The Black-Hispanic Divide

Steven Malanga:

FIERCE fighting over the minority vote may be the real surprise of the '08 Democratic race, with many blacks gravitating to Sen. Barack Obama and Hispanics to Sen. Hillary Clinton. But this split isn't just about these candidates; it's been a long time coming.

The tensions have many sources, but the one few analysts discuss is immigration.

Growing anger over the way Hispanic immigration is changing their neighborhoods has prompted many African-Americans to rethink the notion of a rainbow coalition. Meanwhile, surveys show that many US Hispanics mistrust African-Americans and see themselves as more like whites than like blacks.

In fact, black unease about immigration goes back to the 19th century, when former slave Frederick Douglass warned that immigrants were displacing free blacks in the labor market. Many blacks supported the 1892 federal law that restricted Chinese immigration and later urged restrictions on Mexican workers. "If the million Mexicans who have entered the country have not displaced Negro workers, whom have they displaced?" asked black journalist George Schuyler in 1928.

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When Blacknews.com columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson wrote a series of pieces sympathizing with illegal aliens, the volume of hostile mail from other blacks shocked him. Illegal immigration has sizzled as a topic on African-American stations like satellite radio XM's "The Power," with most callers demanding more restrictions.

Recent polling data suggest the shift. A 2006 Pew Center national survey found that, in urban areas where blacks and Latinos live close together, blacks were likelier to favor cutting immigration levels.

Behind the anger is the rapid change that Hispanic immigration (legal and illegal) is working on longtime black locales. Places like South Los Angeles have transformed almost overnight into majority-Latino communities.

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Blacks' anger is also rising because they realize that many Latinos hold intensely negative stereotypes about them. In a 2006 study of various racial groups' attitudes in Durham, N.C., 59 percent of Latino immigrants said that few or no blacks were hardworking; 57 percent said that few or no blacks could be trusted. By contrast, 9 percent of whites said that blacks weren't hardworking, and only 10 percent said that they couldn't be trusted.

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Hispanic prejudice against blacks is one of the dirty little secrets of the "rainbow coalition." It has been around longer than the civil rights movement and it is not fueled by the black opposition to illegal immigration. Obama's candidacy may have brought some of it out into the open, but it has been there all along. It is one of the reasons why the immigration issue is also such a dangerous one for Democrats and it does not cut for them either way they go.