obama became President (it helped tremendously that he did not have a white wife as well).
Here is Tupac's song "Changes" that the Vatican in Rome has listed as one of the world's greatest songs ever made, and one expressing injustices the Vatican has said.
...I see many predominantly black affluent neighborhoods here in the U.S.
Funny, I've never seen a single one in all my life and I've been to several cities in the United States.
I have seen the Robert Taylor homes in Chicago. I've even driven on dirt roads littered with cotton in rural Virginia to see shot-gun shacks, on stilts, with outhouse, no electricity, no running water, dilapidated, with elderly black folks on porches.
There are middle-class black neighborhoods in the U.S. and I was raised in one. But consider that after World War II all of the industrial Europe and Japan was bombed to hell. The only industrial country in existence on earth that was left unscathed was guess who? Mainland United States.
The United States then held a virtual export monopoly on the rest of the world. That motivated it to help rebuild Europe and Japan so it could sell American finished goods to consumers in those nations. As the United States held a Latin America as a neo-colony through a greedy, corrupt white creole elite throughout Latin America, so to the U.S. was supposed to turn over Vietnam to Japan as a neo-colony, but the U.S. lost the war, and China's communism gained the influence.
My point here is that there are other things that go into accounting for U.S. economic success in the world--that helped provide booming manufacturing jobs for Black-Americans through the '50s and '60s--than simply "hard work."
I think as you see Brazil's economy rise so to you will see more of the black and brown skinned underclasses join into the middle-class ranks. In the capitalist system. In fact, I think you are seeing that now.
Socialist systems like the ones in Cuba and Venezuela (or even in China and Southeast Asia) sought to expedite the means by which those in the underclasses (in Latin America and the U.S. they often were dark skinned due to the history of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade) could grab a slice of the pie. But that path was often antagonistic towards the white elites and often stripped them of land, property, and wealth to varying degrees. Socialism also failed to wipe out poverty. But so has capitalism.
The "racism" problem confronted by many Latinos and Blacks in the U.S. has more to do with the fact that they just behave differently, have their own culture (and language in the case of latinos), which makes it harder for them to break in into the mainstream.
This is not true.
And as a U.S. military veteran of the Marine Corps I tend to get the most respect online from the Irish in Ireland and Australians.
I'm racially mulatto but ethnically Black-American. The way I speak one can tell I'm ethnically Black-American on the phone. I can not help the history of racial segregation in the United States resulted in Black-Americans becoming their own distinct ethnicity.
You didn't see that develop with black and brown Puerto Ricans and Brazilians.
To understand this one must understand a history of Eugenics.
My major is biology, albeit I'm behind on my science courses, but what I want to suggest is I can see a clear history and perception of Eugenics in the genetic racial comments made by Americans as to "blackness."
We might start with the concept of hypodecent. (Without getting into gene expression--ergo this "20%" stuff is not as important as some people make it out to be--and environmental influences also impact certain phenotypic expressions like skin pigmentation).
Basically, the world went to war over Eugenics during WWII, when the Nazi's enthusiastically embraced racial Eugenic concepts widely held in the United States and Europe. The Catholic Church aggressively opposed biological determinism and therefore, the Eugenics of the United States and Germany never caught on well in Latin America in terms of sexual-racial reproductive segregation.
However, nations like Brazil (and the rest of Latin America to varying cultural extents) adopted a Eugenics belief in a reverse direction: promoting whites to have sex with darker folks, and more especially the encouragement of whites from Europe to come live in Brazil, to "whiten" the population and therefore "improve" the "racial stock" of a nation.
If modern anthropology is correct then there is only one race of humans on earth today, therefore, biological "races" among humans are an oxymoron. Sociologically they maybe a truism.
So, the Latin American's racial classification on "looks" rather than "one drop of black blood makes you black" actually aligns more closely to the modern biological anthropological view on race among Homo sapiens today.
White-Americans and Black-Americans view me as "black" even though I share a complexion similar to Halle Berry's, even though one of my parents is German-American. This is not because the United States is "enlightened." It's simply due to cultural reasons revolving around race.
In societies that regard some races of people as dominant or superior and others as subordinate or inferior, hypodescent is the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union or mating between members of different socioeconomic groups or ethnic groups to the subordinate group.[1] The opposite practice is hyperdescent, in which children are assigned to the race that is considered dominant or superior.
The United States has a strong and long history of Identity Politics too. The Irish were great at this long before Black-Americans, gays, and women ever started playing the game like champs too.
I'm not totally against Identity Politics. It has it's benefits and costs. Benefits like Affirmative Action and calling all dark people "black" even if they are close to white in complexion, pushes a minority class ahead economically and politically to some extent. The cost is it creates a lot of antagonistic tension and can over simplify some complex issues.
Identity politics are political arguments that focus upon the self-interest and perspectives of self-identified social interest groups and ways in which people's politics may be shaped by aspects of their identity through race, class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ideology, nation, sexual orientation, culture, currency, information preference, history, musical and/or literary genre, medical conditions, profession, hobby, or any other loosely correlated yet simple to intuit social organizations. Not all members of any given group are necessarily involved in identity politics. The practice has probably a long existence; but the explicit term and movements linked to it really came into being during the latter part of the 20th century. It can most notably be found in class movements, feminist movements, gay and lesbian movements, disability movements, ethnic movements and post colonial movements. But wherever it is found it is also open to wide debate and critique.[1]Minority influence is a central component of identity politics. Minority influence is a form of social influence which takes place when a majority is being influenced to accept the beliefs or behavior of a minority. Unlike other forms of influence this usually involves a personal shift in private opinion. This personal shift in opinion is called conversion.
Thats funny, considering Puerto Rico IS the U.S! What is it with Puerto Ricans having the delusion that it's not? Take a look at the $$ in your pocket lately? Whats is say on it???? The fact that PR's a Commonwealth seems to make people think your somehow NOT the US, I guess MA,PA,KY and VA aren't the US either then.
hmm Are you black? I am having a feeling you are just a white person trying to make us look like we are racist so you don't feel you are the only one listen If anything a puerto rican persona that dislikes african americans in here it should be called self hate you are hating something that is part of you.
I didnt know what was really blatant racism until I moved to the states the only way to know us is to come here and you will see the last of our worries from years and years has been your skin color
Trust me ignore it, Europeans hate to see people of color no matter what ethnic background treat each other with decency and respect, especially if you share any "African" bloodline or heritage. They speak and react out of fear and anguish in being the world's minority as they always have.
the good book said "you will know them by their works" and it still proves true today.
Afro-Latinos seem to more culturally connected to African culture than African Americans are because they weren't completely cut off from their culture compared to African Americans were during the Slave Era. But ironically when its comes to actually claiming black identity, Afro-Latinos seem to be more hesitant to claim their black identity and some would rather be called anything but black. African Americans are pretty much the exact opposite and won't be so hesitant to deny their blackness.
think the identifying mark for the Misesetto or lack Latino is not failing to identify with the black experience its wanting to identify with someone. For many PRlacks they are proud of their experience, culture and language and wouldn't want to lose that just to be black. Nor should they.
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The Black Latino Experience
