Anti-Blackness on Hispanic-serving campuses: what a new study from UNM says, and what it leaves out

A research team at the University of New Mexico has put numbers and language to a complaint that Black students on Hispanic-Serving campuses have been making in plain speech for years: that the diversity conversation on those campuses has, for a long time, been a Latinidad conversation, and that the gap is not incidental. The paper, built around the working concept of anti-Blackness — the mechanisms, inside an institution, that devalue Black students, faculty and staff relative to other groups — argues that HSIs in the United States were never designed to absorb Black students as equals, and that the institutional architecture has not caught up.

The point is not new in the literature on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, where the contrast with predominantly minority-serving institutions has been a running argument for two decades. What the UNM team adds is a framework built specifically for HSIs, a fast-growing institutional category that now educates a majority of the country's Hispanic undergraduates but which, on this reading, has used Hispanic identity as a kind of administrative shorthand for diversity as a whole.

What the paper actually argues

Anti-Blackness, on the researchers' account, is structural rather than interpersonal. It lives in the criteria institutions use to designate themselves HSIs (a federal threshold tied to Hispanic full-time-equivalent enrolment, not to broader minority representation), in the staffing patterns that follow from those criteria, and in the curricular and programmatic choices that flow once an institution has been labelled.

The practical consequences are concrete: Black students report being treated as guests in spaces marketed as minority-serving; Black faculty are hired into departments that advertise their Hispanic-serving status; and student-services budgets tend to track Hispanic enrolment rather than the full demographic mix of a campus. None of this requires any individual administrator to be hostile to Black students. That, the authors suggest, is precisely why it persists.

Why it resonates beyond New Mexico

UNM is unusual among HSIs: it is a state flagship in a state where Hispanic residents are a plurality and Black students a small but persistent minority. That mix gives the institution a particular standing to name the problem. But the larger point travels. Across the Southwest and into the Midwest and Southeast, where the HSI designation has spread fastest over the past decade, similar dynamics have surfaced in student newspapers and accreditation reviews, usually without the academic scaffolding this paper supplies.

The research also lands in a federal environment where the legal status of race-conscious admissions and of race-conscious programming is contested in the courts. Institutions that have built services for Hispanic students using Hispanic-Serving Institutional Development grants and related funding streams now have an administrative and political interest in defining their constituencies narrowly. The paper, in effect, asks whether that narrow definition is defensible.

Where the argument is thin

Honest reporting requires naming the limits. The paper is a conceptual and qualitative contribution; it draws on interviews and case work at HSIs, not on a representative survey. The headline claim — that anti-Blackness is structural at HSIs — is supported by the institutions the authors studied and by a body of adjacent scholarship, but the press release has travelled further than the evidence base. A reader expecting population-level numbers on Black student outcomes at HSIs will not find them in this paper.

There is also a tension the authors acknowledge but do not resolve. Hispanic students at HSIs, particularly those who are themselves Black or of mixed Black and Latin American ancestry, occupy a position the institutional categories do not capture well. The paper argues for disaggregating Black from Hispanic identities inside HSI policy. It does not say how an institution should treat a student who is, by self-description, both.

What to watch

Three things follow. First, whether peer-reviewed journals treating HSIs as an object of study begin to standardise the disaggregation the UNM paper calls for, especially in accreditation language. Second, whether HSIs receiving federal HSI-development grants — administered by the Department of Education — face policy pressure to broaden the populations their funded programmes serve. Third, whether Black student organisations at HSIs begin to use the paper's vocabulary in their own organising, which would be the clearest signal that the framework has legs.

The deeper question is institutional. An HSI that takes the argument seriously has to decide whether its identity is a federal funding category with a demographic threshold attached, or a more ambitious commitment to the students who actually walk its halls. The UNM paper does not settle that question. It is, however, the most pointed version of the question to appear in the scholarly literature to date.

— This piece treats the UNM researchers' anti-Blackness framework as a contribution to an ongoing institutional argument, not as a verdict on any individual campus. The sources consulted do not provide representative-survey data, and readers should treat the structural claims accordingly.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic-Serving_Institution
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historically_black_colleges_and_universities
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_New_Mexico