Introduction

• Pages: 1-21
• Author: Khiara M. Bridges

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INTRODUCTION

• In November 2024, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris to

become the 47th President of the United States, despite the

many scandals that marked his first tenure as president—

including his unsupported claim that his defeat in the 2020

election was the result of massive voter fraud. Exit polls

conducted after the 2024 election revealed that concerns about

inflation and undocumented immigration were top of mind for

persons who voted for Trump and other Republican candidates.

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These voters believed that Trump would curb inflation and

undocumented immigration in a way that Democratic

candidates could not or would not.

While the issue of undocumented immigration does not

inherently implicate race, it may acquire racial connotations in

the U.S. because over two-thirds of those who have immigrated

to the country without authorization are from Mexico and

Central America. Thus, when we talk about stopping or

stemming undocumented immigration, we are talking about

restricting the numbers of Latine

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people who may enter the

country; when we talk about making it easier for undocumented

immigrants to naturalize, we are talking about making it easier

for Latine people to become citizens. This may make us wonder

whether ideas about race have informed our immigration laws

as well as the views that politicians, pundits, scholars, and we,

as citizens, have about those laws.

• In April 2014, Flint, Michigan—a city that is predominately

black and where 40 percent of the residents live below the

poverty line—stopped purchasing treated Lake Huron water

from Detroit and started using the Flint River as its water

source. The Flint River, however, has a high chloride

concentration, making its water more corrosive than Lake

Huron water. When Flint officials failed to add anti-corrosive

agents to the river water, it leached lead from the lead service

pipes that pump water into Flint homes. Thousands of adults

and children were unwittingly exposed to dangerous levels of

lead until the problem was made known to the public in

November 2015.

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See Election 2024: Exit Po lls, CNN POL., https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/

exit-polls/national-results/general/president/0 (Dec. 13, 2024, 5:07 PM).

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This book uses the term Latine, instead of Latino/a or Latin@, as a gender

inclusive, nonbinary reference to people of Latin American descent.

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INTRODUCTION

That Flint used lead pipes to pump water into and out of homes

is not all unique. In fact, many older cities across the nation and

around the globe use lead pipes. Thus, everyone living in these

places—rich and poor, white and nonwhite—is endangered by

an infrastructure that, under certain circumstances, can be

harmful. Further, the latent potential for harm increases as

these infrastructures age and crumble. However, some

communities will be wealthy enough to repair or replace its

infrastructure. Some communities will be able to afford to rip

out the lead pipes and substitute them with safer alternatives.

And some people will be able to move out of toxic neighborhoods

and into newer, healthier ones. The communities unable to

afford to manage the risks associated with their deteriorating

infrastructures, and the people left behind there, inevitably will

be poor. In a country where race follows class closely, these

people and communities will disproportionately be nonwhite.

• On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner died after police officer Daniel

Pantaleo put him in an illegal chokehold during an arrest. The

encounter between Pantaleo and Garner began after Pantaleo,

who is white, approached Garner, who was black, because he

suspected that the latter was selling “loosies”—single cigarettes

from a pack. On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed

black teenager, was shot and killed by a white police officer,

Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri. The city erupted in

protests twice—initially after Brown’s killing, and again after a

grand jury declined to indict Wilson on any charges connected to

the shooting. On November 27, 2014, Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-

old black boy who had been playing with a toy gun outside of a

recreation center in Cleveland, Ohio, was shot and killed by

police officers who reported that they believed that the gun that

Rice held was real. Ohio is one of many U.S. states that permit

the open carry of handguns. On March 30, 2015, Mya Hall was

shot and killed after she took a wrong turn onto National

Security Agency property and crashed into a security gate and a

police car. There was no evidence that Hall, a black transgender

woman, had posed any threat to the facility or to anyone present.

On July 10, 2015, police in Waller County, Texas, stopped

Sandra Bland, a black woman, for failing to signal a lane change.

She was arrested for allegedly assaulting the white police officer

who had pulled her over. Bland was found dead in her jail cell

three days later. On July 6, 2016, a police officer in Falcon

Heights, Minnesota, pulled over Philando Castile, a black man,

as he drove in his car with his girlfriend and her four-year-old

daughter. The officer asked Castile for his license and

registration. He fatally shot Castile, who had informed the