March 28, 2023
"For a long time, the dominant thinking about Latinos was that they complicated the Black-white binary that has defined race in the United States."
"Recently, though, some Afro-Latinos have argued that Latinos have reinforced it. There are Black Latinos and white Latinos, who each experience the world differently. [Nancy López, an Afro-Dominican sociologist at the University of New Mexico] has argued that Latinos’ different experiences stem from their 'street race,' meaning how they are perceived when they walk down the street.... 'Now we’re just gonna mix race, ethnicity, and origin, everything,' she told me. 'It’s all the same. We’re all the same color. No, that’s not the reality. And to say otherwise is to eradicate our ability to document inequities based on what you look like.'... [I]t is hard to imagine what the shared racial characteristics of Latinos are. Proponents of the combined question say that the experience of anti-Latino discrimination defines Latinos as a race. This seems to grant too much power to non-Latinos to define who Latinos are, and doesn’t acknowledge how Latinos, even if they are racialized, are racialized differently depending on factors such as skin color and class background...."
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Identity politics is coming unglued. Hispanics do not like blacks and this has a long history. Blacks need to understand that everyone is equal in opportunity,not outcome.
Recommended reading.
"Seem like every time you stop and turn around
Something else just hit the ground"
diversity
Let’s be blunt about this - Much of Latin culture in south / Central America can be ultra racist about each other - defining blue eyed fair skinned blonds at the top of most desirable and dark skin brown eyed black hair as the bottom. They even have separate words for each “category”. Of course no “academic” can admit that so they throw shade to dance around reality.
Racism isn’t just for whites.
It’s all the same. We’re all the same color.
We don't all have the same skin coloration, but the shades run the gamut from *white to *black (*neither descriptor is correct. Light to dark might be better.) Only rarely do i see a group of people in public that has a majority of a single *color, so who gives a shit? Typing by skin color is a fool's game.
Racist says: "And to say otherwise is to eradicate our ability to document inequities based on what you look like."
Gotta justify your spot in the Intersectional Olympics, don't you know?
Can I be suspicious that some blacks are not doing as well as others, and somehow that has to be somebody's racism that is causing it?
Professional advocates, rather than people you meet in the checkout line at the supermarket, are the primary cause of our divisions, as they need those to have jobs and status.
Back in the 70's, it was the Vietnamese immigrants who screwed up the liberal narrative that non-whites could not succeed in America.
Nonetheless, we still graduated to "White Supremacy" as the cause du jour.
Marxists never quit.
Never.
I’d always read there were three races: Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. This is out of date, I suppose.
Now do the "American Freedmen" ethnicity movement.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/01/27/2023-01635/initial-proposals-for-updating-ombs-race-and-ethnicity-statistical-standards
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/initiatives/freedmens-bureau-records
Proponents want to distinguish between Blacks as the offspring of US slaves versus voluntary African immigrants, and I suppose place the offspring of Black slaves from Brazil who later emigrated to the US in the non-Freedmen category. I don't know. I'm not sure how they'd handle mixed race offspring either, of which there are many.
The second sentence of the 3rd step prayer says, "Relieve me of the bondage of self".
My pronouns are 'American born in the Dominican Republic'.
If that's insufficient, I could switch to 'Leave me the fuck alone'.
currently, California is planning on give a Hundred Million Dollars to each Black in the state.
They are doing this because: California was stolen from (1st) the Mexicans, (2nd) the native Indians.
By giving ALL THE MONEY, IN THE WORLD; to Blacks.. California will be able to say to Mexicans (and Indians):
Sorry! No More Money! We gave it All, to the Blacks (that were NEVER enslaved in California).
California group votes to limit reparations to slave descendants
Lord, give me strength.
It seems to me that these hateful professional obsessives are ready, willing and able to generate and profit endlessly from a regime of bitter unreasoning racist resentment regardless of history, science or fact, and having perfected their methods with a subject population of blacks, are now extending their remit to include not just browns of various shades but anyone at all who fancies himself or herself a victim.
There is no end to this. No rest, no peace, no hope.
In typical New Yorker fashion, we get this simplified nonsensical obsession with color and race. Instead, try this from Richard Rodriguez. From a talk he gave way back in 1999. Far more interesting. Give it up with the New Yorker, the NYTs, the WaPo. What a backwoods provincial world. Give it up.
"There is no Hispaniola. There are lots of Americans who are under the impression that there’s this island called Hispaniola. Somewhere to the left of Castro’s Cuba. And there are a lot of brown people on this island. . . . But there is no Hispaniola. There is no mythical island where all these brown people come from. Just the reverse. There is every race of the world in Latin America. I can introduce you to Nazis hiding in Uruguay today. . . . We can dance tonight in Buenos Aires with Italian tangoists. There’s a Japanese president somewhere in Latin America. I’ve seen him in the paper. I know Maya Indians in Los Angeles who do not speak Spanish. They refuse Spanish to this day, four hundred years later, will not speak a word of Spanish. They’re making pizza in yuppie pizza joints in Santa Monica. . . . Remember only this. The next time that you open the morning newspaper. That there is no such thing as a Hispanic race. There is no such thing as a Hispanic race. Got it? The more interesting thing about Hispanics is that there are now, in America, African American Hispanics, who are describing themselves as Hispanic and not as black. Dominicans who call themselves Hispanic, not black. And there are now white Hispanics, Cubans for example, who describe themselves not as white but as Hispanic. . . .
"The most interesting thing about the majority populations of Hispanics in the United States, the most interesting thing about us, the only interesting thing about us, is that we are mixed. The majority of Mexicans, which is to say sixty percent of the Hispanic population, is mestizo. Like I am. Some of us look Italian. Some of us, as they say, don't look Mexican. And the second largest group are Puerto Ricans who are in the majority mulattos, some measure of European and African.
"Which is to say, one of the most dangerous things we are bringing into the United States is this notion of mixture. . . . There is a revolution coming. And it's going to come. As people are no longer able to identify themselves cleanly. As the borderlines begin to break down. And people find themselves more and more belonging to more than one grouping. Black but also white. Hispanic but also Chinese.
So now we are making up races based on groups that follow the customs, language and institution of colonial Spanish aristocrats? And Latino would make people from Latin America a race, but what of those from South America, or the Caribbean? What of those Hispanics who trace their ancestors back to when Spain control large swaths of North America?
What about Mexicans who have 100% European ancestry with no mixing with indigenous people? Or those African and no indigenous DNA?
black, brown, yellow, red, peach, ... sequester your Rainbow banners and rhetoric, albinos, too, orange you glad you're not a diversitist?
The human race includes a diversity of individuals, minority of one. Lose your ethical religion, your class-disordered ideologies, your diversity, inequity, exclusion (DIEversity).
The concept of "race" or "ethnicity" is fraught with problems. It has vastly more to do with politics than anything real or substantive.
One year at university I lived in a program dorm that was 95% African-American. At one of our weekly meetings a pair of students whom I considered African-American insisted that no they are *Puerto Rican* and we better get that straight. Interesting.
When I worked for the Career Center helping people look for work, patrons from the Middle East struggled with how to answer questions about ethnicity. My understanding is Arabs and Iranians - even though such questions give "Asian" as one option - are supposed to answer "white/Caucasian" which seems bizarre.
Racism isn’t just for whites.
Diversity (e.g. class-based bigotry) is a progressive condition: Hutu vs Tutsi in turn, Mandela's Xhosa vs Zulu with native collateral damage, Kenyan elite vs deplorables, Chinese Han vs lower castes and Uyghurs enslaved, Christian Serbs invaded, services denied, a novel nation carved, etc.
Musk is African-American, a Person of Peach (PoP), a minority under Critical Diversity Theory (CDT).
Why not stop classifying people by skin color? Isn't that the sine qua non of official racism?
Nonetheless, we still graduated to "White Supremacy" as the cause du jour.
Supremacists evolved with diversity [dogma] in an appeal to empathy and exploitation of class-disordered ideologies to pursue redistributive change of capital and control. #BabyLivesMatter (BLM)
The NYTs referred to George Zimmerman as the white Hispanic.
It was funny. The lesser well off Chinese tourists in Beverly Hills will go buy a magazine and use it as a sun shade.
Many years ago I wass at a National CR conference for the agency I worked for. A regional second in command invited me to a luncheon of the"special" people. After my free lunch the Region first in CR command gave us a talk.
To boil it down he said that:
- Black people got the available bag of goodies (and it's a BIG bag).
- Women and, now, Hispanics are taking some off OUR plate.
- These are the enemy.
- Stand with me and we can stop this.
I passed the word I was not THAT kind of special and to not invite me to any more of these meetings.
There were other such examples.
"For a long time, the dominant thinking about Latinos...."
Ya know, the more I look at that phrase the dumber it becomes. Yes. OK for the Dominant Thinkers, but what do the Expert Thinkers think about Latinos? And what do the Dominant and the Expert Thinkers think about Africans? What do Latinos and Africans usually eat for breakfast?
Oh. The New Yorker. Sorry. Shoulda knowed.
The real problem is with the idea of latino as a single group in the first place.
In the us, most are from Puerto Rico, Cuba or Mexico. The three groups have very little in common other than, sort of, the Spanish language.
Culture, customs, history, how and when they came to the US pretty much everything is as different as Irish and Italian-Americans.
Puerto Ricans run from black as any African, where they trace their heritage to pale blue eyed blonde Celtics heritage from northern Spain.
If you include south America you get a big percentage of Italian and German heritage. Other parts of SA descendents of various Indian tribes who have 1000 year histories of mutual animosity. Include Brazil and they don't even speak Spanish.
And Filipinos, are they latino? If Puerto Ricans (And Cubans, Colombians, Argentines etc) are latino, so are Filipinos.
And Spaniards? From Spain? Latino, si o no?
And so on.
And the word "latino" shouldn't that include everyone that speaks a Latin derived language? Are the French "latino"? Rumanians? Italians? Etc.
It is total bullshit.
I doubt anyone could pick Latinos, regardless of where from, out of a lineup based on looks alone.
I know I couldn't do better than random chance.
John Henry
I've not heard it in a while, but I've not been around many babies either.
Back in the 70s,in Puerto Rico as woman were showing there babies around a common compliment would be "o, es tan Blanco" (o s/he is so white) or "mejorando la Raza" (improving the race)
We don't have black and white here. We have a continuum from black to white with all shades between. But lighter skin color used to be viewed as better. Fortunately not so much any more. We're pretty much all Puerto Rican.
John Henry
Lem the Misspeller: "Relieve me of the bondage of self...."
Indeed.
My understanding is Arabs and Iranians - even though such questions give "Asian" as one option - are supposed to answer "white/Caucasian" which seems bizarre.
Biarre? Why? Dress an Iranian (Persian) or any Arab in western style clothes, drop them in any American city, and they look like any other white- because they are. Especially Persian women. They may look a lttle 'exotic" to some, but they are downright Caucasian. People in the USA who haven't travelled elsewhere or looked seriously at any other nation don't realize just how thoroughly mongrelied Americans are- both whites and blacks.
n.n. mentions Hutu vs Tutsi in turn, Mandela's Xhosa vs Zulu. Can you, or any other American, tell the difference between them? I certainly cannot. Drop any American black in any black part of Africa- they're going to recognized as Americans, not tribe members, or Africans in any manner. In Great Britain today, where my ancestors, Scots, Welsh, English, and Irish came from, all of the above can tell at a glance who all of the above are IF they are from there. And can also tell from the way we walk and react, even before we open out mouths to talk, that we're Americans. I can't tell who they are- but they can. And if you drop any of them into the middle of any American city, or even small rural town like I live in, they're just another white person UNTIL they talk. We have such a wide variety of amnnerisms and walk in such different manners that we don't instinctively recognie them as foreigners until we detect their accent- or they ask funny questions like "Where is the lift?"
Italians can usually tell by appearance which region of Italy a fellow Italin comes from.And, may not even consider them a fellow Italian of, let's say, they're from Sicily. Likewise, Spaniards can tell which region of Spain a fellow Spaniard comes from.
Some Americans don't even realiee that there are independence movements in most Eiropean countries. Like in Spain. Where many Cataloninians wish to be Catalonian, not Spanish.
There's a whole bunch of independence movements in Europe that few here are aware of. Wikipedia has a preety good list, though I tink it may be lacking some.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_movements_in_Europe
I counted >30 in Russia alone as it attempts to once again make the entirety of Ukraine part of the Russian empire again. >9 in Spain.
And Walloons and Flemish have never gotten along. Again- do you have any idea of the difference between them? Together they comprise Belgium. Which has 3 active Autonomist and 3 active Secessionist which comprise- Flemish, Walloons, and German speakers...
Nowhere else has a national motto anything like ours- E Pluribus Unum. From Many, One. As long as out political class worked at making it so, it worked. Until late- as DemoncRATs work on making it so, America has not been divided along ethno-religious lines. As different groups at different times immigrated to our cities, they were gradually absorbed into the rest of the population. Some faster then others, but it happened. Without government help nor government hindrance.
Unless someone can come up with another example, there are only two related communities of whites that haven't merged into the general population following that E Pluribus Unum motto. Amish and Mennonite. But- both those commuities would be much larger today if- Mennonites didn't accept Amish leaving their communities and the rest of us didn't accept Mennonites leaving theirs. Sometimes the Amish merge straight into the English- what they call us. But usually they become Mennonite. There still small enclaves of Greek or Italian or Irish communities and others around, but they're small enclaves within the greater community. No clamoring to seperate from the rest of us.
The vast majority of Hispanics are white. All they have to do to merge in is- start speaking English.
David Bernstein wrote a recent book called "Classified" about the bizarre origins of the US ethnic and racial classification system which was generated mostly by the implementation of the 'disparate impact' doctrine in the DOJ, and really has little if any basis in logic. IIRC his story about the selection of the countries of origin that qualified one to be 'Latino' is that it was done by three bureaucrats of Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican origin.
No, these definitions were solidified in the 1990's when it was decided that the FBI would count Hispanics as a separate category of victim under the HCSA but as white offenders if they were the perpetrators of such crimes. They did this intentionally to grow the number of white hate crime offenders and relied on self-identification to categorize.
This was entirely unambiguous and recorded in the Hate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA), but the FBI and activists simultaneously denied it was happening and labeled anyone who even discussed this disparity as a white supremacist. The explanation was that they just decided to count victims by both race and ethnicity but only count offenders by race and not ethnicity, bundling Hispanics in with whites. Why? Don't dare question them. It'll get you on a federal watch list like me. It's estimated that at least 30%, and probably far more of the "white offenders" recorded in the national hate crime statistics are actually Hispanics.
Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury ate a burrito?
They will be charged with cultural appropriation and sentenced to community service in a Planned Parenthood Clinic.
My eyes rolled back so far I saw my brain.
My eyes rolled back so far I saw my brain.
For several years I was close friends with a dark skinned Hispanic woman. So far as I could tell, she didn't have any racial resentments against whites. She did well professionally, and I think part of the reason for her success, was because of that. She was pleasant to be around and had a good sense of humor.....She was a nurse who lived in an expensive high rise building. She wore her white uniform to work. Sometimes residents of the building would see her in the elevator and ask if she was available to clean their apartment. She found such requests amusing more than insulting...People talk about class and racial differences, but the differences in life are even more superficial than that. She was strikingly good looking. People, especially men, really wanted to be her good friend. She did not live in a hostile world.
THIS -- this moronic, divisive, racist obsessing over melanin, one of the least important characteristics of a person -- is why, when some form ask for my race, I say "human."
It really is just a confusing mistake to be making database entries on the basis of 'race' for most people, and 'ethnicity' for one group of people, or a few select groups. Either do them both for everybody, consistently, or - a better solution, since we're 'equal' - get rid of all of these categories, since they really serve very little useful purpose, except to sow division.
Hispanics or Latinos can be a bridge between black and white. The white guy and black guy who might have thrown rocks at each other in previous years both have a Latina girlfriend or wife (maybe sisters). Divide Latinos into blacks and whites and it makes that much more trouble for the country (though it could mean that pure white South Americans don't get affirmative action slots anymore).
I do remember a New Yorker article a while back about how Dominicans don't regard themselves as black, no matter how dark skinned they are themselves. For them, the real blacks were the Haitians. The two groups don't like each other much. Mexican-Americans and African-Americans don't show each other much love, as the stories coming out of LA's city council show. Heck, Mexicans and Central Americans don't like each other much.
Has anyone seen my melting pot?
Althouse, I would like to request you create a new tag for this kind of post: MLK's dream can suck it.
Those in the know understand that to be truly white, DAR (daughters of the American Revolution) white, you have to be a WASP. The Celts (primarily Irish and Scots Irish), Germans, Eastern Europeans, Italians, Jews are just honorary white, primarily used as a buffer to protect the WASPs from the consequences of their racial grandstanding. It's just another version of how the WASP planters encouraged Scots Irish immigrants to populate the Virginia line (roughly where W Virginia split off) to protect the rich farms from the Indians.
They do screw over the Asians in college admissions because they have to let a certain amount of non-WASP "whites" in to the best schools.
Activists seem to be upset that those they call Latino are acting like other immigrant groups - German, Italian, Polish - that came voluntarily to the USA and don't want to join the American black experience of perpetual grievance for a slavery that Latinos did not experience.
Should Latinos Be Considered a Race?
Not if they keep voting for Republicans!
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