Dr. Rosa Clemente’s Five-Week Course Explores Black Puerto Rican History, Radical Organizing And The Work Of Challenging Anti-Blackness From Within
For years, Dr. Rosa Clemente has watched conversations about Black-Latino identity become more visible online, in classrooms and across popular culture. But for Clemente, visibility is not the same as liberation.
That belief sits at the center of “The Black Puerto Rican Radical Tradition: Disrupting Anti-Blackness & Cancelling Latinidad,” a five-week online seminar she created to explore Black Puerto Rican history, political organizing and the anti-Blackness many Black Latinos experience within their own communities.
The course recently completed its fourth cycle and has drawn participants from across the country. Across all four cycles, 101 people have taken part in the seminar. Clemente said she offers five scholarships during each cycle, while most participants pay to attend.
For many, the seminar creates space for conversations they say are often missing from classrooms, workplaces, family discussions and even Latino community spaces.
“Once people started paying, I knew,” Clemente told TheGrio. “I knew how big the need was out here and then within it.”
Clemente, a scholar, journalist and longtime activist, said the seminar is rooted in both history and her own lived experience.
While attending SUNY Albany, Clemente identified as a person of African descent, changed her major to Africana studies and later became president of the Black Student Union. The reaction from some Latino student organizations and administrators was swift.
“Once I got elected, I got backlash from the Latino student groups and some Latino administrators,” Clemente said.
One administrator, she recalled, told her: “You can’t be both, you know, you got to pick a side.”
Those experiences later helped shape Clemente’s 2001 essay, “Who Is Black?,” which challenged readers to think more critically about race, Blackness and identity within Latino communities. At the time, terms like Afro-Latino were not widely used in mainstream conversations, but the questions Clemente raised continue to echo today.
Through the seminar, Clemente examines colonialism, liberation movements, organizing strategies and Black political traditions that have shaped Black Puerto Rican resistance throughout the diaspora.
Many participants arrive carrying questions about family history, racial identity and anti-Blackness they have never had the chance to fully unpack.
“There are definitely some of the younger folks that look back at their childhood and may be angry at someone or their parents or whatever because they didn’t know who they were, or then [it] might also be, they grew up around anti-Blackness as Latinx younger people,” Clemente said.
Building Community Beyond Identity
Over the five weeks, participants discuss how anti-Blackness shows up in families, workplaces, institutions and social circles. Clemente said every participant eventually identifies a moment when they encountered anti-Blackness and considers what it means to challenge it.
“Everybody at one point in all the sessions identified when they encountered anti-Blackness and what they’re doing to disrupt it,” she said.
For younger participants, Clemente said, the work can feel especially isolating. Some are confronting family members, coworkers or community members without having a strong organizing network around them.
“The younger folks are in a space where they just don’t know how to become an organizer, or sometimes they just are isolated in certain geographical areas, and then they’re coming with this, and they’re confronting their family and their workers, and then they often feel like they’re alone,” she said.
That is why the seminar is designed not only as a history course, but as a community-building space. Participants often remain connected after the program ends, sharing resources and continuing the conversations that began during the course.
“We’re in community together,” Clemente said.
Why Clemente Challenges The Idea Of Latinidad
While conversations about Blackness and Latino identity have become more common, Clemente said greater visibility has not necessarily translated into power.
“I don’t think it’s gotten better,” she said. “I just think it’s gotten visible, and visible does not lead many times to power.”
That perspective also informs the seminar’s use of the phrase “Cancelling Latinidad.” Clemente argues that broad terms like Latinidad can often flatten racial differences and minimize the experiences of Black people within Puerto Rican and Latino communities.
The seminar does not ask participants to reject Puerto Rican or Latino identity altogether. Instead, it pushes them to examine how umbrella labels can sometimes hide anti-Blackness and make it harder to address the specific experiences of Black people within those communities.
Clemente also challenges participants to think beyond cultural expression alone.
“What they’re doing is using it as an artistic expression, which is fine, you know, or a cultural, but that has nothing to do with what I call the Black Puerto Rican radical tradition,” Clemente said.
She added, “So what’s happening is that people are claiming the culture, but they’re not claiming the politic.”
For Clemente, embracing Blackness must include more than language, music, food or aesthetics. It must also include political commitment, organizing and a willingness to confront anti-Blackness where it lives.
“My goal in it too was that people are becoming activists and organizers because they attended,” Clemente said.
The Work Begins At Home
Clemente said many seminar conversations lead participants back to their own families.
Coming from a large Puerto Rican family, she said becoming politically conscious forced her to recognize and confront anti-Black attitudes she had previously overlooked. Those experiences became even more personal after she became a mother.
“When I had my daughter, Alicia,” Clemente recalled, “one of my cousins said some stupid [expletive].”
The comment, she said, centered on her daughter’s complexion and hair. Clemente immediately confronted her cousin, recognizing the remark as the kind of anti-Blackness she had long been challenging.
Many seminar participants identify similar moments in their own families. “A lot of the discussions we had through these seminars, everybody would remember something anti-Black that someone in their family did,” she said.
For Clemente, naming those moments is part of the larger work of understanding identity, challenging anti-Blackness and building stronger communities. As she prepares for another seminar cycle later this summer, Clemente said she hopes participants continue the work long after the course ends.
Asked what advice she would offer younger generations navigating race, identity and anti-Blackness, Clemente kept it direct.
“Consistency, be consistent,” she said.
“There are going to be some times when you’re alone, but believe me, those times you feel alone are the times where people are going to be like, oh [expletive] yeah, A B C D person, you’ve been saying this for 30 years, and you’ve never wavered.”
