Shhhhhh, we want them to think we are all redneck bigots.
Yes, the US Federal Government considers these to be legitimate classifications and allows these selections on virtually all official demographics forms.
Why is there no White (not-German), Asian (not-Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, or Thai), or Mixed Race (less than 25% Scottish and not more than 1/8 Cambodian)? Aren’t those legitimate ways that one could identify themselves? The reason, of course, is that those classifications don’t serve the government’s political purpose to help certain minorities. If you aren’t “on the list” of minorities so to speak, you are invisible. The government simply doesn’t care whether or not Scotsmen get into college at the same rate as Manxmen.
I wonder if Chinese self-obsess by discussing in group and getting hot and bothered over the ethnic dominance of Han Chinese in Falun Gong.
Really? They might not use the terms “white and black latinos” or whatever, but no latinos ever call each other “moreno” or “fresa” or “hwedo”? Why do I know those terms and I am not even Latino? I think your claim is bogus.
You are completely wrong about the ethnic composition of Filipinos. I dunno where you got that from. Do you think the islands were uninhabited before Chinese and Spaniards arrived? :dubious:
Excuse me, what is hwedo? I tried a google and it comes up with dragons.
I’m not sure of the spelling, it sounds like “hwedo” or “juedo”, it could be just Mexican slang. It’s basically the opposite of moreno.
I think the point was that color wasn’t the primary way that Latinos identify themselves. There’s a difference between acknowledging that there are white people and black people and claiming that that dividing people into “white” and “black” boxes is important. Americans do understand the difference between tall people and short people (though, just like race, there are vague border areas), but do not obsess over measuring each other and making sure that the right label is printed on their passports.
Have you ever been to Latin America? There is a lot of diversity down there, all the way from pasty gingers to people as dark as equatorial Africans, just like you find in the US. What you do find down there is a lot more mixing, so the average person is a sort of medium light brown to brown and there are relatively few very pale or very dark people. There is a color spectrum, rather than the US’s “color line”. Now go to the US, and the “color line” becomes very distinct.
Moderator Note
April R, insulting comments like this are not permitted in General Questions. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I’ve seen Chinese Mormons! Two, in NYC. I’ve also seen Chinese Jehova’s Witnesses, distributing the Watchtower in Chinese. The only reason I recognized them is because i recognized the Watchtower magazine, even if it wasn’t in English.
Both experiences were rather surreal.
John D. Fitzgerald was author of The Great Brain books, fictionalized accounts of his childhood growing up in Utah territory. He also wrote a straighter version, Papa Married a Mormon. His father was Catholic, his mother Mormon, and all the children went Catholic except for one, his brother Tom. When Tom was old enough he was sent on a mission to China, and this was no later than the turn of the 19th century into the 20th. So the LDS have been working at it.
For a church that has only been established since the 1800, we are extremely diverse. There are regional differences and the leadership is rather homogeneous, but on the same note other denominations have a much more storied and established history. I.e. where is our black pope? Why are we not questioning the obvious split along color lines in the Baptist and Pentecostal churches. The LDS Church makes distinctions on language and offers services in languages prominent in certain locations such as Spanish and Vietnamese, but does not separate members by race or ethnicity. You want to criticize us on something it’s more legitimate to call us our on our stance on homosexuality not race relations. I for one think we are pretty progressive in our attitudes and acceptance of others no matter their country of origin or ethnic makeup. As for interracial relationships, my own sister in law is married to a Samoan, one of our Stake leaders (high regional leadership office) is a black man married to a white lady, I have an older friend at church who is a white lady married to a Tongan, and two of my best friends from church are black women married to white men. Anecdotes for sure, but factual church sanctioned eternally blessed unions nonetheless.
I grew up in SLC as a non-member. My wife is a lifelong member.
I lived on the west side of the valley and the LDS wards were mostly white but by the late 80’s early 90’s you started to see more islanders move in. Where my wife is from it was mainly whites. This was due to a large number of missions in the area to convert the people and provide services. Since BYU offers cheaper tuition and priority registration to members a lot of islander families ended up coming to the US and Utah.
We now live in WA state and in her ward there are some African American families, Hispanic families, and Asian families. Still mostly white but a bit more diverse. Her sister is in an area with a lot more immigrants here in WA and their numbers are a lot more diverse into Hispanic and African American groups.
As others have stated though, outside of the US, the LDS population is much larger as well as representative of the local race (obviously)
Hmmm… there’s a lot of Hindus and Sikhs in my neighbourhood and city, and they almost all seem to be light brown. So I’m not sure what the point of the OP or discussion is.
LDS was a religion that grew up among a bunch of mostly north-European settlers who bugged out for Salt Lake area due to persecution. The racially diverse character of much of the USA is due to migration factors that did not affect Utah - initially slavery, then sharecroppers migrating to cities in the industrial north; Chinese and south European migrants looking for factory jobs in the late 1800’s once the land was already settled; most recently, latinos (legal and illegal) looking for menial jobs that were an improvement over what they left behind. Much of those draws did not apply to Utah, they were never a slave state and not known for heavy industry, a remote destination for immigrants who tended to settle where they landed.
Do they look better? An emphasis on clean-cut and well-dressed probably helps - it’s amazing how much of a “make-over” consists of proper grooming and clean clothes… Not to mention lack of facial piercings or tattoos.
Should we be surprised that a church of tightie-whities had a history of racial bias, considering it was accepted behaviour and law of the land in much of the USA? I don’t think so. The US army actually considered whether they needed to segregate blood banks the same way they segregated their regiments in WWII. Toilets, drinking fountains, Woolworth lunch counters, and of course busses, were segregated by law. Jimmy Carter decided to change churches when he became president, since his chosen (Baptist?) church in Washington did not allow black members - in 1976! I don’t think the Mormons were that far off the tenor of their times, especially when being run by grey 70-year-olds.
As for mixed marriages - the fertile grounds for fresh converts tend to be the poorer areas and foreign countries, which nowadays means ethnically mixed (or not mixed). If the LDS has a policy of expanding their church, they seem to target these areas; they require their adherents to spend a substantial time in early adulthood being missionaries. Here’s a young adult put in close proximity with local converts, in a religion that emphasizes family - any surprise they may end up married to one of the local converts? I suspect current younger members don’t have anywhere near the hang-ups about race that the grey-haired hangovers from the 50’s might have.
Two years later, I’m back with a reply!
[Except for maybe the last few decades,] there was a lot more miscegenation in the days before the great immigration waves of the late 19th and early 20th century than there was after. And in those early days after the Civil War, a great many ex-slaves or even free blacks “passed” into white society. Now, it’s not unusual for white folks to be, say, 3rd generation Italian in the US today, in which case your ancestors missed out on all that inter-racial mixing.
For me, both my paternal grandparents were born in Europe, so it would be unlikely for me to have recent African roots on that side of the family. However, on my mom’s side we go back almost all the way to the Mayflower, so who knows who was boinkng whom back in the day. And if your white family traces its roots to the South (my roots are in the North), then you’re even more likely to have some African ancestry.
Does that make sense?
Yes, I have been to Mexico (several times, several locations), Argentina, Costa Rica (lived there for half a year), Miami (four years) and several SW US locations where you should not get lost if you can’t speak Spanish. My coworkers in those and other locations have included people from Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador and El Salvador, I think I’m not leaving anybody out. Whether we should include Brasil in the count or not, we’ll set aside since it’s one of those discussions which are best had after everybody has had enough food to be mellow and not enough alcohol to be agressive, but they also definitely do not consider color as much of a key divider as Americans do.
In Miami two of my students and I once cracked up a fellow student when we switched back to English seeing him there listening without understanding, he said we didn’t have to and we answered “but of course we do! You’re anglo, aren’t you? Uh, we mean, you speak English, not Spanish!”. He was anglo in Spanish (language) but not Anglo in American English (in which he was African-American).
I think you mean huero or güero then (same pronunciation, different spellings). Officially it means blonde, extraoficially it can be used to mean pale.
Peru! I left out a Peruvian, sorry Pablo.
Yeah, thanks, I didn’t know there was ever a period of more interracial mixing between whites and blacks back then, though I knew that it tended to be more common in the south. Thanks for finally answering a question I forgot I asked! 
Makes sense, thank you.
Young mormons typically go on crusades to various countries to try and get people to join their cause/religion, I believe it is a rite of passage into a higher level of mormonism, I’m not sure who pays for the crusade but it is usually done in at least pairs. Maybe the parents, maybe the church pays for it, I don’t know, but have you ever seen the inside of a mormon temple? I bet the temple pays for it or a lot of it. It would be difficult to identify percentages of nationalism but if you watch “Hell On Wheels” there was at least one Norwegian in the late 1800’s.
People who know what they’re talking about refer to it as a mission, not a crusade.
While culturally, such as in the Intermountain West, a mission may be seen as such–and the LDS church leadership does strongly encourage serving a mission–it is not a requirement for any “higher level”; one may be a member in good standing without serving a mission.
Members who serve missions do work in pairs once arriving in their mission area; however, there are times when they must work in groups of three or four. Also, the missionaries report individually to the mission training center and the mission companion assignments change through the period of the mission. As to who pays for the mission, the member pays for it himself or herself.
Do tell.
Yes, I have. I have seen the inside of a few LDS temples.
The temples pay for none of the mission.
Nationalism is not a synonym for ethnicity.
As someone mentioned up-thread, it’s rather difficult to determine the ethnic composition of the faith’s membership since the LDS church does not keep such a record.
That was more than a little condecending.
Read about mission work if you really want to know instead of spreading misinformation please