I want to know the methodology too. They definitely mention “mixed race.” How mixed? My mother’s half Latino/black, so they’d definitely count her as “non-white” for census purposes despite her looking like the poster child for whiteness. How about Vynce and I at 1/4th “non-white”? What about my hypothetical offspring, and nieces and nephews at 1/8th? A whole crapload of people that everyone would agree are white are to varying extents mixed race, so the story just strikes me as sensationalism designed to worry old people.
She’s done interviews for Hispanic Heritage Month about her status as Mexican-American and how she’s proud of her hispanic heritage. What part of Europe is Mexico?
I figured you’d harp on the “Mexican” part, but I didn’t say Mexican-American because that’s not what I’d say IRL since we’re talking about heritage and not nationality, and I knew my meaning was obvious.
According to Wikipedia, “Her DNA test results were: 70% European, 27% Asian/Indigenous, and 3% African.[56] Specifically, her indigenous American ancestry is Mayan.” So yeah, she’s a mixture of European and indigenous, like most Mexicans. I doubt she or anyone else other than you considers her white.
Depends on the social context. Here in LA, most people would read her as Latina, Mexican or Central American. But she could also easily be Armenian, Persian, Arab, or even a “light skinned black person”. But this is LA, the land of brown and beige, where black folks and fair skinned white folks are both outliers.
In New York, she might be Sicilian or Puerto Rican. It would depend on where she lived, what kind of people she hung out with, other cultural cues.
Out in flyover country, there are a helluva lot of white folks, especially older white folks, who wouldn’t see her as white. She just too dark for that. In small town Wisconsin, for example, white means you can see blood in the face. It means you burn if you spend a day out in the summer sun.
eta,
The other part of social context is who you date and marry. Intermarriage with the historical white American community is the gold standard as far as measuring assimilation is concerned. People who do this routinely are either white or well on the way to becoming white.
Longoria married a black identified multi racial guy, so she’s probably not white at all, in a social context.
Fiscal ? Social, more like. In my experience, recent immigrants (at least those who come from overwhelmingly Catholic countries) don’t give that many fucks about the budget being balanced to the fifth decimal, but they do care about marriage being between a man and a woman like it was in the old country.
[QUOTE=Brain Glutton]
Why wouldn’t they?
[/QUOTE]
At a guess: X-on-non-white crime, felony arrest (which IIRC precludes one from voting in the US) and US Army rah-rah bang dead. All of which would be equally valid for white babies if there wasn’t a relatively straightforward correlation between skin tone and poverty in Western nations.
Has anyone in all of history gone from being identified as non-white to white because they marry a white spouse?! I’m sorry that simply doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t go the other way either.
In order to be white, your Latino characteristics have to have faded enough that people would not think you had any Latino ancestry just by looking. Everything about Eva Mendez still looks Latino, from the olive skin tone to the eyebrow shape.
Charlie Sheen, on the other hand, is someone whose Latino ancestry is not visible.
I don’t know why people think it has anything to do with how long you’ve lived in America or even how many generations of white ancestors you have. There are only two criteria ever used: how you self-identify, and what you look and sound like. Ancestry is only relevant in how it affects that.
Intermarriage rates are one of the most important metrics for assimilation. Basic sociology. A group of people is socially white when they routinely date, and marry whites.
Like the Chinese in Jim Crow Mississippi. They sued to make sure they were not considered “colored” and not forced to send their kids to segregated schools. They prevailed, sent their kids to the white schools, and routinely intermarried with whites. So they were socially white.
Oy… Not all of us are of such significant Native or African ancestry. A LOT of us look like… well, like the transplanted Spaniards our great-great-grandparents were. Southern Europeans, if anything we look Mediterranean and may get confused with Italians, Greeks or Israelis. Once in a while someone tells me surprisedly that I don’t look Puerto Rican… and a couple of times they were clumsy enough to say I “looked white”. To which my answer was, I am, and let the gears grind as they try and process that.
