Perpetual Inferiority: Whites’ Racial Ideology toward Latinos

The author examines contemporary Latino racialization by focusing on whites’ attitudes toward Latinos. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with whites from Orange County, California, the findings show that this group of white Americans believes that Latino culture is deficient and inferior. Moreover, the respondents explicitly ascribe these problems to the group as a whole, regardless of national origin, citizenship status, or generation. The interviews reveal how whites construct Latinos as a racial group by explaining that Latinos pass down their “deficient” culture to the subsequent generation and thus are unable to change, adapt, and progress. In essence, whites perceive Latino cultural traits as fixed. By doing so, whites use cultural racism to function as biological racism. This reveals a racial ideology toward Latinos the author terms perpetual inferiority, which accounts for how whites construct Latinos as a nonwhite racial group that is unable to assimilate. This study demonstrates specifically how external ascription affects the racial formation process of Latinos and their position within the racial hierarchy.