Sometimes we hear about Whites’ attitudes towards groups of color, but what do groups of color think about other racial/ethnic minority groups? Unfortunately, a new study finds that Latinos tend to hold very negative views of Blacks that comes from stereotypical images from their home country, but that Blacks did not reciprocate the same negatives views of Latinos:

Latino immigrants often hold negative views of African-Americans, which they most likely brought with them from their more-segregated Latin American countries, a new Duke University study shows. The study also found that sharing neighborhoods with Blacks reinforced Latino’s negatives views, and reinforces their feelings that they have “more in common with Whites” -- although Whites did not feel the same connection towards the Latinos. . . .

This study reiterated a similar conclusion reached a decade earlier out of Houston, which found that U.S.-born and foreign-born Latinos expressed a more negative view of African-Americans than Blacks expressed of Latinos. In both studies, it’s interesting to note, Blacks did not reciprocate the negative feelings.

However, Duke’s study found that the more educated the Hispanic respondent, and the more social contact they had with Blacks, the less likely they were to harbor negative stereotypes.

All in all, the fact that Latinos overwhelmingly hold negative views of Blacks is a rather sad, but not completely surprising, finding. The article notes that the authors of the study and other researchers point to very biased and stereotypical media images and portrayals of Blacks in the American media as the primary source of these negative views.

It’s also pretty sad to see that two groups of color who should be uniting with each other to fight against the institutional discrimination that they both face are instead, separated (or at least on one side) by prejudice and an apparent desire to be “as White as possible.” At least there is the glimmer of hope that with more education and close contact, such stereotypes can be overcome.

It seems that as capitalism and American culture spreads around the world, many of its cultural and racial stereotypes come along as well.