The Convenience Of Counting Hispanic or Latino As White
Color Hierarchy (Colorism) and the Rare Opportunity For Socioeconomic Manumission
Quite a bit of collateral damage is done when you incorrectly fill out the government census reports. Apparently the legacy of slavery and colonialism have left many confounded due to the valorization of fairer or lighter skin coupled with Anglo facial features. This warped internalization of your very own history and culture is disheartening and further exacerbates the distortion of socioeconomic policies that enable inequality.
In the 2010 United States Census, 50.5 million Americans (16.3% of the total population) listed themselves as ethnically Hispanic or Latino. Of those, 53.0% (26.7 million) self-identified as racially white. The remaining respondents listed their races as: Some other race 36.7%, Two or more races (multiracial) 6.0%, Black or African American 2.5%, American Indian and Alaska Native 1.4%, Asian 0.4%, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander 0.1%.[15]
The respondents in the “Some other race” category are reclassified as white by the Census Bureau 😯 in its official estimates of race. This means that more than 90% of all Hispanic or Latino Americans are counted as “white” in some statistics of the US government.[22]
Hispanics and Latinos who are native-born and those who are immigrant identify as White in nearly identical percentages: 53.9 and 53.7, respectively, per figures from 2007. The overall Hispanic or Latino ratio was 53.8%.[23]
This setting does not bode well for yourself nor the vast majority of minorities in terms of their inclusion and protection of interests, because it allows for disproportional representation, which is neither inclusive, nor representative. In other words it’s not a true consensus. It is a convenient lie.
What the census represents is the persistence of white privilege and its buy-in influence.
What this actually does…
This leads you to believe that there is something more to this condition of having fairer or lighter skin that affiliates you with being somewhat racially superior amongst marginalized darker skin people.
This leads you to believe that your co-optive presumption of de facto and de jure power is proportionally genetic to you due to having fairer or lighter skin.
This leads you to believe that you are actually on-par with your racially white counterparts socioeconomically, but the color hierarchy in place relatively places you otherwise below, and you actually placate the majority in many scenarios with this, and this is why I liken this to some sort of delusional socioeconomic manumission granted by majoritarian democratic principles and ideologies.
This does conflate public opinion polls, which leads you to believe that popular opinions are actually the public opinion.
No it is not.
This is not the root cause of inequality, the answers here reflect only the consequences of inequality and represent a majoritarian view that is centrist right. These answers are a deflection of what is actually causing inequality.
It appears that associating yourself with the socioeconomically advantaged and privileged racial population conveniently based on how well you appear to pass for white has deleterious effects on perception and decision-making for the broader American society.
Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Marco Rubio, to name a few are highly propped up statesmen whose views conflict broadly with the national consensus but locally convey views of the histrionic opinions of the aesthetic ideals of false narratives and appeal to sincere fiction.
The policies carried out by our present institutions reflect more of a centrist-right bias that embodies a false narrative and appeal to sincere fiction. Everyone seems to agree that there needs to be reform based on our socioeconomic and bipartisan condition. To be more exacting we are actually more multi-partisan than the media would have you believe.
The reason why the response on inequality seems so conflicted among “public opinion” is due to this very same paradox of living in a post-racial America, while trying to associate yourself with the economically advantaged race in order to ameliorate your internalizations of slave and colonial legacies and today’s perception bias.
What you may not have been privy to
I would like to point to the symbolism of lynching which signaled subjugated behavior is expected and served as a warning that a certain social distancing is to be followed. Seemingly under the social construct non-white minorities that are not Black assume that the threat is not targeted at them, then and now. The symbol that the noose carries is more so for Blacks, which is inaccurate by all historical accounts under white supremacy. A Harvard Civil Rights — Civil Liberties Law Review authored by Richard Delgado titled The Law of the Noose: A History of Latino Lynching is more than just enlightening, it is pertinent to the overlooked convenience of whiteness and its sincere fictions towards the Hispanic and Latino population.
For example, recent research by reputable historians shows that Latinos, particularly Mexican Americans in the Southwest, were lynched in large numbers during roughly the same period when lynching of blacks ran rampant. Few people know this. Every school child knows that blacks suffered that fate. Why do so few know about the lynching of Latinos?
A recent casebook Latinos and the Law: Cases and Materials, summarizes much of what is known about Latino lynching. Most of the material cited therein is relatively recent, yet the numbers the authorities report are remarkably similar— 597 lynchings or slightly more¹² — most of them dating to the same period when black lynching ran rampant, Reconstruction and the years immediately following it¹³. Moreover, the reasons that motivated the lynchings were similar for the two groups— acting “uppity,” taking away jobs, making advances toward a white woman, cheating at cards, practicing “witchcraft,” and refusing to leave land that Anglos coveted— with one exception¹⁴. Mexicans were lynched for acting “too Mexican”— speaking Spanish too loudly or reminding Anglos too defiantly of their Mexican-ness¹⁵. Even Mexican women, often belonging to lower economic classes,were lynched, often for sexual offenses such as resisting an Anglo’s advances too forcefully.
Motivated ignorance does more harm than good. It desensitizes the effects of whiteness and disingenuously placates the status quo. It demonstratively embellishes history or erases it rather, out of political convenience and promotes anti-intercultural rhetoric amongst non white peoples — ironically within a democratic system.
In order to expand opportunity and mobility the system must embrace inclusion as oppose to denying or ignoring it. This newfound appreciation for systemic and covert oppression is actually absurd because so-called white Latino persons in fact inflict this psychological harm on themselves — their browner kinfolk, while denigrating ancestral groups through a subtle and sophisticated form of dehumanization.
By the way under this socially constructed model of humanity is White-Hispanic more so relative to being a White-African?
