"I'm always on the lookout for what I call stealth racists - those people who have that subliminal instinct to marry whiter and have lighter kids."

So says Washington, DC-based activist Roland Roebuck, an Afro Puerto Rican who recently caused a firestorm of controversy with the publication of his article "Hispanos, Racismo y Obama/Hispanics, Racism and Obama."

"As a student of race relations among Hispanics, I'm not at all surprised at the massive lack of support for the candidacy of Barack Obama among Hispanics," he wrote: "In western and southern states, where Hispanics are numerous, most are giving their support to the little white woman, Hillary Clinton. I totally understand the reason for this. The germ of racism has completely contaminated Hispanics. It's at such a level that, as a group, they would not tolerate the possibility of an African American sitting in the White House."

Roebuck's article - published on February 7, 2008 in the DC-based newspaper Metro Latino USA - tackled important issues about a question many people in the non-Hispanic Black community have had about the lack of support Presidential Candidate Barack Obama has apparently had among Latinos.

His article contrasts with the argument many prominent Latinos have tried to make - that this lack of support is not based on racism, but that the candidacy of Hillary Clinton intrinsically offers more to Latino voters.

Hispanic immigrants to the United States are from countries where they never saw indigenous or African-descendants given much respect, Roebuck, a founding member of the Afro-Latino organization Encuentro, notes. In fact, since in their home countries the only people in charge were and tend to remain people with whiter skin, many Hispanic immigrants come to the U.S. with the ingrained belief that "only white people can save us."

A March 5, 2008 opinion piece in New York City's El Diario/La Prensa supports Roebuck's claim. Entitled, "Si gana Obama,los negros se van a alzar/If Obama wins, Blacks will advance", Columbia University-based filmmaker and scholar Frances Negrón-Muntaner also notes the apparent racism in Latino lack of support for Obama. She points out, though, that many Latinos she spoke with feared that if Obama won, his policies would be focused on helping Black people - to the neglect of others.

Negrón-Muntaner notes that "[I]t's surprising that so many Latinos fear that an Obama win would lead to an insufferable wave of racial pride and race-based arrogance among African Americans. Our public sphere, after all, is almost completely dominated by whites, and racially organized for their benefit not for the benefit of Blacks.

"It would seem that a significant group of Latinos assume that all ‘good things' are granted to them from the magnanimity of whites and that Latinos made no gains from the two centuries-long struggles waged by minorities and laborers in this country. Many have perhaps forgotten that the political gains made by African Americans have benefited not only their community but all of us who live in the United States."

Other studies support these claims: most Latinos tend to identify with whites rather than Blacks, according to preliminary findings in a study by Duke University political scientist Paula McClain. A recent press release regarding McClain's study notes that a survey of Latinos "in Durham, N.C., Little Rock, Ark., and Memphis, Tenn., found that Latinos tend to identify more with whites than with Blacks. Despite skin color, for example, 72 percent of Latinos surveyed in Little Rock consider themselves to be white, according to preliminary findings. Because of racial hierarchies in Latino communities in the U.S. and their native countries, it is advantageous for Latinos, from their perspective, to identify with whites."

The 2003 study, "How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans" by University of Albany sociologist John Logan, found that according to the 2000 census there are nearly one million Black Hispanics in the United States who "have a socioeconomic profile much more similar to non-Hispanic Blacks than to other Hispanic groups, and their neighborhoods have nearly as many Black as Hispanic residents...."

"Black Hispanics potentially provide a bridge between the Black and Hispanic communities," Professor Logan's report asserts: "On the basis of social similarity, if it is necessary to combine them with another group, there are now better reasons to classify Black Hispanics as Black than as Hispanic."

Which is what many Afro Latinos do.

The advances Obama is making towards the U.S. presidency have awed many Afro Latinos who identify Obama as another person in the Americas who is of African descent. Activist Afro Latinos in the United States and throughout Latin America have been proud to see how far Barack Obama has progressed: in other countries, Black politicians are too often under constraints when pushing for higher office or when aspiring to affect their nation's policies. In Colombia, for example, Piedad Córdoba has been labeled a minor traitor to her nation for doing what many progressives have applauded: working with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez to win the release of political prisoners from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Meanwhile in Costa Rica, Congresswoman Epsy Campbell Barr was the recent vice-presidential candidate of the Partido Acción Ciudadana (Citizen Action Party (PAC)), but her party did not win the much-disputed 2006 national elections.

Afro Latinos have looked to Obama's liberal leanings in the hope that they will positively affect upcoming trade agreements and political policies the United States government is currently negotiating in South America.

But with the majority of Latinos identifying with a European ancestry, Barack Obama's candidacy will have to wage a major struggle to convince them that his presidency will be worth their votes.

In Puerto Rico - a U.S. overseas territory which holds its presidential caucus on June 7, 2008 and which has 63 delegates up for grabs - Obama has held fundraisers and raised capital. But he will have to contend with an electorate in which most islanders have a hereditary mixture of African, Native Taino and Spanish blood, yet on the most recent census only eight percent marked themselves as "Black" while 80 percent of Puerto Ricans marked that they consider themselves "white."

"You hear that, ‘Well, you have to understand that Hispanics are very traumatized by issues of race,' " Roland Roebuck said in an interview. "But I am not Oprah; I'm not here to give therapy. My responsibility is to expose Hispanic racism publicly, so that we can deal with it."