Dash Harris Machado
Dash Harris is a Peabody-award winning multi-media journalist and entrepreneur based in Panama. Dash is the producer of NEGRO: A docu-series about Latino Identity, a decade-long, ongoing web-based docu-series that explores AfroDiasporic identity, colonization, the historical and present day class and color complex and hierarchy among Latinxs throughout the Americas. Dash is the co-founder of AfroLatino Travel a travel and community-building resource for the African Diaspora in Latin America, led by Black Latin American locals. Dash has been featured in “50 Shades of Black,” USA Today, Latina magazine, Remezcla, Vibe, CNN, People Chica, Hip Latina, For Harriet, & The Root.
Presentations from Facing Race 2020
If You're Not Talking About Race, You're Not Talking About Anything: Anti-Blackness in the Latinx Community
Our proposed session aims to dismantle anti-blackness and white supremacy among Latinx communities and those that work with Latinx communities. We create a space where we display, present, and analyze how white supremacy and antiblackness have insidiously moved through history, time, space, and society, thereby normalizing it and pointing out traditions, practices, and myths among U.S. Latinxs that are seldom interrogated as anti-black. For example: "there is no racism in Latin America," "class matters more than race," "we are all mixed so how can we be racist?" "we don't identify along racial lines, it is more about our nationalities," "we are all equal in Latin America," "there are no whites in Latin America," "there are no Blacks in X country," "Latinxs do not identify racially, this is a new thing and U.S.-centric," all statements untrue. We offer ways to pushback and re-imagine other ways of being. It is also useful for non-Latinx individuals to receive this information as U.S. politics is tied to Latin American politics. Many of these biases are steeped in "tradition" or "that's just the way it is" with very little interrogation, these ideas and attitudes are often unknowingly replicated and continuously duplicated though generations. Many may never have even had to confront how their positionality and behaviors exhibit loyalty and investment to white hegemony. We invite folks to examine these phenomenas, keeping in mind many behaviors were and are survival tactics to re-imagine other possibilities that recognize our full humanity for future generations.
Speakers: Dash Harris Machado, Evelyn Alvarez, Janvieve Williams Comrie