The Invention of Hispanics
claremontreviewofbooks.com
claremontreviewofbooks.com
As a child (wore my hair quite long then), I've had someone pull me aside and ask, "so umm...what are you?" Wasn't offensive, but rather humorous. For a time, I grew up confused. Looking back, I know it wasn't my fault, but due to the boxes society so wants to put is all into, so they can be comfortable.
I've even had this conversation with my (I believe) majority race. If someone is 50%, we agree they are a member. But what about 40%, or 20%, or even 5%? At what point do we cut it off -- or rather should we cut it off? What if that 5% person was completely raised in said culture? When you begin to ask these kinds of questions, you begin to see the absurdity of classification. After all, the US used to have a one-drop rule...(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule)
I'm not preaching some trans-racial ideology, but I do think we need to rethink the whole idea of race -- particularly in the US.
Back after WWII most european people, supported by the scientific community, agreed that the concept of race was not something applicable to human species. It is only used nowadays to talk about the breeding of particular groups of dogs, cats, cows and goats mostly. For us it all look weird and plain racist to hear race still being used in the US, including in official/administrative papers and law enforcement. We attribute that to a huge part of the US being reluctant to abandon segregation.
And I think most of the racism was kind of hidden as something people would keep for themselves or in close circles. Trump has recently acted as some kind of enabler and we see a resurgence of far-right people in many european countries not being afraid of plainly expressing their hatred and politician and writers not being afraid of getting fined.
I would say the future is kind of cloudy in many european countries right now and probably all over the world in that regard. We are kind of back in the 1930's, just with better tech.
So ultimately hating by skin colour is both more recognised and bad, and has less targets, so we keep our "good old" prejudices that go into sometimes minor things and occasionally get hilarious when people interact all nice because they aren't aware of the other person being from hated group
At least in English, the word "race" does not apply to animals, the word we use for them is "breed". Race is used exclusively for human beings.
It has been largely accepted that there are very little inherent anatomical or behavioral differences between races and that race is not a reliable indicator of genetic similarity or difference. But the concept of race is primarily a sociological concept and has social implications. It is easy to disregard this aspect of it in a region of the world that until recently was largely racially homogenous.
Now in many parts of Europe you have vastly different cultures living together and you're seeing the social impact of this and experiencing living in an environment like that for the first time. In the Americas it has been that way for hundreds of years. We have many culturally distinct, native ethnic groups that are easily identifiable. Using outwardly visible characteristics as an easy indicator of cultural difference is very reliable, it is not that Americans want segregation, it is that all of the groups that live on the continent have identified their communities primarily using race for a very long time, it's not easy to force them all to abandon that heuristic.
Perhaps, but this makes "race" just another word for "culture". And white, Black or Hispanic cultures are far from uniform in the U.S. so even by that standard it makes little sense. "Using outwardly visible characteristics as an easy indicator of cultural difference" merely invites stereotyping anyone who holds such visible characteristics, as if differences within the so-called races weren't far more relevant overall.
And in french "race" is direct traduction to "breed".
The thing is mixing skin colors, physical features, cultures and possibly religious choices/origins to form a blob named race do not work at all.
For example my girlfriend is mexican, her skin is maybe a little more brownish than the average mexican, thus she has been suffering from racism in her own country, hearing her mother saying she wished she had been more white, suffering discrimination during her studies, getting systematically refused entry in places such as dance clubs and generally being dismissed by "white mexicans".
Now she lives in europe and whenever she meet another mexican, it doesn't really matter if he/she is whiter or browner than her. Being all away from their roots are all happy to see and share their common culture, talk about what they are missing (mostly about food ha ha) and they feel much more united than inside their own country.
What about people with parents with white and brown skin colors. I often have a laugh when people mention someone looking no more brownish than the average south spanish being called black because he has a black father or mother. There are so many body characteristics, so many gradients. At which point of brownishness are you sliding from being white to black?
So in a way they are part of a same whole but they can be destinguished at times. And some people having exact same skin color do not necessarily face the same kind of racism depending on where they live and what is the current culture. Racism suffured by black people in the US of A do not have the same characteristics as the racism suffured by black people in other parts of the world. Racism suffured by asian people has different charistics but then again is not the same depending on the country they live. A lot of people from Portugal, Romania, balkanic country suffer from a lot of discrimination and mockery here in europe even when they can't be mistaken physically, just because people figure out their origin another way.
Racism is about creating groups based on arbitrary, unscientific, often fluid and tenous differences. Using the concept of race within a country, even with the idea to fight its effects such as running statistics, positive discrimination can only promote more racism.
His dig at the end that "America doesn't want to end segregation" suggests that he's more than just ignorant here. Race hasn't been used in a segregatory way in America in 70 years. Now it's used as a wedge to push unpopular socialist policies.
And yes segregation still exist in modern american society: https://www.epi.org/publication/modern-segregation/ https://ideas.darden.virginia.edu/segregation-in-2020 https://www.salon.com/2021/06/26/modern-day-segregation-in-h... https://www.diversityinc.com/what-does-segregation-look-like... https://www.studyfinds.org/white-flight-segregation/
You have a very uninformed and derogatory view of a certain segment of the US population, and your view of southerners in particular is very stereotypical and not rooted in fact.
Sadly I would say yes.
I merely said USA is still using the concept of race and it is mostly cultural due to its history. Which means racism/discrimination issues are treated under a vastly different pane of glass. And yes it is fucked up but racism/xenophobia is a global problem.
I never said europe fared better but it seems like mentionning US as a european triggered something that make US people think their country is under attack and they should just enter into negationism mode. Calm down, it is not a US vs Europe thing. More an ackniwledgement that different cultures react differently based on their history.
That was only the start of Brown vs Board of education and mixed marraiges were illegal until Loving vs Virgina in 1967 and the couple at the center of that case were jailed for a year in 1958 for getting married!
> "Virginia had argued that its law was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because the punishment was the same regardless of the offender's race, and thus it "equally burdened" both whites and non-whites"
My race you ask? A Hacker! Haha
India has several different races/castes that are taking their racial conflicts globally(https://www.npr.org/transcripts/923736245).
Mixed Person's have trouble getting bone marrow. (https://www.cancer.net/blog/2021-03/why-bone-marrow-registry...)
Maybe the "race" part is going away ,but the groupings of genes and their unequal transmission through the population isnt.
"Those of us who believe that individual responsibility is a far better route to success than racialization can still reverse what Ylvisaker, Samora, Alinsky, and the rest have wrought."
I'll hit that another way. I took an American Studies class in university required through the School of Humanities for my math degree. It was taught by a Fullbright scholar. One of the assigned books was Horatio's "Ragged Dick". By the teacher's assessment, this is a book for kids - which it is. But the shoe shiner boy in the book Dick exemplified a decently good take on what it is to be American in a way that that doesn't engage race, victimization. In particular,
- Dick had street smarts
- Dick worked hard, got out early to the good spots for shines. He was always on the look out for opportunity
- Dick periodically bought supper for his shoe shiner fellows if they were down on their luck (empathy)
- Dick did a good job on his shines and got tips
- Going the other way, Dick received help and recognition from his betters (read vaguely rich) which he accepted. Through their help he got into school and received a new suit. He started to learn how to read.
- Dick didn't whine; he was quick with a joke or good story. Ex: when asked why his pants were so old, dirty rather than bemoan his situation he said that in fact they were Napoleon's trousers e.g. from a strong and venerable person.
To me this silly kids' book gets a lot right.
Now to be fair it has been criticized too ... it's hard to fully escape injustice. A New Yorker article some years ago took Horatio to task for never engaging slavery, the class system in England, and other injustices. In a sense Horatio ducked some of the hard issues nevertheless giving a decent take on what we want in fellow Americans as I see it: go-getter, competent, forward looking, mostly cheerful, and connected to his fellows.
There's some strange parallels of Ylvisaker, Samora, Alinsky to Russian intellectuals who started Communism. I not taking on or wanting to engage Communism here at all. I am simply pointing out that some strange effects arise when relatively richer, intellects try to "fix" things for other people they claim they're helping.
Central American origin here. According to 23andme I could be anywhere from a quarter to a third Amerindian, and brown enough to have never been called or mistaken for white. Technically, we could be as "Native American" as many, well, Native Americans who have tribal affiliations, except we lost that continuity of culture over the course of 400 years of Spanish shenanigans, so we're not considered Native Americans. We also, depending on the country, tend not to look white. I wouldn't mind being just American and claiming that but small talk always devolves into some indirect form of "well, where are you really from?" and they certainly don't mean what US state I was born and raised in. It's a messy classification system that we're just forced to deal with. Choosing what "race" I am on a form is like signing a Terms and Conditions page I didn't read, solving a captcha and entering a 2FA so I can get on with my task.
"In part" being the key words here. As https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Individual-level_hum... shows, they do differ - they're genetically further from Europeans than Middle Easterners (who are still classified as white on the US census, itself a red herring).
Yet the article contains no such graphs - how deluded must one be to think court cases, census categories, and obscure writings by sociology professors, are better determinants of ethnicity than genetically measurable kinship?
Such a group may well exist, but is the exception rather than the rule.
If you’re in a place where there are relatively few English speakers they all hang out together and the first split will be North Americans versus British + Irish + Aussies + Kiwis + South Africans.
Keyword "unified". There was a series of recent protests complaining some groups were not treated as well as others - if they're all merely "Americans", what did they form groups based on?
Edit: On further reflection, no, even if you drop "unified", I don't see how you could consider Americans being a single ethnic group. Ethnicity is not assigned based on hanging out together when abroad. By that criterion, ex-Yugoslavians would become a single ethnicity.
> By that criterion, ex-Yugoslavians would become a single ethnicity.
Yes. In China they’re a single ethnic group in Shanghai in my experience. The salience of different ethnic identities varies by context. That’s what social construction of identities is about. Shared ancestry is not the only determinant of ethnicity. Mormons are an ethnic group. There are old stock Mormons all over the American Wear. Mormonism is also a universalist religion. Things are complicated.
They’re closer than Nigerians. They assimilate faster but they’re not the same.
If anything, Southern white culture co-opts African-American culture. We have our own dialects (AAVE), our own foods, and our own music (pretty much any popular form of music from blues to rock-and-roll), and our own religious practices. Southern white culture may take in the some of the above, but it's pretty much a one-way transfer.
Like what, specifically in terms of music, religious practices, or foods.
For specifically Southern influence I'm no expert but here's one example.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0163962090285476...
> Southern Culture and Homicide: Examining the Cracker Culture/Black Rednecks Thesis
> Recent scholarship traces the roots of southern violence to the Scots-Irish, who brought a relatively violent “cracker culture” with them to the United States in the eighteenth century. The tolerance for violence inherent in cracker culture was believed to be transmitted throughout the south to other whites and was maintained, in part, through evangelical Christian doctrine. Moreover, Thomas Sowell (2005) recently argued that some southern blacks were also influenced by “cracker culture,” leading to the emergence of a “black redneck” phenomenon influencing homicide among blacks. Using county-level data circa 2000, this study empirically evaluates the merit of the cracker culture/black redneck thesis. Negative binomial regression analyses for a full sample of counties suggest that a measure of southern cracker/black redneck culture is an important factor affecting contemporary rates of argument homicide among both whites and blacks. When counties are divided into south and non-south sub-samples, the results are also consistent: a cracker/black redneck culture effect is evident for both racial groups in the south, and is also apparent outside of the southern region. We interpret these latter findings as possible support for the thesis that southern cracker/black redneck culture has been transported through migration to non-southern localities.
African-Americans are such group. In Africa, they have many different ethnicities. Their descendants in America are all African-Americans, they dont differ at all between those who are from Nigeria 200 years ago and those who are from Angola. Within Africa, there are Nigelians and Angolans and they are distinct ethnicities.
White people in America are such group. The descendants from Germans and French and Poland are all white Americans. In Europe, they are all different ethnicities.
Cause asimilation is a thing. And in fact you or your kids can become other ethnicity. German family who moved and became French. Czechs who moved and their kids became Hungarians. Hungarians who moved and became German. In all those case, no one knows or cares about origin. None of that is rare. Whole areas were assimilated into larger groups, their ethnicity changing over time (yes, pretty often it happened by force).
The latter is literally what Putin is trying to achieve in Ukraine - make it Russia and suppress existence of that Ukrainian ethnicity.
Ethnicity is not just or purely blood. That is why the sociology professors are better determinants if they actually studied that thing. Cause at least they know it is more complicated then just "genetical origin". When you go by genetic only, it is more of race then ethnicity.
I feel there's a whole fascinating worldview behind this. Did right-wing Americans just declare racist bankruptcy and pretend that their long history of fighting against equality didn't count anymore?
The first time I realised Trump would become president was when a sweet old lady Republican party local official calmly stated that "we didn't have a problem with race before Obama came along".