What is Tanya Katerí Hernández reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Tanya Katerí Hernández, author of Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law, and the New Civil Rights Response.

Her entry begins:

I just finished reading Toni Morrison’s Home. It is about a black Korean-War veteran who returns to the United States with psychic war wounds and difficulty navigating the complexities of the U.S. racial terrain. The other primary character is the veteran’s sister who has her own challenges attempting to live with dignity in a historical context where black women were often to reduced to work horses, sex objects, or objects of medical experimentation. I admit that this may sound like an odd choice of fiction with which to relax from the professional demands of constant academic reading. But Toni Morrison’s...[read on]

About Racial Subordination in Latin America, from the publisher:

There are approximately 150 million people of African descent in Latin America yet Afro-descendants have been consistently marginalized as undesirable elements of the society. Latin America has nevertheless long prided itself on its absence of U.S.-styled state-mandated Jim Crow racial segregation laws. This book disrupts the traditional narrative of Latin America's legally benign racial past by comprehensively examining the existence of customary laws of racial regulation and the historic complicity of Latin American states in erecting and sustaining racial hierarchies. Tanya Katerí Hernández is the first author to consider the salience of the customary law of race regulation for the contemporary development of racial equality laws across the region. Therefore, the book has a particular relevance for the contemporary U.S. racial context in which Jim Crow laws have long been abolished and a "post-racial" rhetoric undermines the commitment to racial equality laws and policies amidst a backdrop of continued inequality.

Read an excerpt from Racial Subordination in Latin America, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

Tanya Katerí Hernández is Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law.

The Page 99 Test: Racial Subordination in Latin America.

Writers Read: Tanya Katerí Hernández.

--Marshal Zeringue