Boys Deserve Better Than the Command to 'Be a Man,' by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Boys Deserve Better Than the Command to 'Be a Man'

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 9, 2026

Adam Stanaland’s (2025) Scientific American essay, “Our Narrow View of Masculinity Is Hurting Boys,” offers an important intervention in a moment when masculinity is being weaponized in our politics, schools, media, and homes.

His argument is both simple and profound: masculinity itself is not “toxic.” What harms boys is the pressure to perform a narrow, rigid, emotionally constricted version of masculinity—one that tells them not to cry, not to appear vulnerable, not to be “feminine,” not to ask for help, and not to become anything less than dominant.

This matters deeply for educators and parents. Thankfully, research offers helpful evidence-based insights into how gender norms, social pressure, and rigid expectations shape boys’ development, identity, and behavior (Orenstein, 2020; Rudman & Glick, 2021; Stanaland et al., 2021; Stanaland et al., 2024).

In schools, boys are often socialized into silence long before they are invited into self-knowledge. They learn that tenderness is weakness, that anger is more acceptable than grief, and that care work is somehow beneath them. They absorb lessons about manhood not only from parents and peers, but from classrooms, sports culture, social media, churches, political leaders, and the larger society.

Stanaland’s point is that these pressures do not produce strong boys. They produce fragile ones—boys who may feel compelled to prove their manhood through aggression, domination, homophobia, sexism, emotional withdrawal, or contempt for anything coded as feminine. His research with colleagues similarly finds that adolescent boys can respond aggressively when their masculinity feels threatened, especially when they already feel pressure to be conventionally “manly.”

This is not just a family issue. It is a public issue.

When boys are taught that power matters more than connection, that dominance matters more than empathy, and that vulnerability is shameful, democracy itself suffers. A democratic society requires people who can listen, reflect, collaborate, repair harm, and care for others. These are not “soft” skills. They are civic capacities.

This is why the current political attack on so-called “gender ideology” is so harmful—and, frankly, so nonsensical. The phrase itself is vague by design. It turns serious scholarship, honest classroom discussion, and students’ lived experiences into a caricature. It suggests that talking about gender somehow imposes an ideology, when in fact silence about gender is itself ideological. 

The command to “be a man” is gender ideology. 

The shaming of boys for crying is gender ideology. 

The insistence that girls be compliant and boys be dominant is gender ideology. 

The erasure of LGBTQ+ students and families is gender ideology. 

What opponents call “gender ideology” is often simply the attempt to give young people language for understanding themselves, one another, and the unequal world they are inheriting.

The irony is that our society has rightly encouraged girls to enter domains historically coded as masculine—science, leadership, politics, law, medicine, business, athletics. But we have done far less to encourage boys to enter domains coded as feminine: teaching, nursing, caregiving, early childhood education, social work, emotional labor, and peacemaking. We tell girls they can be anything, but too often tell boys they must be one thing.

That is not liberation. It is another cage.

For communities of color, this conversation is especially layered. Black and Brown boys are already too often read through racist lenses of threat, discipline, criminality, and deficit. They do not need more pressure to perform hardness in order to survive. They need schools and communities that recognize their full humanity—their brilliance, tenderness, humor, creativity, grief, anger, cultural knowledge, and capacity for care.

This is where culturally sustaining education matters. Ethnic Studies, gender studies, restorative practices, critical pedagogy, and social-emotional learning do not “weaken” young people. They give them language for their lives. They help students understand how power works, how identities are formed, how harm is reproduced, and how people can choose otherwise.

In today’s culture wars, however, these very forms of education are under attack. The same politics that censor race, gender, sexuality, and history also narrows the emotional and moral vocabulary available to young people. It tells boys that strength means control, that freedom means domination, and that care is weakness. It calls this “tradition,” but it is really a refusal to let children become fully human.

We should reject this.

Boys deserve a wider horizon. They deserve to know that courage can look like telling the truth. Strength can look like asking for help. Leadership can look like listening. Manhood can include tenderness. And masculinity, when freely chosen and rooted in care, responsibility, humility, and justice, need not be toxic at all.

Stanaland’s essay reminds us that the work before us is not to shame boys or men. It is to free them—and all of us—from scripts that are too small for the lives our children deserve.

The question for parents, educators, and policymakers is not simply, “What kind of men are we raising?”

The deeper question is: “What kind of human beings are we allowing boys to become?”

References

Stanaland, A. (2025, March 10). Our narrow view of masculinity is hurting boys. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-narrow-view-of-masculinity-is-hurting-boys/

Stanaland, A., Gaither, S. E., Gassman-Pines, A., Galvez-Cepeda, D., & Cimpian, A. (2024). Adolescent boys’ aggressive responses to perceived threats to their gender typicality. Developmental Science. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39007941/

Stanaland, A., Gaither, S. E., & Gassman-Pines, A. (2021). The role of social pressure in eliciting men’s aggressive cognition. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33504285/

Rudman, L. A., & Glick, P. (2021). The social psychology of gender: How power and intimacy shape gender relations (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Orenstein, P. (2020). Boys & sex: Young men on hookups, love, porn, consent, and navigating the new masculinity. Harper.

Our Narrow View of Masculinity Is Hurting Boys

Masculinity isn’t “toxic” by itself, but the strain boys feel from society and parents to meet unrealistic expectations is

By Adam Stanaland edited by Megha Satyanarayana | Scientific American | March 10, 2025

Matt Porteous/Getty Images

Each semester, I ask my psychology students to imagine how people would grow up, think and act in a world without societal rules and expectations. This may seem like an easy task, but their initial answers are similar to what you’d expect a fish to say if asked what it’s like to live in water. “What norms?” they ask. This is especially the case for the young men who, like me, had never explicitly questioned messages like, “Boys don’t cry” and “Be a man” before going to college. Amid a resurgence of rigid masculinity—and as a psychologist who studies these issues—I’ve grown increasingly concerned with these unacknowledged pressures that can thwart the healthy development of boys and young men.

This question I pose to my students is based on research I and others did a couple of years ago, looking at how pervasive social norms, especially current views of masculinity, can shape people often in unideal ways. As I’ve noted before in Scientific American, many boys and men report feeling pressured to be stereotypically masculine. This means, for example, pressure to be tough (physical and emotionally), able to fix things and in positions of power – what we call “hegemonic masculinity.” These pressure are often rooted in fundamentally human needs, such as men’s desire to provide for their families, or simply to belong and accepted by others.

Importantly, we’ve found that pressure to be a certain kind of masculine leads to aggressive thoughts and feelings, especially among adolescent boys and young adult men who are in throes of forming an identity. To me, it’s not masculinity that is inherently bad or toxic. Rather, problems arise when rigid masculinity is pressured onto boys and men.

In psychology, pressure is the antithesis of autonomy—or the basic human need to act in line with one’s true self. This is why acting out manliness for pressured reasons leads to “fragile” masculine identities. Instead of a healthy identity rooted in authenticity and autonomy, fragility stems from an insecure need for external validation. As a result, these boys and men feel compelled to prove their manhood to others through stereotypically masculine means. We see the results in the disproportionate rates of men’s gun violence, homophobia, sexual aggression, political bigotry and even anti-environmental behavior, compared to women.

Against this, parents are a critical part of how boys see themselves, and how they understand masculinity. With the rise of a “masculinity” that is increasingly pressuring, parents can help boys develop more expansive identities. This is not about demonizing one idea of masculinity, or boys and men as group, but reducing the pressure to be a narrowly defined man. Genuine and compassionate versions of masculinity exist, and it’s okay for boys to take those paths. Getting there means conversation, modeling desired behavior, and reckoning with our own definitions of what a man is. But it matters, because this pressure to conform to narrow norms is hurting boys.

While we were collecting data on boys’ aggression, we also surveyed their parents, asking them to agree or disagree with statements relating to current beliefs about masculinity. Some of these items had to do with relatively benign beliefs—like, whether men should be handy—and some were more consequential, such as beliefs about homophobia and gender inequality.

We found that parents’ beliefs about hegemonic masculinity related to pressure their sons reported to be stereotypically masculine; that is, parents who simply believed that men should have status and power over others had sons (some as young as 10) who reported feeling pressured to be manly. It’s no surprise, then, that these were the boys who responded aggressively when we challenged their manhood, especially when they were already in the throes of puberty.

These results tell us there is a consequence to raising boys in a man’s world: living up to these expectations is stressing them out. We know this because they report being bullied, or shut out of peer groups. They tell us they have low self-esteem. In their book on the psychology of gender relations between women and men, Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick propose that we are powerfully shaped by how societies are structured—with men most often at the top and women (and people of other genders) situated below them. For proof, look no further than government and business in the U.S. where only 27 percent of federal lawmakers, 10 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and 0 percent of presidents are women.

Immediately, we think about what these disparities mean for girls, and we should, but to the extent that girls receive messages that they can’t get to the top, many boys are hearing that they must get to the top. It’s certainly a double-edged sword. Boys and men are afforded power and privilege, yet many are also pressured to earn and maintain it.


AleksandarNakic/Getty Images

We’ve made great strides in inspiring girls to achieve just as well as boys (and even better)—though there is still much work to do here—yet we’ve so far failed to encourage boys to aspire toward culturally feminized work and communal careers in fields such as nursing, child care and early-childhood education. Instead, in many capitalist cultures across the world, we continue to push and pressure our boys away from anything remotely feminine—away from the innate nurturing and caring tendencies that they demonstrate in childhood—and toward the pinnacles of what we (as societies) have defined as success.

Redefining masculinity starts with you. Not every expression or experiment in masculinity will be safe for your child to pursue, especially in certain areas of the world. (For example, we found that parents in conservative parts of the U.S. put significant pressure on their sons to be masculine, which may be rooted in a fear of openly challenging masculinity norms.) But, as psychologist Onnie Rogers notes, we can encourage boys to “run with intentionality in the opposite direction, against the grain, and more importantly, toward [their] full humanity,” and this means that ideas around masculinity are worth talking about.

As you talk to, play with, observe and guide your sons along their paths, here are some ideas to consider, what I think of as “four Rs” to get you started:

Realize that you can have these hard conversations; that you can intervene and guide. Although you might feel like your sons will develop in ways beyond your control, you do have a significant effect on your children’s core beliefs, values and worldviews. Psychologist Sylvia Perry recently wrote in this very column about how children and young adults can handle hard conversations about race. They can understand complex ideas, histories and perspectives about gender, too.

Reconsider the messages boys are sent (and not sent), both explicitly and implicitly. Children learn about gender through many pathways—summed up as direct teaching, experiencing and modeling. You might try to directly teach your boys to combat gender stereotypes and even explicitly encourage them to take part in “feminine” activities; but arguably more important is what they learn by watching you and what they experience in their own worlds. What’s vital is that boys be given the space to develop apart from pressures to be masculine or feminine—nothing is inherently wrong with boys liking to play with trucks, and pressuring boys to do more “girly” things against their inclinations defeats the purpose.

Resist in the sense of equipping boys to resist messages about who they should and shouldn’t be. Even the best schoolteachers sometimes fall back on antiquated tropes like gendering pink versus blue pencils. If your son wants to use the pink pencil, why the hell shouldn’t he? A new and exciting area of research is looking at how easy it is for boys to actively resist masculinity norms and what benefits they may get from this.

Recognize that the way that society is right now isn’t how it has to be. You could, for instance, tell boys that even though there has never been a woman U.S. president, anyone can be president, regardless of their gender. Highlight women who are leading companies and, possibly more importantly, men who excel in HEED occupations (health care, early education and domestic roles).

These won’t be easy. It won’t be a onetime thing. But the sooner we can start dismantling gender gaps at all levels of society, the sooner we’ll see boys (and girls) less pressured to meet outdated expectations—and more fulfilled in finding authenticity.

Adam Stanaland is an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Richmond. He received a joint Ph.D. in psychology and public policy from Duke University, after which he completed postdoctoral training at New York University. Broadly, his research explores the interplay between societal structures and social norms, such as how political and economic systems influence norms, as well as how norms and beliefs shape group-level behavior.More by Adam Stanaland

"Becoming Mexican American," by Ricardo Romo, Ph.D.

Such a beautiful reflection on what it meant to become "Mexican American" in San Antonio by former University of Texas San Antonio President Ricardo Romo.  It demonstrates a shift in understanding of "Mexican," as a national-origin  identifier to one of "Mexican American," as an ethnic identifier. It is a process. For first-generation immigrants, theirs is an experience of understanding what "Mexicanidad" (or Mexican-ness) means in a U.S. context. In short, although the same term, "Mexican" or "Mexicana/o" gets used, but they mean different things.

Dr. Romo's mention that "Mexican" was a term that entered from outside the lexicon of his community attests to not only the fact that people were primarily Spanish speaking but also that this term was imposed. This brought to mind a statement made by a newly-arrived Mexican student who expressed being troubled about having come to the U.S. to "learn" that "Mexican" is a dirty word.

I shared with her and the rest of the class that there is a long history to this and that the term—even as it represents a source of pride—is nevertheless inflected by vexed Anglo-Mexican relations in the Southwest. 

One sees, for example, people avoiding it altogether, opting for "Hispanic," "Latino," or "Latinx," because the word, "Mexican"—especially when accompanied by pejorative adjectives like "dumb," "greasy," or "dirty"—was intended as a slur. What may further reside at the subterranean, civilizational level, is a negation of Mexico itself, compounded by the fact that the term is of Indigenous origins. That is, the "Mexica" (pronounced me-SHEE-ca) are the Aztec, Nahuatl-speaking people whose very existence threatens the Eurocentric myths of both countries. 

-Angela Valenzuela 

Becoming Mexican American

By Ricardo Romo, Ph.D. | Nov. 1, 2020

The United States seemed far away to the families living in the farming communities of Union, Sabinas, and Agujita in northern Coahuila during the early 1900s. Those wishing to make a new life in the United States had to make a 80 mile trip to Eagle Pass, Texas.

There were no automobiles in any of the surrounding Mexican communities and the railroad tracks had not yet reached the rural areas. Coming to the United States meant walking or riding the entire distance in a horse carriage. Prior to the Mexican Revolution, most of the small farmers from these communities considered this to be too dramatic a step.

Francisco “Pancho” Saenz bought his business in 1937--at the height of the Great Depression. Francisco Saenz [on the right]: Auto Parts store on El Paso Street. 1940s. [Romo Family Photo]

Mexicans came to the United States because profound “push” forces dominated their daily lives. The “push” factors of the early 20th century were a result of civil unrest, war, and political oppression in Mexico. A long and harsh dictatorship in Mexico eventually led to a revolution, which resulted in the exodus of thousands of Mexican between the years 1910-1930. In the 1920s thousands from the Central states of Mexico also left because of religious persecution.

I often wondered why my grandparents came to the United States. My conversations with them revealed the obvious: like many other migrants of that time in Mexico, they left a homeland plagued by violence and with hopes of finding work elsewhere. It is not all that clear that they were seeking a new life elsewhere or in pursuit of the American Dream. They were undecided initially about their future. Unlike the immigrants from Europe and Asia,

Mexicans were close enough to the homeland that if work did not materialize or became unsteady, they were prepared to return. Many actually came to the United States thinking they would earn money and then return to Mexico after the armed conflict ended to buy a small property or start a business.

Maria Saenz Romo, sister of Francisco Saenz, and well known Midwife. Photo taken at her El Paso Street home only five houses away from Kerr Hill Auto Parts. [R.Romo family photos]

My four grandparents were born in Mexico. Two came from the Sabinas region of the northern state of Coahuila. Both of my parents grew up in the Westside of San Antonio, a Mexican barrio where everyone, it seemed, had a connection to Mexico. No one had a television, so our only music and news came from two local Spanish language radio stations.

Mexican barrios like ours and those in other U.S. cities were often called “Little Mexico.” In Dallas, for example, so many Mexican moved into the “Little Jerusalem,” a Jewish neighborhood, that after 1910 it soon became known as “Little Mexico.” But there was nothing little about our barrio in San Antonio, which the US Census estimated as the second largest Mexican American community in the United States after Los Angeles in 1960. Those from outside our barrio called us Mexican, and we referred to ourselves as “La Raza.”

There is much about what I saw and learned in my early years in San Antonio that reveals the extent of our Mexicanism. I grew up surrounded by a large extended family, and they influenced much of my early understanding of Latino culture and society. My “Tio Pancho” was one such influencer.

Kerr Hill Auto Parts owned by Francisco Saenz. 1940s. [R. Romo Family photos]

My uncle, [Tio] Francisco “Pancho” Saenz, came to the United States at the age of 18 with his sister, Maria Romo, and his brother in law, Benito Romo, from the Sabinas region of Coahuila. The three immigrated in 1913 crossing into the United States at the Eagle Pass international border.

Tio Pancho initially worked as a farm laborer, but found a job in a garage as a young man when the family moved to San Antonio. With his savings, Tio Pancho bought his own garage and auto parts store in 1937. Tio Pancho was a frequent “guest DJ” with KCOR. On the radio he told stories about serving in the Mexican Revolution, catching huge fish in the Gulf of Mexico, and knowing the latest juicy stories about Mexican movie stars and popular singers.

Tio Pancho--”El Gavilan Pescador,” loved fishing and hunting and enjoyed telling his fishing stories on the local Spanish-language radio. [R.Romo family photos]

“Tio Pancho” was a popular fellow in our Westside barrio. From the mid 1930s to the time of his death in 1965, he had one of the few Mexican-owned auto parts sales and repair shops in the city. He had radio time on the only Mexican station in town. His sister Maria was one of the most respected midwives in the barrio. His brother Cruz owned a popular night club “El Gaucho” across the street from Tio Pancho’s auto shop on El Paso Street and his younger brother Martin owned several fried chicken drive-inns.

If my grandmother and her brothers believed in the American Dream, they didn’t say. If the American Dream meant being financially successful, creating their own businesses, buying a home, and raising children who attended school, they more than lived this dream.

Although they gave up on returning to Mexico, they never gave up on their idea that family was the Mexican way. My grandmother and her two brothers helped bring my great grandmother, Estefana Cardenas, to the United States. She lived next door to her son’s auto parts store, five houses from her daughter’s home, and across the street from her younger son’s night club.

Today, the auto parts store, Kerr Hill Auto Parts, continues in its 83rd year with the help of Tio Pancho’s son Frank, his wife Vicki, and their son Frankie, They moved the store one block south to Guadalupe Street where they have a larger lot for the garage and auto repair business. These are tough times for small family businesses, and the fourth generation has no interest in keeping the business active after the son, wife and grandson of Tio Pancho retire.

Frank Saenz, Jr., [center] son of Francisco Saenz, with cousins Robert Romo, left— and Ricardo Romo [R] . [R.Romo family photos 2015]

Tio Pancho’s family story is one of many from this Westside barrio. This family did not have strong long-term ties to Mexico, but managed to bring some Mexicanism to San Antonio via their radio experience and interaction with other Mexican customers and family members. All continued to speak Spanish, and Maria Romo, the midwife, learned very little English as nearly all of her clients spoke Spanish.

Tio Pancho’s family contributed to the Mexican American experience, as did thousands of other first generation Mexicanos in the United States. They passed on Mexican values of strong family ties, a respect for hard work and entrepreneurship, an appreciation for being bilingual in Spanish and English, and the importance of higher education.

Why the term “BIPOC” is so complicated, explained by linguists by Constance Grady

The term, "BIPOC," meaning Black Indigenous People of Color, is an interesting term. I was part of a community meeting on Zoom here in Austin several months ago where the term was first heard by members of the Austin Latino Coalition, one of the primary groups that has been spearheading our community's struggle against COVID on the ground. As I recall, in question was a city document about this group's efforts that failed to use either the words, "Hispanic" or "Latino," that not only perplexed members of the community but angered them as a deep sense of erasure became the overriding sentiment.

In the chat, I was trying to say that it could be a progressive term if Latinas and Latinos see themselves as Indigenous, and thusly included. I consider myself as Indigenous, even if I'm also Latina, Chicana, Tejana, and Mexican American, depending on the context. 

I remember conjecturing that the term, BIPOC, may have been reinforced by the racial justice movement that in 2020 was centered in Minnesota in the wake of the George Floyd murder and how that area of the country is definitely a Black and Indigenous space. (Note: That's still a hypothesis.)

Nothing I posted seemed to matter, making me realize anew the importance of not just language, but context. In this context, it felt like the city report intentionally sought to exclude the work of this coalition because it failed to acknowledge them directly, at least either as Hispanic or Latino, particularly since the term, "Latino," is in the actual name of the group.

The short of it is that we should be thoughtful of language, sensitive to context, and ever-mindful of, and respectful toward, what people want to be called. After all, what we might think of as progressive, another may experience as an imposition. 

Thanks to Education Policy and Planning doctoral student, Maria del Carmen Unda, for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

Why the term “BIPOC” is so complicated, 

explained by linguists

There is no “one size fits all” language when it comes to talking about race.

By Constance Grady@constancegrady  Jun 30, 2020, 9:10am EDT

“Y’all know where the term ‘women of color’ came from?” asked Loretta Ross, the co-founder of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, at a reproductive justice training hosted by the Western States Center in 2011.

The moment was documented on video, in a clip that has traveled the internet with increasing speed since the George Floyd protests all across the US reawakened a national conversation about race and racism. After posing her rhetorical question to the audience, Ross went on to describe the alliance formed between different minority women’s groups at the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston.

“It was in those negotiations in Houston that the term ‘women of color’ was created,” Ross said. “It is a solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed women of color who have been minoritized.”

But Ross also explained that in the decades since those minority women’s groups came together to form their alliance, the term “women of color” has been flattened and lost its political meaning. “Unfortunately, so many times people of color hear the term ‘people of color’ from other white people that they think white people created it,” she said, “instead of understanding that we self-made ourselves. This is a term that has a lot of power for us. But we’ve done a poor-ass job of communicating that history so that people understand that power.”

The slippage Ross discussed in 2011 is part of a familiar pattern when it comes to the language we use to talk about political oppression based on identity. An in-group will develop a new label for itself as part of a way of talking about the experiences members of that group hold in common. And then out-groups will begin using that language in a flat, unspecific way. (Think about the term “sexual harassment,” created to discuss a violent abuse of power, which became bowdlerized over the decades.) They rob the language of its political power.

This flattening does not necessarily stem from an active desire to do harm. Often, it’s rooted in a desire to be seen as “not racist” or, more broadly, as one of “the good guys.” Anxious and indiscriminate and mostly white liberal speakers vaguely grasp that old terms like “African American,” “minority,” and “diverse” are outdated, and that new terms like “people of color” and “BIPOC” are in. And so they begin to slot in the new terms for the old without thinking too much about how the new terms are different.

“There’s this anxiety over saying the wrong thing,” says deandre miles-hercules, a PhD linguistics student who focuses on sociocultural linguistic research on race, gender, and sexuality. “And so instead of maybe doing a little research, understanding the history and the different semantic valences of a particular term to decide for yourself, or to understand the appropriateness of a use in a particular context, people generally go, ‘Tell me the word, and I will use the word.’ They’re not interested in learning things about the history of the term, or the context in which it’s appropriate.”

But miles-hercules argues that while people may not intend harm when they use identity labels inaccurately, their inaccuracy is still harmful. “People tune in to this, ‘What is the word? Do I call you African American? Do I call you Black? What is the word that people are preferring these days? I know I can’t call you Negro anymore! So just tell me the word so I can use it and we can go on from there,’” they say. “But that lacks in nuance. And that lack of nuance is a violence.”

In this current moment of crisis and social unrest, we all have to do our part to dismantle systems of oppression. Clearly, we need policies and practices that disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.  In addition, we need teachers and teaching that do this by honoring children's identities and viewing them from an asset-based, non-deficit perspective. 

What the Ethnic Studies research literature shows is that if children are alienated from school, the antidote is an empowering curriculum and pedagogy that centers the experiences, values, ways of knowing and being in the identities that children bring to the classroom. Yes, this means a de-centering of European-American, individualist, white supremacist values that, however toxic, are "natural" to the educational atmosphere that, sadly, nearly all of our children breathe.

This Ethnic Studies curriculum can and should involve an interrogation of terms like "Hispanic" that came into the existence with the 1980 Census together with the more recent term, "Latinx," to which not all people subscribe.  

As addressed herein, it should further bridge Hispanic/Latinx/Xicanx/Mexican American and African American communities, by considering shared roots, experiences, and identitied to which the very much alive and vibrant "Afro-Indigenous," "Afro-Latina/o," and "Afro-Tejana/o" refer.  

Pan-ethnic “Hispanic” identity has often excluded or erased Afro-Latinx and Afro-Indigenous experiences, and in some cases has even been used to excuse anti-Black racism. While discussions of anti-Blackness in Hispanic communities are more mainstream today, Afro-Latinx voices remain less visible, especially in debates around immigration, policing, and housing. Honoring these specific identities is essential to understanding the full diversity of Latinidad.

Let's agree, once and for all, that "There is no apolitical classroom," and let's get on with it everywhere. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Unmaking “Hispanic”: Teaching the Creation of Hispanic Identity

“Hispanic” heritage includes a diverse range of cultures, nationalities, histories and identities.

STEF BERNAL-MARTINEZ

OCTOBER 1, 2018 | Teaching tolerance

In Mexican-American communities, National Hispanic Heritage Month begins with the shout that marks the start of the Mexican Revolution—the grito heard around the world. In the border town that raised me, crimson red and earthy green flank the image of the eagle with the serpent in its clutches. Folks donning these national colors, holding elote in one hand and an agua fresca in the other, celebrate Mexican Independence Day each year on September 16th. This same scene unfolds throughout the United States with different foods, different colors depending on the specific Hispanic community. Each celebration is undeniably unique. 

As we celebrate and honor the heritage of our students throughout Hispanic Heritage Month, we must also do the important work of understanding how and why the distinct histories of a multinational, multicultural and multilingual group of communities were consolidated into Hispanic heritage in the first place. 

As someone who falls under the definition of Hispanic, the way I personally identify shifts. Sometimes, I’m Latinx or Mexican American. Other times, I note that I’m a non-black Latinx person. Almost always, I will identify myself as Xicana. Understanding the history behind these shifting identifications—and particularly the history of the word Hispanic—can help us better understand the challenges this term has created.  

Becoming Hispanic

Well into the 1970s, before we were Hispanic, we were marked by our own nationalities or our ancestral identities. In Texas communities like El Paso, we were Chicanos, Mexicanos or Tejanos. In New York City, folks were often Puerto Ricans or Cubans. 

1980 marked the first year that the U.S. Census offered Hispanic as an option for describing ethnic identity on the short form, the form that went to all households. The form offered a list of those who might choose to identify as “Spanish/Hispanic,” including people who identified as “Mexican,” “Mexican-Amer.,” “Chicano,” “Puerto Rican,” “Cuban” or “other Spanish/Hispanic.” 

Federal recognition of a single Hispanic ethnic identity was a strategic goal of Hispanic community organizers, who hoped to create a collective identity that people from a group of countries colonized by Spain could use to exert political and economic power. In a discussion of her book Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New America, Cristina Mora notes, “Organizations and institutions invest in keeping these terms as broad as possible.” Media companies like Univision therefore supported recognitions that would allow them to appeal to a wider consumer market in the United States. 

The idea was to leverage this power to address shared concerns, improving the material conditions of communities that shared ancestral geography and, in some instances, the Spanish language. In many ways, the adoption of a broad, Hispanic identity helped organizers achieve these goals. It is undeniable that there is economic benefit and political power in the use of Hispanic.

But we can’t discount the perhaps-unintentional effects of this intentional effort. We must ask, “Which communities within the spectrum of Hispanic people have seen benefits from this broad, consolidated identity? What has happened in communities that haven’t seen the benefits? For whom have conditions remained stagnant or even deteriorated?” 

And, perhaps most critically, “Who gains from erasing specific experiences of individual people and diverse cultural identities within the Hispanic community?”   

Ethnic Homogenization Is Anti-black

In the attempt to build political power through pan-ethnic solidarity, particularly vulnerable populations have been excluded from the benefits of that power. In the most extreme cases, Hispanic identity has been used by some to uphold and excuse anti-black violence. We might remember the conversations that unfolded during the George Zimmerman trial. Commentators often conflated ethnic and racial identity to argue that Zimmerman couldn’t be racist because he’s “Hispanic, not white.”

In the past few years, the exploration of anti-blackness in Hispanic communities has entered the mainstream. Organizations like the National Latina Institute and publications such as Everyday Feminism articulate the pervasiveness of anti-blackness in Hispanic communities and name strategies for dismantling this oppression within our own families and beyond. Less visible in this mainstream conversation is the argument put forth by Afro-Latinx organizers, artists and writers themselves. 

When visualizing those most affected by the national debate on immigration, for example, more often than not we picture the face of a non-black person. To do so is to ignore those who share both blackness and Hispanic identities. In this case, the homogenization of the groups that are supposed to be represented by the word Hispanic has obscured the experiences of Hispanic people who are also black.

During my first year of teaching in the predominantly Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights, New York, I witnessed the necessity of honoring the specific identities of Afro-Latinx students. Both my students and I were considered Hispanic under the definition put forth by the Census Bureau, but there were stark differences in our experiences of Latinidad because of our racial identities.  

In the Classroom

There is no perfect pathway or absolute language for recognizing both the shared and unique experiences within Hispanic communities. However, one way to start is to make space for the unmaking of the word Hispanic. As we celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, here are some ways to do so:

• Dispel the mainstream myth of a homogenous Hispanic identity by discussing the racial spectrum of experience held under the term Hispanic.
• Discuss the contention around the words Hispanic and Latinx. Explain that these terms are not universally accepted.
• Ask Latinx and Hispanic students (or their families) how they identify themselves before assigning these labels to them. Ask all students (or their families) their racial or ethnic identities before assigning labels to them. 
• Highlight the work of organizations, like Undocublack, that expand the traditional imagery of an immigrant. 
• Explain that Hispanic history is Black history. Listen to the stories of Afro-Latinx communities. 
• Explore the creation of the word Hispanic as a category in the U.S. Census. 
• Resist highlighting exclusively Mexican history, culture, events or people. 
• Prepare your own understandings of racial and ethnic identities, including the differences between the terms Hispanic and Latinx. 
• Familiarize yourself with U.S. Latinx civil rights history.  

Bernal-Martinez is TT’s Teaching and Learning Specialist and a Xicana documentary artist and educator. 

What It Means to Be ‘Latinx,’ and What That Means for America by Julian Castro

So many people are exploring not solely "Latinx identity," per se, but also what it actually means.  Here, Julian Castro reviews a book on the topic by Dr. Ed Morales titled, Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture.

Personally, I like the gender neutral part of the expression and also that it's a millennial development and I really love my millennial students and have two millennial children of my own.

The "Latin" part of the word is the rub for me as it smacks of assimilation as it suggests that we're "Latin," from Europe when we're not.  Even if our genes travelled all of the world, our people did not.  

Moreover, in some situations, "Latinx" can inadvertently participate in the erasure of history.  What comes to mind, in this regard, is the establishment of the "Chicana Caucus" at the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies," where some wanted to change the name to the "Latinx Caucus" a few years ago.  This put the caucus in an interesting situation due to its long history of progressive politics, but pushed back on this specific proposal in order to preserve the history of the caucus.

I'm confident that this kind of situation is playing out across many different contexts and is certainly something that must get discussed and negotiated.

That said, what I do like of Castro's reading Morales’ analysis of Latinx identity is that the x is variable, beyond the gender neutrality it clearly represents.  As an umbrella term, it conveys mestizaje, hybridity, and a spectrum of identity.  

My sense of where this will all go at least with respect to everyday social relations is in the direction of "situational ethnicity" where depending on the context, one's ethnic identity either gets displayed or concealed.  In some contexts, Latinx makes sense.  In others, it won't.

I conclude by citing another important work by political scientist Dr. Cristina Beltran, author of the book, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity.  I think she nails it when she offers the following:

"Latino," like the category "women," should be reconceived as a site of permanent political contestation. 

This is a reasonable conclusion to draw and this is a good problem to have.  Thanks to Paul Saldaña for sharing.

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

What It Means to Be ‘Latinx,’ and What That Means for America

A crowd at the 2018 Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City.CreditBebeto Matthews/Associated Press

Image

By Julian Castro

• Nov. 14, 2018

LATINX
The New Force in American Politics and Culture

By Ed Morales 368 pp. Verso. $24.95.

A crowd at the 2018 Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City.CreditCreditBebeto Matthews/Associated Press

In September, just in time for Hispanic Heritage Month, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary recognized the word “Latinx,” which it defines as “of, relating to or marked by Latin American heritage — used as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina.” I was happy to see the addition, and also more than a little amused. I thought back to my freshman year of college in 1992. As I sat in a computer room in my dorm working away on an early Macintosh, a red squiggly line immediately appeared underneath the word “Chicano” after I typed it into the paper I was writing about my family’s background. When I hit the spell check to see what the problem was, Microsoft Word had a suggestion: Chicago. “You don’t even exist,” popped into my head. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a new experience. Years earlier, in middle school, I’d been asked to fill out a form that included a question about my background. There were three options to choose from: black, white or other. “Well, I’m not black or white,” I remember thinking, pencil in hand, “but I don’t like the sound of ‘other.’” I left it blank.

For many Latinos, stories like these are all too familiar. In “Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture,” Ed Morales fills in that blank as well as the long, painful, complex and intersectional struggle for identity that has shaped America’s Latino community. As Morales notes, Latinx is just the latest in a series of terms, from Hispanic to Latino/a and even Latin@, employed to refer to individuals of Latin American heritage in an inclusive way.

Reading Morales’s dissection of Latinx identity formation, however, one begins to believe that the x in “Latinx” is more than just a means of providing gender-neutrality. As in algebra, the x is variable. How a Latino or Latina perceives himself or herself — and how he or she is perceived by others — often depends on context. Unhappy with the binary notion of race popular in the United States, Morales offers the concept of mestizaje, or hybridity, that encompasses a spectrum of identity, the result of hundreds of years of intermixing among African, European and indigenous peoples in Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean. Latinos can be black, white, brown or anything in between. Skin color, national origin, whether one lives in the mainland United States or outside of it, and one’s ability to speak Spanish, not to mention gender and sexual orientation, all play a role in one’s self-concept.

Morales, an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University who describes his own identity as that of a “racialized person living in a U.S. megacity, who has a somewhat ambiguous phenotypical appearance,” proves refreshingly introspective, weaving enough personal biography into the book to pull the work back from veering too far into inaccessible academic jargon. “In my own extended family, there is generally a disdain for blackness,” he writes, and tells of his father, who “traded on Anglo-Americans’ perceptions of his whiteness if it helped him in financial or social transactions, yet sought to avoid complete identification with whiteness when it came to his ‘real’ identity.”

According to the 2010 census, there were 55 million Latinos in the United States, and they made up 23 percent of Americans under the age of 18. Today, although Asian-Americans are now growing more quickly in percentage terms, Latinos are still growing fastest numerically. That means the destiny of the United States and the destiny of the Latino community are powerfully intertwined.

“The American identity will never be fixed and final; it will always be in the making,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote a quarter century ago in “The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.” While Schlesinger’s observation may be true, it is much easier asserted than accepted.

With his boogeyman approach to electoral politics, Donald Trump has deftly exploited anxieties about the impact of America’s changing demographics on our national identity, and no group has been more vilified by Trump for political purposes than Latinos. After declaring in his announcement speech that Mexico was sending rapists and drug runners to our country, months later Trump dismissed questions about the legitimacy of fraud claims against Trump University by insisting that the American-born judge of Mexican descent who was presiding over the case could not do his job right because “he’s Mexican!” His administration has been even worse, cruelly separating families apprehended at the Southern border, failing to adequately respond to Hurricane Maria and then dismissing the deaths of 3,000 Puerto Ricans as mere fantasy concocted by political opponents.

It is no surprise, then, that the Latino community is widely misperceived and is especially in need today of voices to defend and humanize it. In this way, “Latinx” couldn’t be timelier. For one thing, Morales shatters Americans’ view of the community as monolithic. Although nearly two-thirds of Latinos claim Mexican heritage, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and a growing community of Latinos from Central and South America each have unique cultural and political experiences in the United States.

Morales explores these to varying degrees, and, importantly, makes clear that Latinos have been integral to America’s progress for generations, even as they have grappled with relative invisibility, outright rejection of their place in America and internal struggles about their own identity. He reminds us that it was Gonzalo and Felícitas Méndez, the Mexican-born father and Puerto Rican mother of daughter Sylvia Mendez, who challenged California’s separate and unequal “Mexican schools,” winning an appellate court victory in 1946 that paved the way for the Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education that struck down racial segregation in schools eight years later.

Morales’s writing can be hyperbolic at times. “For an American economy that has been largely stagnant, the opening of Cuba is a last-ditch opportunity to stave off looming worldwide economic disaster,” he writes of President Obama’s efforts to open up Cuba to American investment. Still, the book’s deep dive into the crosscurrents of Latinx identity is a powerful reminder that, as Americans wrestle with questions about who is and who is not “American” — and, indeed, questions about what it means to be an American in the 21st century — the nation can benefit immensely from the robust inclusion and understanding of a community that has spent generations grappling with nearly every facet of its own identity.