Welcome to Miami. Please Select Your Race.
There’s something about Miami that’s hard to explain to people who have never lived here. The weather is beautiful, the beaches are incredible, the women are gorgeous, and the food alone makes it difficult to imagine living anywhere else. You can have Cuban coffee in the morning, Jamaican food for lunch, Colombian food for dinner, and somehow end up at a Haitian restaurant at two in the morning wondering why you haven’t been eating there your entire life.
And the people are just as interesting. Miami is one of the few places in America where you can meet someone from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, or Brazil in the same afternoon without anybody thinking that’s unusual. The accents, the music, the personalities, the different cultures all make the city feel like you’re living somewhere outside the United States, except you still have to pay American taxes.
Then I came across an Instagram video calling Miami one of the most racist cities in America.
That’s a pretty bold accusation. Especially about a city that prides itself on diversity. But he wasn’t the only one saying it, and judging by the comments, he wasn’t the only one who believed it.
What surprised me wasn’t necessarily the accusation. It was how quickly people dismissed it. Some had lived in Miami their entire lives and insisted they’d never witnessed racism. Others pointed to the city’s enormous Hispanic population as evidence that the accusation was ridiculous.
Apparently, having people from different countries living next door to one another is all the proof we need that everybody gets along. But Miami has always struck me as a place where people are very interested in where you’re from, what language you speak, and occasionally what kind of Black you are.
Welcome to Miami. Please select your race.
This is Hialeah
In 2018, a Black woman named Alexandria Montgomery pulled into a Taco Bell drive-through in Hialeah, Florida, to order food. Nothing complicated. Just another person making a decision she’d probably regret about forty-five minutes later.
Hialeah is about as Cuban as a city can get without actually being in Cuba. Spanish dominates everything from the restaurants to the businesses, and nobody seems particularly concerned about changing that. English might be Florida’s official language, but Hialeah has operated under its own arrangement for years.
The woman taking orders didn’t speak English, and Montgomery didn’t speak Spanish. Montgomery tried ordering anyway. A man in the car even offered to use the numbers on the Spanish menu, but the employee wasn’t having it. She refused to take the order, and soon the conversation escalated into threats to call the police.
When Montgomery questioned what was happening, the employee had a simple explanation: “This is Hialeah.”
The video went viral, and the employee was eventually fired. Montgomery believed she was treated differently because she was Black. Others saw it as a language dispute.
At a Taco Bell. In Florida.
The Miami Bubble
In 1989, a Black woman named Cathy Staten looked for a job at a cable television company in Miami. She walked into the office, looked around, and noticed two things. Everybody seemed to be speaking Spanish, and nobody looked like her.
And Cathy wasn’t some newcomer trying to find her way around Miami. She was born there.
She left feeling like she never had a chance. Back at the employment office, she complained that Latino employers hired other Latinos instead of Black applicants.
While Cathy was struggling to find work, Miami was becoming a place where you could open a business, raise a family, buy a house, and make a pretty good living without speaking much English. Your accountant spoke Spanish. Your doctor spoke Spanish. The guy selling you a Mercedes spoke Spanish. And business was good.
Then Miami started attracting people from New York, California, Chicago, and just about everywhere else. They came for the weather, the taxes, and, apparently, the chance to pay twice as much for a house. And they expected to do business in English.
Suddenly, businesses that had served the same customers for decades saw new faces walk through the door. People who didn’t speak Spanish, didn’t know how things worked around there, and weren’t particularly interested in figuring it out before spending their money.
Now the neighborhoods are changing again. The customers who once walked in speaking Spanish are standing in line beside newcomers ordering in English.
Funny thing about living in a bubble. Eventually, somebody else moves into the neighborhood.
The Color Chart Nobody Wants to Discuss
Growing up in New York, Jason Rosario occasionally found himself in a strange position. He was Dominican, spoke Spanish, and knew exactly where his family came from, yet he still struggled to convince other Dominicans he was one of them.
Jason remembers walking into Dominican-owned bodegas and deliberately speaking Spanish, sometimes even slowing down to make sure the person behind the counter understood him. Yet somehow, the response would still come back in English. Around some of his Black friends, speaking Spanish made him the Dominican kid, but in certain Dominican businesses, his complexion apparently had a stronger accent than he did.
Spend enough time in Miami, and you’ll notice that asking somebody where they’re from is usually a much easier conversation than asking about race. Somebody might tell you they’re Cuban, Dominican, Colombian, or Venezuelan, and you can spend the next twenty minutes hearing about their hometown, their grandmother’s cooking, and why the food back home is better than anything you’ll find here.
Back in 1996, a Black Cuban named Joel Ruiz went to Versailles in Little Havana with his uncle and three light-skinned women. After dinner, they left in a red Nissan.
About twenty blocks later, four police cars pulled them over. Officers approached with guns drawn, ordered everyone out, and searched them. Joel recalled that one officer told him he’d been watching the group since Versailles and decided to stop them after seeing so many Black people in the car.
Joel went out for dinner. By the end of the night, he was explaining himself to four police cars.
Apparently, the red Nissan wasn’t what caught their attention.
Black Enough to Date. Not Enough to Bring Home.
Of course, not every racial contradiction in Miami involves somebody getting pulled over. Sometimes it looks more like a perfectly good relationship that gets complicated the moment someone mentions meeting the parents.
You meet somebody, grab coffee one afternoon, and enjoy the conversation enough to make dinner plans. She’s Latina, you’re Black. Dinner turns into another date, then another, and before long you’re spending weekends together, meeting friends, celebrating birthdays, and planning vacations.
“So when am I going to meet your family?”
“Soon.”
Fair enough. Meeting somebody’s parents is a whole different commitment. You gotta remember names, answer questions about your intentions, and pretend you haven’t already heard every embarrassing childhood story.
But a few weeks turn into a few months. You’ve met her friends, her coworkers, even a cousin who came down for the weekend. Somehow, her parents are still busy.
Eventually, she agrees to dinner on Sunday. By Saturday, she’s asked you three times what you’re wearing.
Sunday arrives, and you show up with flowers. Her father opens the door with a big smile and reaches out to shake your hand. Then he sees you.
From somewhere inside, her mother calls out, “Who is it?”
Her father doesn’t answer.
Her mother comes around the corner, takes one look at you, and nearly drops the dish she’s carrying.
You haven’t even made it into the house, and you’ve already ruined Sunday dinner.
The Children Are Watching
Spend a weekend at a youth volleyball tournament in South Florida, and you’ll see just about every kind of family imaginable. Parents speaking Spanish, English, Portuguese, and occasionally all three during the same argument with a referee. Different countries, different cultures, and hundreds of kids chasing the same ball around a gym.
But take a closer look at the teams.
For all the diversity Miami loves to celebrate, you can go through an entire volleyball season and barely see a Black girl on the court. You might see hundreds of players over a weekend and count the Black girls on one hand.
And it’s not because Black girls don’t play volleyball. Drive a little farther north into Broward, and the team pictures start to look very different.
Nobody announces any of this. The coaches coach, the parents cheer, and everybody’s busy trying to figure out why a tournament scheduled for 9 a.m. is somehow still running at 6 p.m.
And it isn’t just volleyball. You see it in schools, neighborhoods, birthday parties, and the friendships kids grow up around. Ray spends much of his childhood being one of the few Black kids in those spaces. After a while, it barely registers.
Then one day at school, another child tells him his skin is the color of poop. Ray is six. He barely reacts.
As the years pass, his parents notice Ray doesn’t seem as confident as he once was. They remind him he’s Black and should be proud. He never asked what was wrong with being Black.
Eventually, Ray changes schools. There are more Black kids in his classes, he makes new friends, and he isn’t always the only one who looks like him.
Over time, his parents begin to notice something. Ray seems more confident, more comfortable with himself. He’s getting older, finding his place.
And nobody had to tell him to be proud of being Black.
Miami Has Always Had Its Own Definition of Freedom
In June 1990, Nelson Mandela got the kind of welcome most politicians could only dream of.
He’d spent 27 years in prison fighting apartheid. Now he was traveling across America, being greeted by cheering crowds, standing ovations, and politicians practically lining up to shake his hand.
Miami had a problem with Mandela. Not because he’d spent nearly three decades fighting a system that treated Black people as inferior. But because he’d publicly supported Fidel Castro.
For Cuban exiles who had fled Castro’s government, this wasn’t some minor disagreement over foreign policy. Castro represented the very oppression they had escaped. And Mandela, whose movement had received support from Cuba in its fight against apartheid, wasn’t about to pretend otherwise.
Here was a man who’d spent most of his adult life fighting oppression, standing in a city built by people who’d escaped it.
And somehow, he was the controversial one.
Several mayors condemned his remarks. Miami’s official honors never materialized. No proclamation. No ceremonial key.
Mandela still spoke to thousands of union members at the Miami Beach Convention Center, while supporters and protesters gathered outside.
Miami’s Black community wasn’t having it.
Attorney H.T. Smith helped organize a boycott of Miami’s tourism industry. Conventions began pulling out, hotel bookings disappeared, and Miami suddenly discovered that offending people could get expensive.
The boycott lasted nearly three years. By the time it ended in 1993, estimates of lost tourism revenue reached $50 million. An agreement included commitments to support Black-owned businesses, expand educational opportunities, and improve access to jobs.
The boycott organizers even produced a video about Miami’s treatment of Black residents. That video included a detail that deserved its own investigation.
Dade County had given a ceremonial key to RoboCop.
Yes, RoboCop.
Fast-forward to May 2026.
At a State of Black Miami town hall, residents ask who gets hired and who gets left out. One woman asks why Miami hasn’t selected an African American city manager. Another speaker questions the lack of Black recruits in Miami-Dade Fire Rescue’s newest class.
Nobody’s arguing about Fidel Castro this time.
They’re arguing about jobs.
Thirty-six years earlier, Black Miami was demanding recognition and economic opportunity. Now residents were back asking who gets hired to run the place.
Of course, Miami had changed. New skyscrapers, new money, new neighborhoods, and enough luxury condos to make you wonder whether anybody here still owns a regular house.
And through all those changes, RoboCop was still the guy who got the key.
Miami Loves Black Culture. Does It Love Black People?
Miami has never had a problem enjoying Black culture.
The music. The fashion. The slang. Half the city has been using it so long that some people probably think they invented it.
Spend a Saturday night in downtown Miami, and you’ll hear hip-hop coming from rooftop bars, waterfront restaurants, luxury cars, and clubs where a bottle of tequila costs more than somebody’s rent. The music is loud, the lyrics aren’t exactly family-friendly, and somewhere, a guy who doesn’t speak much English knows every word to a song he probably wouldn’t want his mother to translate.
Long before every restaurant needed a DJ and a reservation deposit, Luther ‘Luke’ Campbell and 2 Live Crew were making Miami Bass impossible to ignore.
Luke wasn’t exactly the kind of artist the Chamber of Commerce would’ve invited to perform at its annual luncheon. His records were raunchy, politicians wanted them banned, and the music came from a part of Miami that usually didn’t get invited to tell the city what was cool.
But you couldn’t escape it. Not at the clubs, not at the parties, and certainly not when somebody pulled up beside you with enough bass in the trunk to rearrange your internal organs.
Miami didn’t have to approve of Luke to dance to his music.
A song can travel from a neighborhood party to a South Beach nightclub without anybody wondering what happened to the neighborhood along the way. The music becomes Miami, but the neighborhood stays Liberty City. Everybody gets to claim the sound, even if not everybody gets to claim the city.
Miami has always understood the value of an image. Put palm trees behind something, add a DJ, charge $28 for a cocktail, and suddenly you’ve created an experience. By the time the bill arrives, everybody’s had a little taste of Black Miami without ever leaving Brickell.
You don’t have to visit Liberty City before ordering bottle service in Brickell. That would be ridiculous, and Miami already has enough ridiculous rules about where you can park.
Everybody knows the music.
Not everybody knows the Miami that made it.
So, Does Miami Have a Black Problem?
Well, that depends on who you ask.
Ask somebody if Miami has a race problem, and they’ll tell you to look around. Walk into Publix, and you’ll hear three different languages before you reach the produce section. What more proof do you need?
Ask somebody who’s spent years being reminded that their skin color matters more than they’d like, and you might get a very different answer.
Both people live in Miami, sometimes ten minutes apart, shopping at the same stores and driving the same streets. And neither can believe the other doesn’t see what they see.
Miami is loud, ambitious, beautiful, ridiculous, and sometimes so obsessed with appearances that you wonder whether the entire city is preparing for a photo shoot.
I love Miami. Even when it drives me crazy.
So, does Miami have a Black problem?
Yes. But I don’t think it’s always the kind people recognize.
Miami makes race complicated when it’s convenient and surprisingly simple when it isn’t. People can debate what Black means all day, but somehow those distinctions don’t always matter when it’s time to judge somebody by the color of their skin.
Everybody has their own definition of Black, their own exceptions, and somehow an explanation for why none of it has anything to do with race.
Miami doesn’t lack diversity.
It lacks people willing to question what they’ve learned to believe about each other.
