Richard Prince Journal-isms Roundtable: Do Media Accurately Cover Black-Latino Relations? Part 1

In 2004, scholar and attorney Nicolas Vaca wrote “The Presumed Alliance: The Unspoken Conflict Between Latinos and Blacks and What It Means for America.” Vaca told PBS interviewer Ray Suarez that the two groups “suffer from the same kind of racial profiling, discrimination, prejudice. Those similar kinds of problems affect both groups, but in fact you still have a conflict because it is to some extent a zero-sum game, and each group wants to have its own for its own.”

In 2008, the Pew Research Center found that “While blacks and Hispanics hold broadly favorable views of each other, Hispanics are less likely to say the two groups get along well. At the same time, African Americans are far more likely than Latinos to say blacks are frequently the victims of racial discrimination.”

Meanwhile, among journalists, Blacks and Hispanics joined Native Americans and Asian Americans in the Unity: Journalists of Color coalition, which remained intact from its incorporation in 1990 until the Black and Hispanic groups pulled out in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Since then, the two groups have periodically held joint conventions.

Most recently, after large numbers of Latino men voted in November for Donald Trump, New York Times columnist Charles…