No, for most purposes they never did (in fact, for many purposes where this is used, it is immediately separated from anything that would associate it with the submitter, so it would be hard for them to come back and ask you for anything), and the 2024 revisions to the definitions of the minimum categories removes the language about maintaining an ongoing affiliation ("who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment") from the definition of that category. [0]
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/03/29/2024-06...
In practical usage, they'd far more likely be called Spanish or European in the US context.
"The term commonly applies to Spaniards and Spanish-speaking populations and countries in Hispanic America and Hispanic Africa" I.e. not mainland Spain.
This is not a complex sentence.
So it makes sense that you could be a Caucasian Hispanic.
These all have just as much claim from a cultural-diaspora perspective eh? With a wide variety of phenotypes, if we go back a bit. Though Indian should probably be more finely divided if we’re being honest.
If you really wanted to piss people off, we could of course lump Indian, Singaporean, Australian, American, etc. under English Ethnicity.
The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
That said, there is probably a good argument for breaking out at least South Asian from Asian as a distinct top-level racial category, in the same way that MENA recently was. (But note that all of the top-level categories also have more detailed breakdowns available, and recent revisions have also moved to require the more detailed options to collected in a wider range of circumstances.)
> The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
Mostly, the opposite: that the successors to the conquistadors were less genocidal and more assimilationist than their British and British-descended North American counterparts.
The only reason these groups are included this way is because of lobbying power (for and against) and $$ and privileges related to being in or out of various categories.
From an ontological perspective, your argument is BS looking at the actual distributions and ground truth of these groups.
What racial groups in the minimum reporting scheme does this ethnic group cut across, and in what rough proportions?
(But I don't think "white supremacy" is a good way to think about the Nazis' hatred of Jewish people. They were white supremacists, but they hated the Jews for other reasons and if by some miracle they had abruptly stopped being white supremacists I think they would have gone right on persecuting Jewish people.)
Hispanics are Caucasian in the original classification:
Just compare a Mexican Mariachi with an Asturian folk guy playing Celtic songs with bagpipes. Or the differences on ideology, state support, progressiveness... as much as a Brit and the average North American if not more.
The modern concept of "race" in general is a BS construct that was invented to support and justify European imperialism, and which has long been recognized as having only the loosest relation to biological reality despite in its own terms being conceptualized as a biological reality of some importance.
OTOH, its also produced very real communities of differentiated experience, identity, and treatment, and it is largely that which the US government system of race (plus one ethnicity, in the minimum scheme) is designed to gather data related to.
> If I understand them correctly,
You do not.
> officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian
"Caucasian" is not part of the official race/ethnicity scheme used in US federal government reporting. Someone who has prehistoric ancestors who were from the region which is now Portugal or France, and who identifies with the racial group into which people with that ancestry are categorized, would be White, possibly with another racial and/or ethnic category depending on what other ancestry they identified with.
> whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic
With the same description as above, replacing "Portugal or France" with "Spain", the person would still be White.
A person who also identifies with Spanish or South, Central, or North American (south of the US border) national/cultural origin would be Hispanic or Latino by ethnicity (the only ethnic category in the scheme) as well as any racial category or categories they identify with.
Here's a news release on 2024 updates to the scheme, which involve combine the race/ethnicity questions into a single multiple answer allowed question (the race question was already multiple answers allowed, but the presence or absence of the one ethnic category was a separate question) as well as other updates to the scheme: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2024/...
Is ‘caste’, race? Because it sure is used that way (or worse) in places that have it. And that’s been going on for longer than what we currently call European civilization.
Regional customs vary, but southern indian cousin marriage traditions in particular are heavily caste oriented.
The only thing not ‘race’ about it, is the word.
Spain and it’s colonies also had a ‘casta’ system with simpler and more explicit rules.
French colonists to the new world freely intermarried (and had kids) with Native Americans and people brought over from Africa, and eventually those same groups were prevented from marrying under racist american laws.
So there's lots of french blood in black people in the southern united states, but they were eventually prevented from marrying white french people, even when they were literally part of the same large family tree! There are long lines and families of black people who literally descend from my ancestors that I wouldn't have been allowed to marry!
Which should clearly demonstrate that it was never about your genetic or biologic ancestry, as modern science knows.
Wikipedia claims America's "blacks can't marry whites" laws have no precedent.
Similarly, there was lots of inter-racial relations before some colonies banned it, and other colonies never banned it.