For the second time in a week, an MSNBC segment that was meant to condemn racism ended up with the segment’s participants spewing hateful and racist comments towards others. This time, the incident occurred on Saturday’s The Cross Connection as host Tiffany Cross and Prof. Tanya Hernandez reacted to the Los Angeles City Council racism scandal by lamenting that some Latinos try to be and are “white.”
Cross declared that, “I’ve grown up in communities where the Latino community was very adjacent, and, you know, a lot of shared experiences. And, it does tend to, the common ground here is white supremacy because it seems like some people in the Latino community feel like if we’re white-adjacent maybe they will not be subjected to the same racism and prejudice.”
Anybody wondering about definition of “white-adjacent” was left wanting as Cross continued, “I want to show a clip from a great writer in The Atlantic who says ‘your ‘whiteness’ will always be relative.’—She’s directing this towards the Latino community—'You can utter as much garbage as you want about black people, you can vote Republican and lead the Proud Boys but you will never achieve whiteness. The ‘gift’ bestowed upon Italians and the Irish isn't happening for us.’”
The councilmembers who were compelled to resign were Democrats! They took Cross’s obsession with race-based identity politics to its logical conclusion. Unable to see the consequences of her own beliefs, Cross turned to Hernandez and concluded, ‘“So, you can discriminate against black people and Afro-Latinos all you want. It won’t make you white. It just makes you a racist person of color. A Brown Clayton Bigsby. A fool.’ I echo those sentiments, curious your thoughts, this morning?”
Hernandez responded by somehow managing to be even more absurd:
Well, I actually think there is another layer to this, some people within the Latino community do achieve whiteness, one, because they are white appearing, they favor more our European ancestors, and depending on their accent, their educational level, whether they actually have a recognizable Hispanic surname, all of those things enable a person to, I wouldn't call it passing, but seemingly and seamlessly being able to pass into whiteness, or white Anglo-whiteness, just as they have whiteness within and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Only MSNBC could think going after someone’s accent makes them the anti-racist, but the worst was yet to come as Hernandez continued, “So, I guess what I want to say is despite this idea of all Latinos being brown, you know, some browns are browner or than others and some whites are whiter than others. There are Latinos who are white, whether they have that personal identity or not, that is their socially ascribed race from others outside, and they get to live in that privilege as well.”
MSNBC Privilege is the idea that you can be as racist as you want towards others, so long as you claim to be fighting racism in the process.
This segment was sponsored by Tide.
Here is a transcript for the October 15 show:
MSNBC The Cross Connection with Tiffany Cross
10/15/2022
10:17 AM ET
TIFFANY CROSS: Yeah, I agree, and, you know, Tanya I want to bring you into the conversation because, you know, I see these things, I’ve heard and been in proximity to these things my entire life. I’ve grown up in communities where the Latino community was very adjacent, and, you know, a lot of shared experiences.
And, it does tend to, the common ground here is white supremacy because it seems like some people in the Latino community feel like if we’re white-adjacent maybe they will not be subjected to the same racism and prejudice.
I want to show a clip from a great writer in The Atlantic who says “your ‘whiteness’ will always be relative.”—She’s directing this towards the Latino community—“You can utter as much garbage as you want about black people, you can vote Republican and lead the Proud Boys but you will never achieve whiteness. The ‘gift’ bestowed upon Italians and the Irish isn't happening for us. So, you can discriminate against black people and Afro-Latinos all you want. It won’t make you white. It just makes you a racist person of color. A Brown Clayton Bigsby. A fool.”
I echo those sentiments, curious your thoughts, this morning?
TANYA K. HERNANDEZ: Well, I actually think there is another layer to this, some people within the Latino community do achieve whiteness, one, because they are white appearing, they favor more our European ancestors, and depending on their accent, their educational level, whether they actually have a recognizable Hispanic surname, all of those things enable a person to, I wouldn't call it passing, but seemingly and seamlessly being able to pass into whiteness, or white Anglo-whiteness, just as they have whiteness within and Latin America and the Caribbean.
So, I guess what I want to say is despite this idea of all Latinos being brown, you know, some browns are browner or than others and some whites are whiter than others.
There are Latinos who are white, whether they have that personal identity or not, that is their socially ascribed race from others outside, and they get to live in that privilege as well.
