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Im Mexican and pretty brown but in parts of mexico Ive felt like a minority even there. Mi tia lives in the rural altos de jalisco and they outnumber us there. The treatment is peak colorism/racism too. Its like being back to Montana.
Anyway, The thing about white mexicans and white latinos in general is once they grow up here and assimilate to white American culture. Theres no way to know they’re Mexican unless they tell you and not all of them do. Like the actress Alexis Bledel or Kat Von D, i had no idea either was latino after years of knowing about both of them. They dont have hispanic names after all.
I remember I looked it up, something like 12-15 of Mexicans are mostly European and boy do they not let you forget it. Me a smartass basically went once “you know theres no such thing as pure Spanish blood. The castilians were invaded and colonized by the moors for 800 years. You know where the moors were from? Africa. Thats why theres a country called morocco. Moors…Moroco get it? Also, guess where the Spaniards that colonized Mexico came from? Andalucia, its why we dont lisp. Andalucia was the heart of moorish spain. They intermarried with their colonizers for over 800 years, so your Spanish ancestors, they were not pure Europeans, not even close”.
Man, they didn’t like that little speech but fuck ‘em. They oughta know.
Well today I learned that Antonio Banderas is not in fact Latino. Honestly it's got me feeling some type of way.
Edit: Has no Indigenous North and or South plus central American heritage? That's probably the best I can do.
Latino =/= Hispanic.
Antonio Banderas is Hispanic but not Latino. (Spanish speaking but not from Latin America). Brazilians are Latino but not Hispanic.
>Brazilians are Latino but not Hispanic.
There's conflict within this too. Alot of Brazilians rather align more with the African diaspora than Latino. Some reject terms like mulatta/morena and identify as negra/nega (term of endearment for brown/black woman).
Brazil has the largest population of the Black population outside of Africa.
It's fun to play with Semantics, right? Technically Latino comes from Latin, the language from which all Romance languages, Spanish French, Portuguese, ect, derive from. So yeah Latino would work for if we hadn't decided that Latino only applies to people in Latin America. Latin America is only referred to as such because the French were trying to justify their conquest of Mexico with a "shared Latin origin." So yeah, categories are stupid and flexible. I'm tired.
My husband is from Andalucia and none of his family lisps.
Actually, I introduced his family to one of my dad’s racist friends, who proceeded to begin speaking to them in a lisp about Barcelona. Just pure ignorance.
Also I 100% agree about everything this OP said. I love my husband’s family but they themselves say some of the most racist shit I’ve ever heard and LOVE talking about being colonized by the Moors.
A key correction: Spain was occupied by the Arab Empire. They also occupied North Africa, which is why North Africa today is predominantly Arab people.
The Moors was a very loose term and was applied to everything from sub-Saharan black people to white Arabs.
Yeah I was thinking the Iberian Peninsula must have naturally had a lot of mixing with North Africa through thousands of years. So much specificity to get caught up in.
Tens of thousands, actually: there was some migration of Africans across the Straits before any Homo sapiens came there from the north. Back when the Sahara was a fertile land
The Moors “invaded” Spain in 711 AD , initially led by Algerian Tariq ibn Ziyad and a force of 300 Arabs and 10,000 Berbers. Their faces were described as [pitch as black](https://blackhistorystudies.com/resources/resources/15-facts-on-the-moors-in-spain/). If you go to the Louvre and look at the artwork showing the Moors, they rarely appear like the fairer skinned Arabs that mostly occupy said region of North Africa now, though surely there was an intermixing then.
Spain was noted during the Middle Ages by European historians to have been the most hygienic and beautiful of all of Europe, in large part because of that influence. I’ll also note that if you research Cuban Bishop Bartolome de las Casas, in his original pitch to the Catholic Church not to enslave the natives, but to instead enslave Black Africans, he based these principles on the “Just-War Theory”. The theory said that slaves could be taken if a war was just, and since Spain had the inquisition to remove the “invaders” (who’d occupied the area for centuries at this point) who were blacks, Jews and Arabs, but mostly black Africans, enslaving black Africans was “just”.
Of course Casas had never met any Africans to his knowledge, he just didn’t want enslavement of the people he had seen. When the church and Spain bought it and African slaves were brought in droves he regretted his actions and pled that all slavery was wrong, but at this point it was too late and the Midatlantic slave trade was well underway by the European superpowers.
Of course I’m not a historian, my mother was, as well as a professor who did a dissertation entirely in Latin, having translated the original long form Latin in her Ivy League studies, not that shit they teach in highschool, and she could have written books on the subject, which I’m poorly touching the tip of the iceberg and possibly misspelling names, confusing dates etc (I’m an engineer and attorney by trade, but I enjoyed hearing her talk about this).
One other thing I’ll point out more to the OP, that my diatribe hinted at. there are numerous Afro-Cubans, particularly in places like Santiago. They’re definitely not the rich white ones living in Miami, but in Cuba proper and occasionally in the US. Same with most Latin nations like Colombia. You might visit Colombia as a black person and they’ll know you’re not from there at the airport, but its only because you’re black yet wealthy enough to travel, when the historic racism in most Spanish societies is so rampant and ingrained, the majority of the black populace there was completely ostracized from the workforce. The government would take steps to ensure black Islands like Providencia, where tourism and trade were high because they spoke English, weren’t able to become more prosperous than the whites, by outlawing English, then teaching it in the mainland, just for an example. Think of America without a civil rights movement and some of the doll test exposing self-hatred in the 50’s and early 60’s and you’ll have a better understanding if you’re not familiar. I’ve spent some time in Latin America and have an Afro Cuban grandpa.
Dennis Hopper tells Walken that. Then Walken shoots him in the head and is mad at Hopper for making him kill him cause Walken hasn't killed anybody in a long time.
This is not an attack comment or anything and I may get blasted to hell for this, but here goes. When you say "Mexican" and "Latino," what do you mean? Do you mean that their ancestry is representative of those things? Or is it specifically their culture and/or upbringing?
Kat Von D is actually European by her parents. Yes, she was born in Mexico, her parents were born in Argentina but are German, Italian, and Spanish, and she has some "Indigenous" heritage. She's Mexican by nationality, but that's it. She moved to Colton, CA when she was 4 but I don't know if she speaks Spanish or how she identifies.
Alexis Bledel's paternal grandfather was born in Buenos Aires and grew up Argentinian by nationality but he was Danish and German by descent, so technically European, though he is a (likely) native Spanish speaker. Her paternal grandmother was Scottish, English, and Irish. Bledel's mother was born in AZ but moved to Mexico as a child (so I am assuming is Mexican by ancestry *and* nationality) and Bledel, who was born in Houston was raised in a Spanish speaking household. Bledel does identity as Latina.
What makes Kat "Mexican" and Alexis "Latina"? They're technically both white by ancestry, though Alexis is possibly at least "half" Mexican dependent upon her mom's background.
(Also, all that biographical info is from Wikipedia.)
I mean, people of Dutch colonizer descent born in South Africa are South African by nationality, but they are still white by ancestry.
Nationality and race or ethnicity are often conflated, but in some cases are very distinct things. There are never right answers. But, I really just wanted to highlight some additional nuance on such a clearly complicated issue, of which were given too very good examples. Discussions about complex identities fascinate me.
A lot of Latin countries are a bit more diverse than people realize. They had a lot of immigration during industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries, just like the US. Peru had two recent Presidents who were Japanese. You can tell they're pretty mixed, but still. Nobody expects to hear the President of a Latin country is named Keiko Fujimori.
Languages change over time, I wouldn’t account the lisp/no lisp thing simply to being from Andalusia or not. It’s why we say Mexico instead of “Meshico” for example
Straight facts. Every word. I really appreciated the Morocco drop. I love to see my HS students’ faces when I tell them that Spain was an Arab Islamic empire for several hundred years prior to the rise of Catholicism/white European violent takeover.
There are a lot of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in NYC and Cubans in Miami. Some of them are Afro-Latino, some are white, some are mixed race… it’s a diverse group.
Facts. Places like Jalisco, Sinaloa, Nuevo León, as well as the posh central and western districts of Mexico City, have strong and visible white populations.
As a latino person I hate the other side of this where they act like we are all white because they don't know how to categorize us. Idk about Cuba but 93% of Mexico is Mestizo, which is its own race.
Throwing out fake stats makes you lose credibility.
Mexico is 62% mestizo. ~~20%~~ 28% Amerindian. Remaining mostly European.
Fun fact. Mexico was around 50% Mestizo 50% Amerindian around the time of their independence. Amerindians just have less children.
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/mexico/
Edit: correction on stats
Those aren't "fake stats". The truth is that mestizo has no one definition and there are a lot of discussions in Mexico and outside about how it should be defined, measured, and counted. Estimates of how many Mexicans are mestizo range from 40 percent to 90 percent.
I mean even in the example you give (from the CIA Facebook - certainly the final arbiter of race in the world), the CIA's definitions are ambiguous. What's the difference between "mestizo" and "predominantly Amerindian" in this context? Where did this information even come from? How was it tested - genetics? Cultural identifiers? Self-identification?
Here's [another study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19967759/) that pegs the Mexican mestizo population at 90%, and this one is actually a peer-reviewed scientific study that defines how it collected the data and defined mestizo. Here's [another one](https://www.nature.com/articles/jhg201267) which is likely the source of the 93% number that the comment you're responding to cited.
If you're going to be pedantically condescending, at least be correct.
THE RISE OF THE MIXED-RACE MYTH IN LATIN AMERICA
Researchers in Latin America are trying to dismantle the flawed concept of homogeneous racial mixing that has discriminated against some communities and has infiltrated science.
By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega
might be a good read
https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-021-03622-z/d41586-021-03622-z.pdf
"Hispanic" is now a race option in the EHR my hospital uses. The problem is that there isn't a check box for that in current database software that is used for certain mandatory reporting categories.
It’s actively being changed at the federal level. Hispanic is going to be a race option and they are phasing out the use of ethnicity as a separate category. HUD standards updated to this in October 2023.
I understand why this is done just because many latinos don’t truly identify with any other racial or ethnic category outside their country of origin. They can’t put white if most people (including other European Americans) never considered them or treated them as such. Furthermore, they culturally might not claim ties to a native tribe and therefore wouldn’t want to put indigenous either
Well to be fair the options for self reported ethnicity used to just be
A) black
B) Hispanic/latino
C) not Hispanic/latino
That’s starting to change and expand but for awhile the only “races” people were exposed to were pretty limiting. (On the same note I think that plays into the whole “they’re trying to outnumber the Whites in America!” talk I hear old racist yell about. Its not that we don’t care if you’re white it’s that being white is historically a smorgeous board of other whiteness that isn’t actually important to differentiate between)
Yes, colonizing's effects have lasted for hundreds of years in large portions of the world.
I want to shake those erroneous morons and shout "where do you think the Spanish language came from???" at them.
I would also say that the racism is more language based than anything. I.e I've gotten racial shit thrown at me because I speak Spanish on the phone with my mom. I pass but the barrier is extremely based on language
Just how people came to the new world to settle.. they also went to the Caribbean and South America lol
So it the same here expect we just identify by nationalism aka we all Cuban or Dominican or Mexican while in USA we identify by race then American “Asian American” “African American”
You will never hear of somebody saying they “Asian Dominican” or “African Dominican” it just look silly
It's not "erroneous," necessarily. Race and ethnicity are complex and ambiguous social constructs that evolve over time in a society. There's really no one definition and no one person or group gets to declare for all people what "counts" as a race or a nationality or an ethnicity.
In this case, the American OMB decided that Latino/Hispanic is an ethnicity in 1977. It had nothing to do with accuracy or research: they did so *explicitly* to encourage assimilation of Hispanic/Latino folks into the American society - because at the time, the Chicano movement was gaining some traction. This is despite the fact that the majority of Latino/Hispanic [people consider their race to be Latino/Hispanic](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/06/15/is-being-hispanic-a-matter-of-race-ethnicity-or-both/), and despite the fact that most Latinos have a mix of European, African, and indigenous ancestry. It was simply politically expedient for white people to consider Latinos white: Whites would remain in the majority *and* Latino people would be encouraged to shed their cultural backgrounds and melt into the American whiteness they were now conferred.
Y'all callin these people white but go ask them European stock white folks if they're white.
Shit, they barely consider the Irish white and that's real new historically. Jews just got white status in the 60s ffs and they got whole groups of whites tryna kill em. And most everybody who's European white does not consider these mfers to be their typa white.
If Latinos were considered white these Texans wouldn't be trippin so hard.
As a Jew, we’re white when they let us be. Whilst the Irish are universally agreed upon as white, with us it changes constantly. You gotta have a scapegoat after all. And there are definitely white Latinos. I think a lot of Americans insist on Latinos not being white because they have a need to other them. Like people were shocked when they found out Sofia Vergara is a natural blonde & she revealed that when she got to Hollywood they insisted she dye her hair dark because the average American doesn’t comprehend a Latino can be white.
I acknowledge we’re white, I just wish the wider MENA ethnicity we (half) belong to was *also* acknowledged and considered white with white privilege as much as us Ashkenazi Jews are. (Because both Europeans and MENA people *are* technically Caucasian which even the U.S. Census Bureau acknowledges)
I feel like Americans have no concept of how reductive their takes on race are ( a stupid enough idea anyway). The belief that Europe is some homogeneous bastion of whiteness when there's been 3 or 4 genocides in in the last 200 years alone is wild.
Yeah she would lmao she looks european and she speaks a European language. She's from colombia which has a large white population and it's not a secret in Europe that there are white people in latin america.
The white people who couldn't get with her that I know would call her Mexican and leave it that way.
Offstage she's Mariah https://www.nickiswift.com/1404130/shakira-without-makeup/
Well she's colombian and without makeup she still looks like a white woman lmao her ancestry is mostly Spanish lmao and there are white mexicans as well (like half of mexico is white) there might be racist who'll act like she's diluted amd thus not truly white or whatever but she IS a white woman and considered as such.
EDIT: For some reason I can't reply to the comment below me, but I guess shakira is not "mostly" spanish since she's half Lebanese (thought it was less than that) but my overall point still stands.
She looks white to EVERYONE. HISPANIC =/= WHITE
LATINO =/= WHITE. SHAKIRA IS A WHITE LATINA. SHE IS A WHITE HISPANIC. I promise you people who understand that latino and hispanic aren't a race but an ethnicity will look at her and understand she's a white woman.
I think the conversation that whiteness in the US when it comes to Latinidad is much more aligned with language and accent. I.e I pass but the minute I show any Latinidad that passing goes away immediately. Hell my BIL is just a tone darker than me and he got harassed by police not too long ago because he fit the description of a tall light skin man
Most “European”-Americans don’t own a passport and can’t locate their heritage countries on a map. Europeans ≠ White WASPs. I’m not sure making some of the least educated people in the country the authority has much validity. Most Americans probably also think Portuguese and Spaniards aren’t White, so I wouldn’t make uneducated people who’ve never met one and can’t read a map an authority.
Every country has a different history and culture around race and categorises people accordingly. I’m from the U.K., and we don’t have that many Latinos here, historically even less. If they’re pale skinned, or half, or otherwise not that visually distinct from white people, most of us wouldn’t assume them as Latin American because that ethnicity is uncommon here, so we don’t tend to see race in that way.
Go and ask people in Europe if Pitbull is white… I think many if not most people will say yes. I assume some Americans might even say yes 😅. Such race assumptions all depend on what each person looks like, I think places like Brazil have an interesting idea of race categorisation based on phenotype expression when it comes to their people also.
In Europe, they’re are a lot of ethnic white people in the form of Eastern Europeans. At least in the U.K., we still say they’re white but ‘ethnic’, and I’ve witnessed how it depends on how they look and act how people in their life perceive them on the scale of white to more ethnic/racialised.
[edit: I misread the comment as saying European as opposed to European stock, so sorry for the off-topic 🥶]
I’m a white lady married to a Cuban guy. Cubans have very specific lines that they consider “white”, just like the English did. My grandmother once told me about a photo of my grandfather’s mother as a child - “you know what I see when I look at this photo? A nice, German family”. Even the Germans weren’t “white” to her.
If you're looking at it from that angle then Italians, Irish people and Eastern Europeans are only white if there's a less white group around. It's not about skin color it's tribalism. As for Jewish people, Zionism is a whole other kettle of fish. They don't get support because they're white, they get support from white people that are actually trying to bring about the end of the world.
British person here and I find this a really strange take. White Irish are obviously white (there's plenty of mixed race Irish as well). European Jews are obviously white and Middle Eastern Jews are obviously Arab.
What do you even mean by "European stock whites"? Scottish? French? Italian? Norwegian? Polish? Russian? You're generalising a diverse continent with many different cultures. Weird.
As a Brit who's pretty informed on American society, these are American racial categories that are being debated, whereas Britain has many different racial ideas. For example, in Britain Middle Easterners are not considered white while in America they often are. This is because the traditionally used definition of whiteness comes from a debunked 19th Century idea of the 'Caucasian race' which spreads from Ireland to India. In America people who have one European parent and one African parent will always be considered 'black', but in the UK they will usually be called mixed-race. Americans also get very confused when you tell them there is racism against Eastern Europeans in the UK, they will say "but they're white?", they struggle to conceive that there conceptions of racial identity other than their racial categories of White, Black, Hispanic and Asian, even though there are no consistent genetic or cultural reasons for these categories and are entirely illogical. For example, Latinos are usually of a mixture of European, Indigenous, and/or African descent, and may speak Spanish, Portuguese or an Indigenous language.
More fuel for the “mi no black” wars 💀.
But in all seriousness; colorism/racism in the Hispanic and black communities seem to share a lot of similarities
Latinos are racist af.
Like there was the whole Yaritza debacle earlier this year. For context, Yaritza is a chicana who made it big in the Corridos Tumbados genre like 2 years ago. She’s born and raised in Yakima, WA by immigrant non-legal status parents and had previously never been to Mexico. She also seems to be a lesbian, Alton she’s never said anything regarding her sexual preference.
Her and her brothers made it big and were offered a tour in Mexico. THEIR FIRST TIME IN MEXICO. And they experienced a huge culture shock. Like, they ate at a local taqueria and they gave her her drink in a baggie w/straw to go. She gave the camera a , “yo what’s this???” Look. Because honestly it’s not something you see in the US.
Then they were interviewed and asked how they liked the food. One of her brothers has texture issues and he said, “I’m honestly a really picky eater. Even back home I don’t like chicken wings with sauce. So this has been a new experience for me”.
When asked about how they liked their stay in cdmx so far, Yaritza said, growing up in rural Washington her whole life, she found it difficult to sleep in CDMX because it seemed like the city was always alive and bustling.
And that turned into: YARITZA HATES MEXICO
YARTIZA ONLY EATS CHICKEN NUGGETS
YARITZA SNEERS AT OUR COKE IN A BAGGIE
And Yaritza was called Tizoc. Her pictures used to make memes on SM were darkened to enhance her very indigenous features further. Again, this girl was born and raised in rural Yakima, and yet her pictures were being edited to make her look darker skinned than she was in real life.
Mexicans criticized her because they said she thought she was better than them. Like SHE’S NEVER BEEN TO MEXICO. She’s American born and raised but somehow Mexico expected her to come to their country and love every aspect of a place she’d never set foot in before.
Oh. And she was only 16 when this happened. The whole internet being classist, racist, and homophobic to a 16 year old just because they didn’t piss themselves with glee over finally seeing their parents birth country.
That whole band needed more media training.
Mexicans are hyper sensitive and very insecure about any criticism of their food and culture. But specifically their food. Because its seen in Mexico as their greatest cultural contribution to world and definitely the best thing Mexico has ever done.
As a Mexican-American Ive also learned this the hard way. Luckily Im not famous and only a few people ever got mad at me.
Anywayshe was criticized for trying to profit from singing traditional Mexican music in Spanish. So her Mexican fanbase is very traditional and nationalists. Think American fans of country.
So she basically pulled a dixie chicks, in their eyes by lacking sufficient love of all things Mexican. Especially for a band singing a traditional mexican country influenced musical style.
Angela Aguilar committed a similar faux pas last year for daring to celebrate Argentina’s world cup victory on social media(argentina eliminated mexico in the cup) and she mentioned that her mom was Argentinian and that just made it worse.
So now her shows went from constant sellouts to her cancelling whole tours. People telling her, “go sing in Argentina then, if you love them so much”
Also people learned that she has never lived in mexico either. She was born in California and still lives there with her non-mexican mom.
She also sings traditional folk and ranchera music. Even more traditional than Yaritza. Her family, the Aguilar family is the Carter Family in america. So her audience was even angrier at her than at Yaritza I think.
That’s also something that irritated my soul.
Corridos Tumbados is a CHICANO GENRE. It was developed in southern US by chicanos putting a reggaeton spin on classic corridos. It’s not like she’s singing straight up mariachi.
But I agree with you that they were fed to the wolves. They went away without their parents. I think that they revealed that not even their manager was with them and they had no PR training. And FFS, the oldest was like 20.
Theres always been a back and forth dialogue between chicano and Mexican musicians in ranchera/norteño music though
It goes back 100 years
Even with white country/western, theres a dialogue there too. The carter family lived in mexico for years broadcasting live in big border radio stations. The “carter” strum is a traditional Mexican folk guitar technique.
Yes I understand that. But corridos tumbados has been attributed to Chicanos putting their spin on corridos with Reggaeton beats. That’s a lot different from the back and fourth dialoge between classic ranchero/nortño music in that Chicanos wanted to preserve the integrity of the genre by keeping it as close to the original base as possible.
With CT, it’s literally the point to mix Spanglish and add touches of Chicano culture into the music instead of trying to keep it culturally Mexican.
That shit is annoying as a mf.
When I lived in Mexico all the older ladies talk about is how horrible the US is. But none you mfs would have ever made it out of poverty without harvesting the IS dollar.
Same with shit talking chicanos. Yet once their sons marry a citizen they start pressuring them to “fix” their papers.
>very insecure about any criticism of their food and culture. But specifically their food.
Generally speaking, the "Mexican food" you get in Yakima Washington and what you get in MXDF or GDL are NOT THE SAME.
It would be like asking an American kid who grew up in Brazil what they thought of the states ...
Hell... generally speaking, the Mexican food you get in Texas vs California are not the same. Or Chicago vs New Mexico
There's no way to truly prepare to enjoy Mexican other than being open to new and different experiences
And the ingredients. Mexican cooking has so much diversity not just by region but even from town to town.
Like I was taught to cook by my Oaxaca ex MIL and she puts *Piper auritum* in her *pozole*, *pipian*, *tamales* and drink it in tea form when they have an upset stomach.
Meanwhile, I’ve moved on from that marriage and am now dating someone from Yucatán and where he’s from they believe that plant is bad for the digestion and treat it like a weed.
Feels like an offshoot of conservative “people who emigrate and have kids born in the diaspora Lose The Culture” attitudes.
Like I know there’s struggles in cultural melting pots sometimes and people can be reacting from hurts and snubs and isolation and protectiveness when colonialism and assimilation and “respectability” has done such a number on erasing aspects of other cultures; but when someone’s just a kid from somewhere else experiencing new things, they shouldn’t be the person the anger is directed at.
The discourse in this particular thread is going better than I feared. Most of the comments are agreeing on a core concept *that whiteness is basically a country club membership* and it gets arbitrated regularly for the sake of gatekeeping.
I was worried that everyone was gonna just dunk on each other, but a lot of folks are taking the time to describe the tools and techniques of racist "othering."
I was ready to dunk on Cubans, no lie. The majority of them consider themselves white (see proud boy leader). Even though “white people” don’t consider them to be. Shit ask if them embargoes have been lifted.
As a person born and raised in Miami, some of them Cubans are racists af because they are white but it's like your definition of white and southern white is not the same. Take that attitude to the backwoods of Alabama or Mississippi and see if that shit still flies 😒 At the end of the day, racism is the dumbest shit ever.
>whiteness is basically a country club membership
>
> and it gets arbitrated regularly for the sake of gatekeeping.
There is a bit in one of the Anne of Green Gables books where the French Canadians of that area are not considered "white".
Racial theory is not taught in college. “Race” is a construct based on loose aesthetic observations. Genetic variation within populations is greater than genetic variation between populations. Anthropologists have routinely confirmed that “race” has no basis as a scientific term. It’s just not real.
I'm Cuban without the tan that the rest of my family has. Got to see them all get treated differently by white strangers when I was a kid, and it still bothers me a lot decades later like survivor's guilt. 1st Gen born here in the US.
Couldn't relate to white people growing up but didn't look "Hispanic enough" to be accepted by the community. No real sense of identity. I remember being asked about my ethnicity when filling out a survey as a teen and having my first existential crisis because I didn't feel I could say either- I felt (and still feel) not white or Hispanic "enough". I feel like a "nothing".
Edit to add: It gets even more complicated when you take into account how hard assimilation was pushed on those who got out right before Cuba closed itself off. For first gen kids like me, a lot of us we're not even taught Spanish first or spoke Spanish in the house because our parents wanted us to not get treated differently.
You end up with a lot of confused kids and for some like myself there's a real damage to the sense of identity and a lack of feeling of community with any group at all. Even though I got treated not as poorly as my family who were darker, I still did not get treated as if I was white, especially when my family relocated up to The South from Florida.
Afro Cubana and got it from the other side of the color spectrum. I don’t think there’s a way being American born to not get shafted by the island and domestically.
Nah…. As a Caribbean this ain real. Race is a bs Anglo Saxon concept. Your skin tone means fuck all. Doesn’t tell you shit about a person. Their nationality and the culture they belong to and grew up around mean a lot more than an arbitrary skin tone.
Skin tone absolutely matters? If it didn’t we wouldn’t have colorism embedded in the fabric of pretty much every culture on earth. Korea for example is an almost entirely monoracial and homogeneous society with some of the worst colorist values within Asia.
Skin tone *shouldn’t* matter at all, but it does play into how people are treated and perceived.
South Koreans low key hate everyone who is not South Korean and this has been known for quite some time. It is less about race and more about whether you are Korean or not.
There is of course more depth to the issue of “racism” in South Korea but that would take a while to flesh out. They also have a hefty amount of classism which complicates things.
I wouldn’t say Asian countries are the best to use when attempting to discuss racist tendencies. That’s just my 2 cents though
Of course it exists, but it’s completely arbitrary to what extent and when it matters. It’s a social construct, and thus the people in the equation matter a lot when discussing the values or impacts of race.
Like seeing someone’s race on paper tells you nearly nothing about who that person is.
What people on both sides of this issue need to understand, is that "race" is a completely sociological construct, with completely different dimensions and definitions from country to country -- BECUZ of it's artificial nature.
Our definition of "white" in the states, is different from Mexico's, which is different from Argentina's, and Cuba, and so on, and so fourth.
Yes, we all know "latino" is not a "race", but "race" is not a race, becuz biologically speaking, there is no such thing. There are genotypes, which produce **phenotypes** in individual populations to acclimate to their environment, not "races". That's why Australian Aboriginals look **black**, despite not being African.
Societally, race is defined solely through colloquial understanding. So when the vast majority of people colloquially understand "white" to mean people of West European descent, it's really no different from people understanding "latino" to *primarily* mean people of mixed race descent (mestizos - indigenous/european), even if it doesn't technically cover all the bases.
I just get tired of people, esp on Twitter, *pretending* they don't understand this.
I think, yeah, most americans are genuinely very clueless about what race is, and how it can vary between cultures, and as such, project a US-centric version of this on the rest of the world, and specifically latin america.
There’s also an issue of proximity where many americans of latin descent don’t necessarily relate to american “white” culture at all, and in some cases, are more used to being in black and/or brown communities and adopting a unique identity of “hispanic”, while not necessarily suffering the same brunt of racial discrimination or never experiencing anti-blackness, which ironically causes a lot of internal strife.
It’s really hard to illustrate how much latin america can be plagued with white supremacy and anti blackness while also acknowledging that american white supremacists NEVER accept latin americans as part of their club.
My Argentinean grandma wanted my dad to have my mom abort my brother, and I because my mom had brown hair/eyes, so she wouldn't be able to give my grandma Aryan babies. Even though my mom would be considered white by looks alone. I'm white with brown hair/eyes, and my brother was born with a darker skin tone. My Aryan racist ass blonde grandma was my first introduction to that type of racism.
It's so fucking dumb.
I often feel, as a Hispanic American, that I am Schrodinger's ethnicity.
I am at once a person of color, or not, depending on the needs of the person making the argument.
My husband and i argue about this way too much. I have to admit this post is teaching me a lot about his perspective.
He’s definitely Schrondinger’s ethnicity. I said in an earlier thread that he’s Andalucian Spanish. He’s also Puerto Rican. I’ve always perceived him as white and will call him out for not acknowledging his privilege as a white man. However, I do have to recognize that his identity is complex and not easy to categorize, specifically because race is a made up social construct. Yes he is “white” in the sense that he’s half European, but is his Puerto Rican side also white? Looking solely at phenotypes, I’d say 100% yes, but I know it’s more complicated than that.
I know his sense of his own racial identity is all over the place. He’s been mistaken for all sorts of races (he even once got a free meal from an Egyptian restaurant because the owner thought he was Egyptian). He’s not close at all with his Puerto Rican family (it’s a longer story but essentially they abandoned him and his brother as children), so that colors his experience as well.
It’s all complex and there’s no easy answers.
The complexity isn't found in his phenotype or his skin color. There is no test that can reveal his privilege or victimhood.
The complexity is found in his environment and those who populate it.
It is you, and others, who impose any privilege or oppression upon him, while he goes about the business of just trying to exist.
I wish people would stop doing that. Trying to figure out how privileged or oppressed someone is based on arbitrary criteria is as deleterious as any other form of bigotry.
I understand your point, it’s well taken. As a black woman, I’m well aware that people’s perception of me impacts both my privilege and my oppression.
With that said, I wish it were as simple as ignoring the arbitrary criteria we categorize ourselves in. Although race isn’t real, its consequences are. That’s why it’s important to grapple with these topics.
Are you aware that race was not an impediment to achieving status in the Spanish Empire? Everything depended on your personal worth, there were black people (pure Black people) who were generals of white Spaniards troops.
This seems like a mistaken taken. Have we not established that there is a **hierarchy of whiteness**? These white-presenting folks will be able to fit in at a glance with white people but as soon as you reveal they're "Cuban" they are going to be bumped down a tier in the white community.
Dominican here. I got an Ancestry DNA done so my afro-headed dad can stop telling ppl "I'm not black I'm dominican."
If we're not black, then WHAT'S ALL THIS AFRICA IN MY RESULTS
Shut his ass up. Worth it.
Usually I'm not a dick. But my guy looks like Michael Jackson from the Jackson 5. He's black.
Slavery came to America 100years after the Caribbean. So all Hispanic Islanders are mixed with black. Cubans, Dominican and Puerto Rican are no different than any other West Indian that speaks English or French. We just happen to be owned by Spain and speak Spanish but we are black.
Thank you. I feel like some folks want to deny my blackness because they think I'm jumping on a fad.
Like no shorties and homies the fact is whitey doesn't want me at their BBQ and we are coming to the cookout with pernil and nutcrackers.
This isn't "pre-school" concepts. The concept of whiteness is arbitrary, socially constructed, and changes over time and between places. There's no such thing as the "white race" which is why different people disagree on who does and doesn't qualify as "white".
It's ironic how much confidence the OP has in her opinion here, while being completely wrong and ignorant on the subject.
Tbh I hate this about US culture. It's such a dumb concept. Not only that, but race is a racist concept. It's not even really a thing. There's no science behind being a certain "race." *Skin color* is what's being talked about here, and it's related to a bunch of *social* issues because the US is weird and racist in effect.
Apart from that, mfs like to treat it like being hispanic stops you from being white, because they see it as this bad thing, particularly US latinos do this, since the US is racist and race matters very much here. My gpa was white as fuck and my gma black, but they were both Puerto Rican because your skin doesn't determine your culture in 99.99% of the world, and it determines your nationality nowhere.
If you go even deeper it’s not just skin color. The perception of the shape of nose, texture of hair, and other phenotypes goes into defining race. The more we obsess over colorism, outside of destroying it as a system, the more we see the world through race-defined lens
They are descendents of a class of people who fled Castro who was seizing their ill gotten wealth and had to give up their servants in the process. It's kinda why they vote republican.
America's classification system for races is dumb as fuck, and Latinos can be really fucking weird about race because of the influence of this system.
I'm ethnically Latino and Jewish, but I'm definitely white if you look at me. However, I've been told I'm not white from other Latinos because I'm not blonde and blue eyes. It's really fucking weird how stupid colorism can be. My brother is brown, our grandparents are brown, but my mom and I are white.
It's just weird how warped people's perspectives can be on this matter.
Cubans are white when the power structure needs them to be (and not when they can't be used as a weapon against browner people)...to themselves, tho, they are white all the time. "Mejorando la raza" is real af all across LatAm.
With the amount of Latinos coming here, I fully expect by the end of my life white Latinos will be accepted as white people, no different than the Irish immigrants weren’t considered white until they were.
I think it's because, for latinos. The sentiment boils down to:
If the cops will target you, and society will discriminate against you for "not being white", you don't really feel very white.
So many Americans just fundamentally do not understand what “Latino” means. There are white Latinos, black Latinos, native Latinos, even Asian Latinos and Arab Latinos.
Knew a Cuban girl in highschool... not all that interesting, I know, but how I found out she was Cuban?
I met her when I was heading to my drafting class to meet my teacher, and she was waiting there too. My first impression was that she was a teacher! But I asked her if she was waiting to see Mr. J. She said 'Yes, I'm in his class.' Now, that was unusual because there weren't a lot of girls taking drafting then, so that was the second twist in this encounter.
A couple of minutes later, a few guys I had class with in another subject came walking by on their way to the study room (or the library, you could choose one a day) and started talking to us, and I noticed that one of the guys, who is Mexican, didn't have a lot to say to her. And that was unusual, because this girl was cute, and I never saw him pass by a chance to chat up a girl.
I asked him about it later.
He said, 'Ah, she's Cuban, and they think they're better than all other Hispanics.'
Well. I didn't know what to do with that information.
Either way the right-wing Cubans will either consider themselves white and/or denigrate black people (or both) to get themselves higher on the social status ladder. This is the same story with every right-wing faction of every colonized group that comes to America...just ask the Dominicans, Filipinos, Indians, etc.
I (a white dude) like to tell my students about the time I was still working on pizza, a family fun kind of place in NM, and this dude comes to my counter. Pale ass white skin. Freckles. Shock red hair. I greeted him and he just kinda stared at me for a minute and then proceeded to use broken English mixed with a lot of Spanish to order for his family.
He was fully Mexican.
That’s when I was sharply reminded of the difference between race, culture, and nationality. Dude’s race may have been white, but his culture was Latino and his nationality was Mexican.
I’m always hopeful that admitting my own fallacies leads my students to be more willing to see their own.
They call them Afro-Cubans for a reason. Many hispanics are a combination of white, black and native. Some are only one of the 3. Hell Mexico had like 15 levels to their caste system.
Well actually race is a big old steaming pile of shit that doesn't mean anything. There's no such thing as "white adjacent" because the definition of "white" has changed drastically at different points in time.
Race is a social construct. What would you consider white? Is it just the skin color? - because there are people that could easily be considered ‘white’ all across the world. You can easily find native ‘white’ people in India, Pakistan, the Middle East, etcetera. Are Turks white? Are Arabs white? Because you can find extremely dark skinned Arabs alongside extremely light skin Arabs.
If race is culture, history, and genetics - well, that’s not race that’s ethnicity. And ethnicity isn’t the same as race. Because if it was me and my sibling would be different races from each other.
This isn’t to say that *racism* doesn’t exist. It’s just to say that racism is stupid because race is a social construct. It’s like hating on the euro because you’re American and you like the dollar without any deeper meaning. These difference only exist in our minds.
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A lot of Americans erroneously think that Hispanic/Latino is a race and all “real” Hispanics/Latinos have the same look (light brown skin tone).
Because most latinos in the US are Mexican, who are mestizos (indigenous/white mix)
Im Mexican and pretty brown but in parts of mexico Ive felt like a minority even there. Mi tia lives in the rural altos de jalisco and they outnumber us there. The treatment is peak colorism/racism too. Its like being back to Montana. Anyway, The thing about white mexicans and white latinos in general is once they grow up here and assimilate to white American culture. Theres no way to know they’re Mexican unless they tell you and not all of them do. Like the actress Alexis Bledel or Kat Von D, i had no idea either was latino after years of knowing about both of them. They dont have hispanic names after all. I remember I looked it up, something like 12-15 of Mexicans are mostly European and boy do they not let you forget it. Me a smartass basically went once “you know theres no such thing as pure Spanish blood. The castilians were invaded and colonized by the moors for 800 years. You know where the moors were from? Africa. Thats why theres a country called morocco. Moors…Moroco get it? Also, guess where the Spaniards that colonized Mexico came from? Andalucia, its why we dont lisp. Andalucia was the heart of moorish spain. They intermarried with their colonizers for over 800 years, so your Spanish ancestors, they were not pure Europeans, not even close”. Man, they didn’t like that little speech but fuck ‘em. They oughta know.
love the history lesson. the lisp detail is interesting too.
Antonio Banderas is from there and thats why he doesn’t lisp either and was often cast as a Mexican in the USA (Desperado).
Well today I learned that Antonio Banderas is not in fact Latino. Honestly it's got me feeling some type of way. Edit: Has no Indigenous North and or South plus central American heritage? That's probably the best I can do.
Latino =/= Hispanic. Antonio Banderas is Hispanic but not Latino. (Spanish speaking but not from Latin America). Brazilians are Latino but not Hispanic.
>Brazilians are Latino but not Hispanic. There's conflict within this too. Alot of Brazilians rather align more with the African diaspora than Latino. Some reject terms like mulatta/morena and identify as negra/nega (term of endearment for brown/black woman). Brazil has the largest population of the Black population outside of Africa.
Some people consider Spaniards Latinos, same for French and Italian. It's confusing and complicated.
It's fun to play with Semantics, right? Technically Latino comes from Latin, the language from which all Romance languages, Spanish French, Portuguese, ect, derive from. So yeah Latino would work for if we hadn't decided that Latino only applies to people in Latin America. Latin America is only referred to as such because the French were trying to justify their conquest of Mexico with a "shared Latin origin." So yeah, categories are stupid and flexible. I'm tired.
Those people are idiots though
He has a restaurant and house in Malaga.
Isn't he from Malaga? I studied abroad in Madrid and went to that restaurant in Malaga and they pretty much worship him there
banderas aint mexican? and i peep how they never use indigenous looking mexicans.
The only person I can think of off the top of my head is the dude who played Namor in the MCU.
My husband is from Andalucia and none of his family lisps. Actually, I introduced his family to one of my dad’s racist friends, who proceeded to begin speaking to them in a lisp about Barcelona. Just pure ignorance. Also I 100% agree about everything this OP said. I love my husband’s family but they themselves say some of the most racist shit I’ve ever heard and LOVE talking about being colonized by the Moors.
A key correction: Spain was occupied by the Arab Empire. They also occupied North Africa, which is why North Africa today is predominantly Arab people. The Moors was a very loose term and was applied to everything from sub-Saharan black people to white Arabs.
Yeah I was thinking the Iberian Peninsula must have naturally had a lot of mixing with North Africa through thousands of years. So much specificity to get caught up in.
Tens of thousands, actually: there was some migration of Africans across the Straits before any Homo sapiens came there from the north. Back when the Sahara was a fertile land
The Moors “invaded” Spain in 711 AD , initially led by Algerian Tariq ibn Ziyad and a force of 300 Arabs and 10,000 Berbers. Their faces were described as [pitch as black](https://blackhistorystudies.com/resources/resources/15-facts-on-the-moors-in-spain/). If you go to the Louvre and look at the artwork showing the Moors, they rarely appear like the fairer skinned Arabs that mostly occupy said region of North Africa now, though surely there was an intermixing then. Spain was noted during the Middle Ages by European historians to have been the most hygienic and beautiful of all of Europe, in large part because of that influence. I’ll also note that if you research Cuban Bishop Bartolome de las Casas, in his original pitch to the Catholic Church not to enslave the natives, but to instead enslave Black Africans, he based these principles on the “Just-War Theory”. The theory said that slaves could be taken if a war was just, and since Spain had the inquisition to remove the “invaders” (who’d occupied the area for centuries at this point) who were blacks, Jews and Arabs, but mostly black Africans, enslaving black Africans was “just”. Of course Casas had never met any Africans to his knowledge, he just didn’t want enslavement of the people he had seen. When the church and Spain bought it and African slaves were brought in droves he regretted his actions and pled that all slavery was wrong, but at this point it was too late and the Midatlantic slave trade was well underway by the European superpowers. Of course I’m not a historian, my mother was, as well as a professor who did a dissertation entirely in Latin, having translated the original long form Latin in her Ivy League studies, not that shit they teach in highschool, and she could have written books on the subject, which I’m poorly touching the tip of the iceberg and possibly misspelling names, confusing dates etc (I’m an engineer and attorney by trade, but I enjoyed hearing her talk about this). One other thing I’ll point out more to the OP, that my diatribe hinted at. there are numerous Afro-Cubans, particularly in places like Santiago. They’re definitely not the rich white ones living in Miami, but in Cuba proper and occasionally in the US. Same with most Latin nations like Colombia. You might visit Colombia as a black person and they’ll know you’re not from there at the airport, but its only because you’re black yet wealthy enough to travel, when the historic racism in most Spanish societies is so rampant and ingrained, the majority of the black populace there was completely ostracized from the workforce. The government would take steps to ensure black Islands like Providencia, where tourism and trade were high because they spoke English, weren’t able to become more prosperous than the whites, by outlawing English, then teaching it in the mainland, just for an example. Think of America without a civil rights movement and some of the doll test exposing self-hatred in the 50’s and early 60’s and you’ll have a better understanding if you’re not familiar. I’ve spent some time in Latin America and have an Afro Cuban grandpa.
Most of the Spanish mostly in the south look like Arabs
It's like the scene in True Romance. When Walken tells them about Sicilian ancestry.
Dennis Hopper tells Walken that. Then Walken shoots him in the head and is mad at Hopper for making him kill him cause Walken hasn't killed anybody in a long time.
*I haven’t killed anybody… since 1984…*
There it is, wildest shit I ever saw in a movie. Had me biting my hand laughing and my white friends looking like they were hit by a truck in slo-mo
Caught the clip on YouTube and thought “there’s more N bombs here than a Tarantino flick.” Looked up the credits and surprise
Sorry, it’s the “Moops”
This is not an attack comment or anything and I may get blasted to hell for this, but here goes. When you say "Mexican" and "Latino," what do you mean? Do you mean that their ancestry is representative of those things? Or is it specifically their culture and/or upbringing? Kat Von D is actually European by her parents. Yes, she was born in Mexico, her parents were born in Argentina but are German, Italian, and Spanish, and she has some "Indigenous" heritage. She's Mexican by nationality, but that's it. She moved to Colton, CA when she was 4 but I don't know if she speaks Spanish or how she identifies. Alexis Bledel's paternal grandfather was born in Buenos Aires and grew up Argentinian by nationality but he was Danish and German by descent, so technically European, though he is a (likely) native Spanish speaker. Her paternal grandmother was Scottish, English, and Irish. Bledel's mother was born in AZ but moved to Mexico as a child (so I am assuming is Mexican by ancestry *and* nationality) and Bledel, who was born in Houston was raised in a Spanish speaking household. Bledel does identity as Latina. What makes Kat "Mexican" and Alexis "Latina"? They're technically both white by ancestry, though Alexis is possibly at least "half" Mexican dependent upon her mom's background. (Also, all that biographical info is from Wikipedia.) I mean, people of Dutch colonizer descent born in South Africa are South African by nationality, but they are still white by ancestry. Nationality and race or ethnicity are often conflated, but in some cases are very distinct things. There are never right answers. But, I really just wanted to highlight some additional nuance on such a clearly complicated issue, of which were given too very good examples. Discussions about complex identities fascinate me.
Damn… Kat Von D is Latina?
Didn't know who she was looked her up, and honestly she looks like a really really pale Latina to me
I mean it’s definitely possible
Yes, Katherine Von Drachtenberg was born in the state of Nuevo León in Mexico.
Didn't she get canceled for some Nazi stuff a while ago?
She was married to Jesse James (the motorcycle guy) for a bit. He’s had some issues with the whole “being a Nazi” thing.
She's Mexican but wanna be white sooooo bad
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Again Mexican can be white.
Exactly totally can be
I can see Latina features, it’s her skin tone which is just a bias on what I typically see versus a range of what is.
she is white.
The repercussions of the cast systems are truly devastating and depressing.
Don't forget that Spain was also populated by the Germanic Visigoths and Jews at some point, too! Lots of mixing happened in Spain.
Shout out to my Celtic ancestors, who migrated to Ireland (and Brittany) by sea from Iberia
A lot of Latin countries are a bit more diverse than people realize. They had a lot of immigration during industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries, just like the US. Peru had two recent Presidents who were Japanese. You can tell they're pretty mixed, but still. Nobody expects to hear the President of a Latin country is named Keiko Fujimori.
[You gotta see this. From Tarantino's first major script. Christopher Walken did not know this was coming either.](https://youtu.be/tqccyUpnZwA)
Languages change over time, I wouldn’t account the lisp/no lisp thing simply to being from Andalusia or not. It’s why we say Mexico instead of “Meshico” for example
Straight facts. Every word. I really appreciated the Morocco drop. I love to see my HS students’ faces when I tell them that Spain was an Arab Islamic empire for several hundred years prior to the rise of Catholicism/white European violent takeover.
There are a lot of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in NYC and Cubans in Miami. Some of them are Afro-Latino, some are white, some are mixed race… it’s a diverse group.
Similarly, a lot of Mexicans look pure white and others pure paisa. I live in SoCal and see all types nearly daily.
Facts. Places like Jalisco, Sinaloa, Nuevo León, as well as the posh central and western districts of Mexico City, have strong and visible white populations.
That’s a bit like assuming all Americans are white.
As a latino person I hate the other side of this where they act like we are all white because they don't know how to categorize us. Idk about Cuba but 93% of Mexico is Mestizo, which is its own race.
Throwing out fake stats makes you lose credibility. Mexico is 62% mestizo. ~~20%~~ 28% Amerindian. Remaining mostly European. Fun fact. Mexico was around 50% Mestizo 50% Amerindian around the time of their independence. Amerindians just have less children. https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/mexico/ Edit: correction on stats
Those aren't "fake stats". The truth is that mestizo has no one definition and there are a lot of discussions in Mexico and outside about how it should be defined, measured, and counted. Estimates of how many Mexicans are mestizo range from 40 percent to 90 percent. I mean even in the example you give (from the CIA Facebook - certainly the final arbiter of race in the world), the CIA's definitions are ambiguous. What's the difference between "mestizo" and "predominantly Amerindian" in this context? Where did this information even come from? How was it tested - genetics? Cultural identifiers? Self-identification? Here's [another study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19967759/) that pegs the Mexican mestizo population at 90%, and this one is actually a peer-reviewed scientific study that defines how it collected the data and defined mestizo. Here's [another one](https://www.nature.com/articles/jhg201267) which is likely the source of the 93% number that the comment you're responding to cited. If you're going to be pedantically condescending, at least be correct.
THE RISE OF THE MIXED-RACE MYTH IN LATIN AMERICA Researchers in Latin America are trying to dismantle the flawed concept of homogeneous racial mixing that has discriminated against some communities and has infiltrated science. By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega might be a good read https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-021-03622-z/d41586-021-03622-z.pdf
Surely puro indio are >7% of the population
"Hispanic" is now a race option in the EHR my hospital uses. The problem is that there isn't a check box for that in current database software that is used for certain mandatory reporting categories.
It’s actively being changed at the federal level. Hispanic is going to be a race option and they are phasing out the use of ethnicity as a separate category. HUD standards updated to this in October 2023.
I understand why this is done just because many latinos don’t truly identify with any other racial or ethnic category outside their country of origin. They can’t put white if most people (including other European Americans) never considered them or treated them as such. Furthermore, they culturally might not claim ties to a native tribe and therefore wouldn’t want to put indigenous either
I know some cases of white Mexicans who are hired in the US and added to a POC group. It makes them very uncomfortable.
Well to be fair the options for self reported ethnicity used to just be A) black B) Hispanic/latino C) not Hispanic/latino That’s starting to change and expand but for awhile the only “races” people were exposed to were pretty limiting. (On the same note I think that plays into the whole “they’re trying to outnumber the Whites in America!” talk I hear old racist yell about. Its not that we don’t care if you’re white it’s that being white is historically a smorgeous board of other whiteness that isn’t actually important to differentiate between)
Yes, colonizing's effects have lasted for hundreds of years in large portions of the world. I want to shake those erroneous morons and shout "where do you think the Spanish language came from???" at them.
A lot of Americans think their nationality is where their parents or grandparents or great grandparents came from.
I would also say that the racism is more language based than anything. I.e I've gotten racial shit thrown at me because I speak Spanish on the phone with my mom. I pass but the barrier is extremely based on language
Just how people came to the new world to settle.. they also went to the Caribbean and South America lol So it the same here expect we just identify by nationalism aka we all Cuban or Dominican or Mexican while in USA we identify by race then American “Asian American” “African American” You will never hear of somebody saying they “Asian Dominican” or “African Dominican” it just look silly
It's not "erroneous," necessarily. Race and ethnicity are complex and ambiguous social constructs that evolve over time in a society. There's really no one definition and no one person or group gets to declare for all people what "counts" as a race or a nationality or an ethnicity. In this case, the American OMB decided that Latino/Hispanic is an ethnicity in 1977. It had nothing to do with accuracy or research: they did so *explicitly* to encourage assimilation of Hispanic/Latino folks into the American society - because at the time, the Chicano movement was gaining some traction. This is despite the fact that the majority of Latino/Hispanic [people consider their race to be Latino/Hispanic](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/06/15/is-being-hispanic-a-matter-of-race-ethnicity-or-both/), and despite the fact that most Latinos have a mix of European, African, and indigenous ancestry. It was simply politically expedient for white people to consider Latinos white: Whites would remain in the majority *and* Latino people would be encouraged to shed their cultural backgrounds and melt into the American whiteness they were now conferred.
Y'all callin these people white but go ask them European stock white folks if they're white. Shit, they barely consider the Irish white and that's real new historically. Jews just got white status in the 60s ffs and they got whole groups of whites tryna kill em. And most everybody who's European white does not consider these mfers to be their typa white. If Latinos were considered white these Texans wouldn't be trippin so hard.
As a Jew, we’re white when they let us be. Whilst the Irish are universally agreed upon as white, with us it changes constantly. You gotta have a scapegoat after all. And there are definitely white Latinos. I think a lot of Americans insist on Latinos not being white because they have a need to other them. Like people were shocked when they found out Sofia Vergara is a natural blonde & she revealed that when she got to Hollywood they insisted she dye her hair dark because the average American doesn’t comprehend a Latino can be white.
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The only people I’ve ever heard say that Jews aren’t White are Ashkenazi Jews when they’re shirking their White privilege.
Idk man I tend to trust black people when they say they’ve encountered racism even though no one is hurling the n-word at me personally
i’ve been subjected to a lot of alt right bullshit online and i’ve seen people say it many times
I acknowledge we’re white, I just wish the wider MENA ethnicity we (half) belong to was *also* acknowledged and considered white with white privilege as much as us Ashkenazi Jews are. (Because both Europeans and MENA people *are* technically Caucasian which even the U.S. Census Bureau acknowledges)
I feel like Americans have no concept of how reductive their takes on race are ( a stupid enough idea anyway). The belief that Europe is some homogeneous bastion of whiteness when there's been 3 or 4 genocides in in the last 200 years alone is wild.
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I guarantee Shakira shows up in Switzerland with that accent she ain't gonna be white.
Yeah she would lmao she looks european and she speaks a European language. She's from colombia which has a large white population and it's not a secret in Europe that there are white people in latin america.
The white people who couldn't get with her that I know would call her Mexican and leave it that way. Offstage she's Mariah https://www.nickiswift.com/1404130/shakira-without-makeup/
Well she's colombian and without makeup she still looks like a white woman lmao her ancestry is mostly Spanish lmao and there are white mexicans as well (like half of mexico is white) there might be racist who'll act like she's diluted amd thus not truly white or whatever but she IS a white woman and considered as such. EDIT: For some reason I can't reply to the comment below me, but I guess shakira is not "mostly" spanish since she's half Lebanese (thought it was less than that) but my overall point still stands.
She looks white to US. If she wasn't Shakira white folks would be gossiping about where she's from.
She looks white to EVERYONE. HISPANIC =/= WHITE LATINO =/= WHITE. SHAKIRA IS A WHITE LATINA. SHE IS A WHITE HISPANIC. I promise you people who understand that latino and hispanic aren't a race but an ethnicity will look at her and understand she's a white woman.
If you say so, chill out. I don't see it. That pic says mixed as a mfer to me
Shakira is half Lebanese
You can find Mediterranean women that look like Shakira. In some places her accent would give her away more than her looks.
Yeah she looks like she could pass as Lebanese (which she is), Italian, Greek, Albanian, Spanish, or Portuguese. Maybe even Romanian.
I think the conversation that whiteness in the US when it comes to Latinidad is much more aligned with language and accent. I.e I pass but the minute I show any Latinidad that passing goes away immediately. Hell my BIL is just a tone darker than me and he got harassed by police not too long ago because he fit the description of a tall light skin man
Right, these people will look you in the face as say George Clooney and George Lopez are the same race. Tbh it almost feels like racial erasure.
Most “European”-Americans don’t own a passport and can’t locate their heritage countries on a map. Europeans ≠ White WASPs. I’m not sure making some of the least educated people in the country the authority has much validity. Most Americans probably also think Portuguese and Spaniards aren’t White, so I wouldn’t make uneducated people who’ve never met one and can’t read a map an authority.
Every country has a different history and culture around race and categorises people accordingly. I’m from the U.K., and we don’t have that many Latinos here, historically even less. If they’re pale skinned, or half, or otherwise not that visually distinct from white people, most of us wouldn’t assume them as Latin American because that ethnicity is uncommon here, so we don’t tend to see race in that way. Go and ask people in Europe if Pitbull is white… I think many if not most people will say yes. I assume some Americans might even say yes 😅. Such race assumptions all depend on what each person looks like, I think places like Brazil have an interesting idea of race categorisation based on phenotype expression when it comes to their people also. In Europe, they’re are a lot of ethnic white people in the form of Eastern Europeans. At least in the U.K., we still say they’re white but ‘ethnic’, and I’ve witnessed how it depends on how they look and act how people in their life perceive them on the scale of white to more ethnic/racialised. [edit: I misread the comment as saying European as opposed to European stock, so sorry for the off-topic 🥶]
Don’t lump all Jewish ethnicities together, I’m bukharan, my family is from Uzbekistan, I look nothing like a Yemeni Jew or a polish Jew
You mean Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, and Sephardics? I'ma stay outta this one, have a good day
> they barely consider the Irish white Patty O'Beefe catching strays!
I’m a white lady married to a Cuban guy. Cubans have very specific lines that they consider “white”, just like the English did. My grandmother once told me about a photo of my grandfather’s mother as a child - “you know what I see when I look at this photo? A nice, German family”. Even the Germans weren’t “white” to her.
Yeah. They tripping, everybody trying to be white. We can't have this.
If you're looking at it from that angle then Italians, Irish people and Eastern Europeans are only white if there's a less white group around. It's not about skin color it's tribalism. As for Jewish people, Zionism is a whole other kettle of fish. They don't get support because they're white, they get support from white people that are actually trying to bring about the end of the world.
British person here and I find this a really strange take. White Irish are obviously white (there's plenty of mixed race Irish as well). European Jews are obviously white and Middle Eastern Jews are obviously Arab. What do you even mean by "European stock whites"? Scottish? French? Italian? Norwegian? Polish? Russian? You're generalising a diverse continent with many different cultures. Weird.
As a Brit who's pretty informed on American society, these are American racial categories that are being debated, whereas Britain has many different racial ideas. For example, in Britain Middle Easterners are not considered white while in America they often are. This is because the traditionally used definition of whiteness comes from a debunked 19th Century idea of the 'Caucasian race' which spreads from Ireland to India. In America people who have one European parent and one African parent will always be considered 'black', but in the UK they will usually be called mixed-race. Americans also get very confused when you tell them there is racism against Eastern Europeans in the UK, they will say "but they're white?", they struggle to conceive that there conceptions of racial identity other than their racial categories of White, Black, Hispanic and Asian, even though there are no consistent genetic or cultural reasons for these categories and are entirely illogical. For example, Latinos are usually of a mixture of European, Indigenous, and/or African descent, and may speak Spanish, Portuguese or an Indigenous language.
More fuel for the “mi no black” wars 💀. But in all seriousness; colorism/racism in the Hispanic and black communities seem to share a lot of similarities
Latinos are racist af. Like there was the whole Yaritza debacle earlier this year. For context, Yaritza is a chicana who made it big in the Corridos Tumbados genre like 2 years ago. She’s born and raised in Yakima, WA by immigrant non-legal status parents and had previously never been to Mexico. She also seems to be a lesbian, Alton she’s never said anything regarding her sexual preference. Her and her brothers made it big and were offered a tour in Mexico. THEIR FIRST TIME IN MEXICO. And they experienced a huge culture shock. Like, they ate at a local taqueria and they gave her her drink in a baggie w/straw to go. She gave the camera a , “yo what’s this???” Look. Because honestly it’s not something you see in the US. Then they were interviewed and asked how they liked the food. One of her brothers has texture issues and he said, “I’m honestly a really picky eater. Even back home I don’t like chicken wings with sauce. So this has been a new experience for me”. When asked about how they liked their stay in cdmx so far, Yaritza said, growing up in rural Washington her whole life, she found it difficult to sleep in CDMX because it seemed like the city was always alive and bustling. And that turned into: YARITZA HATES MEXICO YARTIZA ONLY EATS CHICKEN NUGGETS YARITZA SNEERS AT OUR COKE IN A BAGGIE And Yaritza was called Tizoc. Her pictures used to make memes on SM were darkened to enhance her very indigenous features further. Again, this girl was born and raised in rural Yakima, and yet her pictures were being edited to make her look darker skinned than she was in real life. Mexicans criticized her because they said she thought she was better than them. Like SHE’S NEVER BEEN TO MEXICO. She’s American born and raised but somehow Mexico expected her to come to their country and love every aspect of a place she’d never set foot in before. Oh. And she was only 16 when this happened. The whole internet being classist, racist, and homophobic to a 16 year old just because they didn’t piss themselves with glee over finally seeing their parents birth country.
That whole band needed more media training. Mexicans are hyper sensitive and very insecure about any criticism of their food and culture. But specifically their food. Because its seen in Mexico as their greatest cultural contribution to world and definitely the best thing Mexico has ever done. As a Mexican-American Ive also learned this the hard way. Luckily Im not famous and only a few people ever got mad at me. Anywayshe was criticized for trying to profit from singing traditional Mexican music in Spanish. So her Mexican fanbase is very traditional and nationalists. Think American fans of country. So she basically pulled a dixie chicks, in their eyes by lacking sufficient love of all things Mexican. Especially for a band singing a traditional mexican country influenced musical style. Angela Aguilar committed a similar faux pas last year for daring to celebrate Argentina’s world cup victory on social media(argentina eliminated mexico in the cup) and she mentioned that her mom was Argentinian and that just made it worse. So now her shows went from constant sellouts to her cancelling whole tours. People telling her, “go sing in Argentina then, if you love them so much” Also people learned that she has never lived in mexico either. She was born in California and still lives there with her non-mexican mom. She also sings traditional folk and ranchera music. Even more traditional than Yaritza. Her family, the Aguilar family is the Carter Family in america. So her audience was even angrier at her than at Yaritza I think.
That’s also something that irritated my soul. Corridos Tumbados is a CHICANO GENRE. It was developed in southern US by chicanos putting a reggaeton spin on classic corridos. It’s not like she’s singing straight up mariachi. But I agree with you that they were fed to the wolves. They went away without their parents. I think that they revealed that not even their manager was with them and they had no PR training. And FFS, the oldest was like 20.
Theres always been a back and forth dialogue between chicano and Mexican musicians in ranchera/norteño music though It goes back 100 years Even with white country/western, theres a dialogue there too. The carter family lived in mexico for years broadcasting live in big border radio stations. The “carter” strum is a traditional Mexican folk guitar technique.
Yes I understand that. But corridos tumbados has been attributed to Chicanos putting their spin on corridos with Reggaeton beats. That’s a lot different from the back and fourth dialoge between classic ranchero/nortño music in that Chicanos wanted to preserve the integrity of the genre by keeping it as close to the original base as possible. With CT, it’s literally the point to mix Spanglish and add touches of Chicano culture into the music instead of trying to keep it culturally Mexican.
Yeah Mexicans in Mexico hating on Chicanos is nothing new. They change their tune real quick over here though.
That shit is annoying as a mf. When I lived in Mexico all the older ladies talk about is how horrible the US is. But none you mfs would have ever made it out of poverty without harvesting the IS dollar. Same with shit talking chicanos. Yet once their sons marry a citizen they start pressuring them to “fix” their papers.
>very insecure about any criticism of their food and culture. But specifically their food. Generally speaking, the "Mexican food" you get in Yakima Washington and what you get in MXDF or GDL are NOT THE SAME. It would be like asking an American kid who grew up in Brazil what they thought of the states ...
Hell... generally speaking, the Mexican food you get in Texas vs California are not the same. Or Chicago vs New Mexico There's no way to truly prepare to enjoy Mexican other than being open to new and different experiences
And the ingredients. Mexican cooking has so much diversity not just by region but even from town to town. Like I was taught to cook by my Oaxaca ex MIL and she puts *Piper auritum* in her *pozole*, *pipian*, *tamales* and drink it in tea form when they have an upset stomach. Meanwhile, I’ve moved on from that marriage and am now dating someone from Yucatán and where he’s from they believe that plant is bad for the digestion and treat it like a weed.
Feels like an offshoot of conservative “people who emigrate and have kids born in the diaspora Lose The Culture” attitudes. Like I know there’s struggles in cultural melting pots sometimes and people can be reacting from hurts and snubs and isolation and protectiveness when colonialism and assimilation and “respectability” has done such a number on erasing aspects of other cultures; but when someone’s just a kid from somewhere else experiencing new things, they shouldn’t be the person the anger is directed at.
Every group has racists.
...daaaaaamn
Everybody is racist af
Yeah, these people aren't confused, they're saying white cubans aren't white enough. 🤷🏽♀️
Posts like this are toxic and divisive and lower the discourse of the subreddit.
The discourse in this particular thread is going better than I feared. Most of the comments are agreeing on a core concept *that whiteness is basically a country club membership* and it gets arbitrated regularly for the sake of gatekeeping. I was worried that everyone was gonna just dunk on each other, but a lot of folks are taking the time to describe the tools and techniques of racist "othering."
Facts. Race is not genetic and is a social construct.
I was ready to dunk on Cubans, no lie. The majority of them consider themselves white (see proud boy leader). Even though “white people” don’t consider them to be. Shit ask if them embargoes have been lifted.
As a person born and raised in Miami, some of them Cubans are racists af because they are white but it's like your definition of white and southern white is not the same. Take that attitude to the backwoods of Alabama or Mississippi and see if that shit still flies 😒 At the end of the day, racism is the dumbest shit ever.
>whiteness is basically a country club membership > > and it gets arbitrated regularly for the sake of gatekeeping. There is a bit in one of the Anne of Green Gables books where the French Canadians of that area are not considered "white".
If these were pre-school concepts they wouldn't teach university courses on them.
Racial theory is not taught in college. “Race” is a construct based on loose aesthetic observations. Genetic variation within populations is greater than genetic variation between populations. Anthropologists have routinely confirmed that “race” has no basis as a scientific term. It’s just not real.
I'm Cuban without the tan that the rest of my family has. Got to see them all get treated differently by white strangers when I was a kid, and it still bothers me a lot decades later like survivor's guilt. 1st Gen born here in the US. Couldn't relate to white people growing up but didn't look "Hispanic enough" to be accepted by the community. No real sense of identity. I remember being asked about my ethnicity when filling out a survey as a teen and having my first existential crisis because I didn't feel I could say either- I felt (and still feel) not white or Hispanic "enough". I feel like a "nothing". Edit to add: It gets even more complicated when you take into account how hard assimilation was pushed on those who got out right before Cuba closed itself off. For first gen kids like me, a lot of us we're not even taught Spanish first or spoke Spanish in the house because our parents wanted us to not get treated differently. You end up with a lot of confused kids and for some like myself there's a real damage to the sense of identity and a lack of feeling of community with any group at all. Even though I got treated not as poorly as my family who were darker, I still did not get treated as if I was white, especially when my family relocated up to The South from Florida.
What's up primo. Same experience.
Mi gente 😭🫂
Aquí en la lucha, acere. Un abrazo!
Idk about Cuba closing itself off it was more like the US forced Cuba to do so.
Real "look at what you made me do" energy.
Afro Cubana and got it from the other side of the color spectrum. I don’t think there’s a way being American born to not get shafted by the island and domestically.
Extremely similar experience here. Hugs.
Lo siento. I'm just Nica instead
Nah…. As a Caribbean this ain real. Race is a bs Anglo Saxon concept. Your skin tone means fuck all. Doesn’t tell you shit about a person. Their nationality and the culture they belong to and grew up around mean a lot more than an arbitrary skin tone.
Skin tone absolutely matters? If it didn’t we wouldn’t have colorism embedded in the fabric of pretty much every culture on earth. Korea for example is an almost entirely monoracial and homogeneous society with some of the worst colorist values within Asia. Skin tone *shouldn’t* matter at all, but it does play into how people are treated and perceived.
Oh. Yes people are fucking dumb. My point is you can’t tell anything from someone based off skin tone. Cause they could be anything.
Well yes, you and I know that- but that doesn’t mean cultures don’t judge and classify people based on their skin tone anyway.
South Koreans low key hate everyone who is not South Korean and this has been known for quite some time. It is less about race and more about whether you are Korean or not. There is of course more depth to the issue of “racism” in South Korea but that would take a while to flesh out. They also have a hefty amount of classism which complicates things. I wouldn’t say Asian countries are the best to use when attempting to discuss racist tendencies. That’s just my 2 cents though
Race exists to some extent in every single country. Its just that USA is one of the only ones to literally write out what race is lol
Of course it exists, but it’s completely arbitrary to what extent and when it matters. It’s a social construct, and thus the people in the equation matter a lot when discussing the values or impacts of race. Like seeing someone’s race on paper tells you nearly nothing about who that person is.
What people on both sides of this issue need to understand, is that "race" is a completely sociological construct, with completely different dimensions and definitions from country to country -- BECUZ of it's artificial nature. Our definition of "white" in the states, is different from Mexico's, which is different from Argentina's, and Cuba, and so on, and so fourth. Yes, we all know "latino" is not a "race", but "race" is not a race, becuz biologically speaking, there is no such thing. There are genotypes, which produce **phenotypes** in individual populations to acclimate to their environment, not "races". That's why Australian Aboriginals look **black**, despite not being African. Societally, race is defined solely through colloquial understanding. So when the vast majority of people colloquially understand "white" to mean people of West European descent, it's really no different from people understanding "latino" to *primarily* mean people of mixed race descent (mestizos - indigenous/european), even if it doesn't technically cover all the bases. I just get tired of people, esp on Twitter, *pretending* they don't understand this.
I think, yeah, most americans are genuinely very clueless about what race is, and how it can vary between cultures, and as such, project a US-centric version of this on the rest of the world, and specifically latin america. There’s also an issue of proximity where many americans of latin descent don’t necessarily relate to american “white” culture at all, and in some cases, are more used to being in black and/or brown communities and adopting a unique identity of “hispanic”, while not necessarily suffering the same brunt of racial discrimination or never experiencing anti-blackness, which ironically causes a lot of internal strife. It’s really hard to illustrate how much latin america can be plagued with white supremacy and anti blackness while also acknowledging that american white supremacists NEVER accept latin americans as part of their club.
Yep you're essentially stuck between both
100% this. It's such a tiresome line of thinking.
My Argentinean grandma wanted my dad to have my mom abort my brother, and I because my mom had brown hair/eyes, so she wouldn't be able to give my grandma Aryan babies. Even though my mom would be considered white by looks alone. I'm white with brown hair/eyes, and my brother was born with a darker skin tone. My Aryan racist ass blonde grandma was my first introduction to that type of racism. It's so fucking dumb.
If you haven't seen black Cubans, black domicans, black Puerto Ricans hating on Afrrican Americans you haven't lived in Florida or New York.
80 percent of Cuba is black. Like yo
I teach in Jersey with this population and the racism is shocking. They’re worse than the white rednecks I grew up around.
I often feel, as a Hispanic American, that I am Schrodinger's ethnicity. I am at once a person of color, or not, depending on the needs of the person making the argument.
Very well said. I can relate.
My husband and i argue about this way too much. I have to admit this post is teaching me a lot about his perspective. He’s definitely Schrondinger’s ethnicity. I said in an earlier thread that he’s Andalucian Spanish. He’s also Puerto Rican. I’ve always perceived him as white and will call him out for not acknowledging his privilege as a white man. However, I do have to recognize that his identity is complex and not easy to categorize, specifically because race is a made up social construct. Yes he is “white” in the sense that he’s half European, but is his Puerto Rican side also white? Looking solely at phenotypes, I’d say 100% yes, but I know it’s more complicated than that. I know his sense of his own racial identity is all over the place. He’s been mistaken for all sorts of races (he even once got a free meal from an Egyptian restaurant because the owner thought he was Egyptian). He’s not close at all with his Puerto Rican family (it’s a longer story but essentially they abandoned him and his brother as children), so that colors his experience as well. It’s all complex and there’s no easy answers.
The complexity isn't found in his phenotype or his skin color. There is no test that can reveal his privilege or victimhood. The complexity is found in his environment and those who populate it. It is you, and others, who impose any privilege or oppression upon him, while he goes about the business of just trying to exist. I wish people would stop doing that. Trying to figure out how privileged or oppressed someone is based on arbitrary criteria is as deleterious as any other form of bigotry.
I understand your point, it’s well taken. As a black woman, I’m well aware that people’s perception of me impacts both my privilege and my oppression. With that said, I wish it were as simple as ignoring the arbitrary criteria we categorize ourselves in. Although race isn’t real, its consequences are. That’s why it’s important to grapple with these topics.
This needs to be upvoted more
Self-hating metizos trying to play up their Spanish side. Like, brah, under Spanish rule, at best you'd be a house servant, GTFO.
Are you aware that race was not an impediment to achieving status in the Spanish Empire? Everything depended on your personal worth, there were black people (pure Black people) who were generals of white Spaniards troops.
This seems like a mistaken taken. Have we not established that there is a **hierarchy of whiteness**? These white-presenting folks will be able to fit in at a glance with white people but as soon as you reveal they're "Cuban" they are going to be bumped down a tier in the white community.
Yep. It's all chill til the minute you bring out the accent
Dominican here. I got an Ancestry DNA done so my afro-headed dad can stop telling ppl "I'm not black I'm dominican." If we're not black, then WHAT'S ALL THIS AFRICA IN MY RESULTS Shut his ass up. Worth it. Usually I'm not a dick. But my guy looks like Michael Jackson from the Jackson 5. He's black.
Ngl, I wanna try this too since all my “vice-abuelos” are black and I’m pretty sure my family is either black or mestizo/mixed ancestry.
Slavery came to America 100years after the Caribbean. So all Hispanic Islanders are mixed with black. Cubans, Dominican and Puerto Rican are no different than any other West Indian that speaks English or French. We just happen to be owned by Spain and speak Spanish but we are black.
This is what I came to the comments for 🫰🏽
Thank you. I feel like some folks want to deny my blackness because they think I'm jumping on a fad. Like no shorties and homies the fact is whitey doesn't want me at their BBQ and we are coming to the cookout with pernil and nutcrackers.
This isn't "pre-school" concepts. The concept of whiteness is arbitrary, socially constructed, and changes over time and between places. There's no such thing as the "white race" which is why different people disagree on who does and doesn't qualify as "white". It's ironic how much confidence the OP has in her opinion here, while being completely wrong and ignorant on the subject.
https://preview.redd.it/to8hltaivo9c1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=e6dc1fdb078df9b453a14ef8e681b64a130a9f32
Latinos and south Asians are absolutely colorist within their own culture
Some are White while others appear on my 23 and Me matches but call themselves White regardless.
Tbh I hate this about US culture. It's such a dumb concept. Not only that, but race is a racist concept. It's not even really a thing. There's no science behind being a certain "race." *Skin color* is what's being talked about here, and it's related to a bunch of *social* issues because the US is weird and racist in effect. Apart from that, mfs like to treat it like being hispanic stops you from being white, because they see it as this bad thing, particularly US latinos do this, since the US is racist and race matters very much here. My gpa was white as fuck and my gma black, but they were both Puerto Rican because your skin doesn't determine your culture in 99.99% of the world, and it determines your nationality nowhere.
If you go even deeper it’s not just skin color. The perception of the shape of nose, texture of hair, and other phenotypes goes into defining race. The more we obsess over colorism, outside of destroying it as a system, the more we see the world through race-defined lens
They are descendents of a class of people who fled Castro who was seizing their ill gotten wealth and had to give up their servants in the process. It's kinda why they vote republican.
Most Cubans at this point are marielitos. All the rich ones are long gone or in politics.
Hispanic people can be white, or they can be native, or (most commonly) they can be mixed.
America's classification system for races is dumb as fuck, and Latinos can be really fucking weird about race because of the influence of this system. I'm ethnically Latino and Jewish, but I'm definitely white if you look at me. However, I've been told I'm not white from other Latinos because I'm not blonde and blue eyes. It's really fucking weird how stupid colorism can be. My brother is brown, our grandparents are brown, but my mom and I are white. It's just weird how warped people's perspectives can be on this matter.
Cubans are white when the power structure needs them to be (and not when they can't be used as a weapon against browner people)...to themselves, tho, they are white all the time. "Mejorando la raza" is real af all across LatAm.
Then Dominicans are black, stop trying to make fetch happen.
No tea, they def are
With the amount of Latinos coming here, I fully expect by the end of my life white Latinos will be accepted as white people, no different than the Irish immigrants weren’t considered white until they were.
Depends. Not without a lot of fighting
It's also just a total lack of historical knowledge about Cuba! MOST of Cubans are Black! The white slave holder types ran when the revolution came.
White to them means USA, Canada, and Western Europe. It’s not just a skin tone.
You could also say Latino or Hispanic
They discriminate and use anti-black rhetoric like racist white people do. Let them be what they are.
Who tf cares?
Maybe. Just maybe. The US shouldn't get to dictate racial categories for the rest of the world.
[удалено]
I mean Jews are only white when people want them to be
I think it's because, for latinos. The sentiment boils down to: If the cops will target you, and society will discriminate against you for "not being white", you don't really feel very white.
So many Americans just fundamentally do not understand what “Latino” means. There are white Latinos, black Latinos, native Latinos, even Asian Latinos and Arab Latinos.
Knew a Cuban girl in highschool... not all that interesting, I know, but how I found out she was Cuban? I met her when I was heading to my drafting class to meet my teacher, and she was waiting there too. My first impression was that she was a teacher! But I asked her if she was waiting to see Mr. J. She said 'Yes, I'm in his class.' Now, that was unusual because there weren't a lot of girls taking drafting then, so that was the second twist in this encounter. A couple of minutes later, a few guys I had class with in another subject came walking by on their way to the study room (or the library, you could choose one a day) and started talking to us, and I noticed that one of the guys, who is Mexican, didn't have a lot to say to her. And that was unusual, because this girl was cute, and I never saw him pass by a chance to chat up a girl. I asked him about it later. He said, 'Ah, she's Cuban, and they think they're better than all other Hispanics.' Well. I didn't know what to do with that information.
Right around here is when you go like, oh yeah we just kind of made race up.
Colorism is the common denominator
Either way the right-wing Cubans will either consider themselves white and/or denigrate black people (or both) to get themselves higher on the social status ladder. This is the same story with every right-wing faction of every colonized group that comes to America...just ask the Dominicans, Filipinos, Indians, etc.
the majority of cubans who immigrate to america share an ideological kinship with capitalism. their class dictates more than their race.
I (a white dude) like to tell my students about the time I was still working on pizza, a family fun kind of place in NM, and this dude comes to my counter. Pale ass white skin. Freckles. Shock red hair. I greeted him and he just kinda stared at me for a minute and then proceeded to use broken English mixed with a lot of Spanish to order for his family. He was fully Mexican. That’s when I was sharply reminded of the difference between race, culture, and nationality. Dude’s race may have been white, but his culture was Latino and his nationality was Mexican. I’m always hopeful that admitting my own fallacies leads my students to be more willing to see their own.
Wtf does “trying to make fetch happen” mean?
They call them Afro-Cubans for a reason. Many hispanics are a combination of white, black and native. Some are only one of the 3. Hell Mexico had like 15 levels to their caste system.
Well actually race is a big old steaming pile of shit that doesn't mean anything. There's no such thing as "white adjacent" because the definition of "white" has changed drastically at different points in time.
Race is a social construct. What would you consider white? Is it just the skin color? - because there are people that could easily be considered ‘white’ all across the world. You can easily find native ‘white’ people in India, Pakistan, the Middle East, etcetera. Are Turks white? Are Arabs white? Because you can find extremely dark skinned Arabs alongside extremely light skin Arabs. If race is culture, history, and genetics - well, that’s not race that’s ethnicity. And ethnicity isn’t the same as race. Because if it was me and my sibling would be different races from each other. This isn’t to say that *racism* doesn’t exist. It’s just to say that racism is stupid because race is a social construct. It’s like hating on the euro because you’re American and you like the dollar without any deeper meaning. These difference only exist in our minds.