This. Most of Latin America (exceptions include Argentina and Chile) parallels the US situation in that you have “black” people and “white” people (some countries, like Cuba and Brazil, have a whole lotta “mixed-race” folks as well, and that’s now a choice as well on US census forms).
Yet, the distinction of being “Latino/Hispanic” is an important one in the US context. So, unless you include both distinctions (it’s almost arbitrary that we choose to call one if them “race” and the other “ethnicity” – it really doesn’t matter much what you call them), you’re going to lose some potentially valuable demographic information.
(A problem, though. It ignores the third important “racial” category – that of (Hispanic) Amerindian, a.k.a. “indigenous.” Is this an option for those who also check “Hispanic” on the US census form?).
But that still raises the question of why not just add more races and ethnicities and allow people to check multiple? I’m sure our newfangled computermabobs are sophisticated enough to handle such a thing, and surely it would be more informative if you’re interested in demographic data.
I work with census data sometimes, and for many purposes it really is a lot easier to only have to deal with a few categories, even if that means simplifying various nuances. The categories the US census already uses are enough to generate a book-full of maps (mainly maps of the country at the county unit of measurement; some others are by state, and others by metropolitan area). Just for the univariate maps, you have percentage maps as well as percentage change maps…and then you start getting into bivariate and multivariate stuff.
Case studies are done to delve deeper into these matters, but at a national level, there are good reasons to keep it reasonably simple.
No, seriously, there are Latin American countries where descendants of Chinese people who immigrated in the 19th century are considered a distinct group. And of course, nowadays you get Latin Americans whose parents are from anywhere in the whole world, including some whose parents would be considered white by Hispanics but brown by Americans.
The forms I had to fill when I was in the US all happened to list “White, not Hispanic” and “Hispanic” (without any additional questions about color) in the same part as “African-American” and others, but that was also back when you only could tick one checkbox. My Dominican coworkers found it pretty irritating, as they often were told they’d ticked the wrong box (“but you’re black, you can’t be Hispanic!” “lady, what I’m not is anything-American!”).
As for whether Filipinos are Hispanics: by the definitions I’m most used to encountering, they’re not Latinos (Latino is a shortening of latinoamericano and the Filipines are not in America), but they’re Hispanic (at least, they are if they speak Spanish as a primary language, note it doesn’t have to be an exclusive primary). By this definition, Spaniards and people from Equatorial Guinea are Hispanics as well.
There are people who insist that Hispanic comes from Hispanoamericano and not of hispanoparlante, but that would mean we need to use the whole mouthful in order to include the whole culture.
There’s a third definition which includes Portugal and her former colonies, by understanding “Hispanic” as “related to Hispania” and not as “speaking the language that’s called ‘Spanish’ in English”; while the Portuguese-speaking don’t usually take offence at seeing their flags among those ringing Our Lady of the Pillar (patron saint of Hispanics) and some even love it, this is not the meaning that’s normally used when talking about ethnicity.
This is always the definition I’ve encountered of “Hispanic”. I recall reading a rather long essay on the Latino/Hispanic distinction way back in English 101 in college, it was a very interesting war that seemed to consist almost entirely of pedantry among people who agreed with each other on most every other related issue. It was kind of odd, and yet fascinating at the same time.
There are plenty of Africans, Middle Eastern (Shakira), and yes, even Chinese in the mixture (may explain the abundance of cheap Chinese food restaurants here). If you want to include the Chinese (which, IIRC, were only present in parts of the Caribbean), you should also include the Middle Eastern group.
Jragon, one of the things I remember being mentioned (but probably not by my professors), was how the term latinoamericano was coined and used by Latinos (us) vs Hispanic being a term assigned originally by others (them). I do know that in most of the essays I had to read in nineteenth century Latinamerican literature referred and used the first term, and did not use Hispanic.
The reality of the situation from a genetic and sociological approach is that “Race” is an undefined and undefinable category category whereas ethnicity actually has some meaning in the real world.
All of the questions should be about ethnicity rather than about race.
Good points about the Chinese and Middle Eastern populations in Latin America. (The most famous example of the latter might be Shakira.) But, as someone else pointed out, there might not be enough of these folks who live in the US to make it worth including separate categories for them in, say, census forms. But I’d have no objection if they did include them.
(How do the US census forms handle “Middle Eastern,” anyway? As a separate, unique, and unitary “race”? Or just as “white”? Or do the ones from, say, Iraq check “Asian” due to their continent, while the Tunisians check “Africa” due to theirs? No, that would be idiotic…)
ETA: Ninja’d by KarlGrenze with the Shakira reference! Hmmm…Shakira in a ninja outfit…nice…but I digress…
Do census forms separate African Americans, descended from slaves in the USA, African emigrants, and Afro-Caribbean people descended from slaves? Is that one race? But how many ethnicities?
Is Irish a separate ethnicity/race- it often is seen as such in the UK because of historic discrimination.
No. Americans of Irish descent are as assimilated – meaning, in this context, “white” – as those of British or German origin these days. Indeed, the majority of white Americans are a mix of two of these three (British, Irish, German), and many, many are a mix of all three (I am an example).
Japanese, too, of course (mostly Brazil (1.5 million) and Peru IIRC). Not sure if there are lots of Indians in the Latin parts of the Caribbean like there are in the Anglo parts. I don’t think significantly many.
Well, loads of 'em in Guyana, which is in South America – hence, by the definition of many, “Latin America” – but is culturally much more a part of the Caribbean region (even though it doesn’t touch the Caribbean Sea.) It’s complicated!
A friend who has been to Guyana gave me a homespun CD from there called “Hot Hot Chutney” – the music is a precise blend of Latin salsa, Caribbean dance rhythms, and South Asian sounds and lyric themes.
“Hispanics” of Amerind, Asian, etc. origins would, I suppose, be able to enter that bit under the “race” question of the two-part questionnaire. I’ve seen a lot of these government forms with those two-parters.
(And yes, “Latino” is an identifier the literary/intellectual class of the region came up with in the 19th Century; “Hispanic” is one that someone came up with in the USA much later. They are not necessarily 100% the same thing.)
As an aside – down here after the last two census results journalist/commentators have written fauxtrage stories a decade apart about how 80% or however many of the people in Puerto Rico marked themselves as “white” in the “race” question. Much handwringing ensued about how that symbolizes self-loathing or a distortion of self-perception or pernicious influences from anglodominant media, yadda yadda…
Thing is, that reaction mostly comes across as glossing over that for the average man-in-the-street actually answering the form in a town in PR (who has not been reading the commentators’ books), in our cultural context there IS such a thing as being a White Puerto Rican, a Black Puerto Rican, a Mixed-race Puerto Rican, etc.; due to sociohistorical factors, contrary to the US, in PR mixed-race defaults to the “whiter” identifier and that had been so since before US influence; so this average man-in-the-street has not been instructed that in the “race” question, “white” means other than what HE calls “white” in our context, he marks “white” and the intelligentsia wails.
I was just thinking about that. Yea, what can be considered in census forms “white” in the US will include only a subset of what is considered “white” in other countries/places (because I’m sure what you mentioned happens in other areas, not just Puerto Rico).
Although I’m sure, with the large amount that selected “white”, that some of those who did would not even qualify as “white” under “PR standards” either.
In the US, no to both. There is occasional commentary that there ought to be a difference between people descended from slaves and people descended from recent immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa because there are significant cultural differences between them, but it is not happening. To some extent, Afro-Caribbean culture and African-American mainland culture has merged to some extent and there is quite a bit of shared history and experience from slavery, so there may not be as much of a push to emphasize a distinction. I’ll let the black people here comment on this if they want. Btw, Colin Powell’s parents were both Jamaican.
As others have mentioned, Irish people in the US have assimilated so much that there really isn’t any political point to identifying who is and who is not Irish. If you decided to start giving minority points to Irish people, you would end up giving them to many, perhaps, most, white people, including ones whose only meaningful connection to Ireland is a family tree that grandma drew up showing one or two Potato Famine refugees.
Yea, what can be considered in census forms “white” in the US will include only a subset of what is considered “white” in other countries/places (because I’m sure what you mentioned happens in other areas, not just Puerto Rico).