Not very surprising that the official US races are BS. If I understand them correctly, officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian, whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic, which makes zero sense from any point of view.
To be fair, in the eyes of the US government, Hispanic is an ethnicity and not a race so you can be White and Hispanic. However, this distinction is lost among most and ethnicity and race are commonly used interchangeably.
To be fair, in the eyes of the US government, races are non-exclusive and you can be White, Black or African American, American Indian or Native Alaskan, and all the other racial categories simultaneously, as well as either having or not having Hispanic or Latino ethnicity.
The kicker is that if you select "American Indian or Native Alaskan" they start asking for tribal documentation. But you can check Black or White or Hispanic (Not White) or anything else all you want. Who will gainsay?
> The kicker is that if you select "American Indian or Native Alaskan" they start asking for tribal documentation.
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]
No Wikipedia explicitly states that people from Spain are not included;
"The term commonly applies to Spaniards and Spanish-speaking populations and countries in Hispanic America and Hispanic Africa" I.e. not mainland Spain.
A friend in college from Spain had way too much fun pretending to be stereotypically hispanic and would insist that he had more a claim to it, being from Hispaniola, after all.
Yeah and it actually kinda makes sense--in Mexico, there are white Hispanics who descended from Spanish Jews and have not interbred much with the natives. They are tall and white. Then there are people with little or no European blood in them, and they are short and brown, generally speaking.
So it makes sense that you could be a Caucasian Hispanic.
What other ethnicities do you think there is an equally strong case to include in the list of minimum reporting categories (which is what the official scheme defines) on par with the one current ethnic and six current (with the recent addition of Middle East and North African) racial categories?
Chinese. Indian. Northern European (Nordic countries). English.
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?
The case for including an ethnicity in the minimum reporting categories starts with, largely, that it is both a large community and that it significantly cuts across rather than existing largely within a category already defined as a racial category; "Ethnicities" which would fall almost entirely within the Asian, Asian, or White racial categories don't really have a strong case.
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.
American born Ethnic Chinese would like a word. As would a very large number of other groups.
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.
Realistically the US has different ethnicities just considering the differences between north and south, east, midwest and its spectrum, and then the west. For some the differences are so great the language spoken is no longer mutually intelligible.
The entire US "race" discourse is pretty stupid, to be fair, too bad it has infected much of the rest of the world because of the influence of the US media.
Every place in the world I've looked into has stupid "race" issues that make no sense to anyone outside. There is a human tribal tendancy to want to find someone "different and lesser" than us that we can then look down on. Exactly what those things are vary a lot from place to place (and over history even in one place) depending on various factors. However there always is some group that is seen as lesser for no good reason.
I think you need to replace the first "US" with "European imperialist" and "US media" at the end with "European imperialism", and adjust your timeline for the origin of the problem.
Parent was not talking about the origin though. Present day obsession with so called "race" is absolutely a US phenomenon. Classifying people as "caucasian" for instance always trips me up because it's something that people would call you a nazi for elsewhere.
I don't think paganel's claim is that all race discourse is derived from the US. Rather, that (1) the race discourse in the US is stupid and (2) that much race discourse elsewhere these days is derived from the US's and is therefore similarly stupid. (Other independent race discourse might also be stupid but in different ways.)
Race discourse in the US is not stupid. Nazis from Germany mass murdered people because of white supremacy before US critical race theory. It's important to talk about Nazis and white supremacy instead of ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away by itself.
It is possible for something to be important to talk about, and for the way it's talked about to be stupid. In fact, I think it's quite common. I agree with paganel that a lot of US race discourse is stupid. I agree with you that sometimes it's important to talk about race. There's no contradiction between those.
(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.)
Hispanic can be any race, from African Black to Nordic White.
Also, there can be huge differences between Hispanic themselves, an Argentinian, Mexican, Peruvian and Asturian might share common traits (Catholic Culture -not beliefs, culture, something affecting even Atheists, and I am not talking about superstitions- , food) but their customs and worldview can be totally alien between ourselves.
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.
> Not very surprising that the official US races are BS.
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/...
Regardless of what specific term is used, it is used (and abused!) equivalently pretty much everywhere humans exist.
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.
Caste is synonymous with social class. There is no genetic or racial component to it, and no one is claiming as such (including the people who are discriminating on the basis of caste).
The study shows the reverse effect. Because of the emergence of the caste system and rigid classes people stopped intermixing across caste boundaries and now 2000 years later you can find certain genetic differentiators between them.
The reality is the same for "Race" and "Ethnicity", and all sorts of other words that humans have used to categorize "not my family".
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.
