Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Nathan Newman wrote:
>
> >Latino is a similarly multiple identity, since latinos come in a range of
> >races and colors and heritages.
>
> Here's the Census Bureau definition of "Hispanic":
>
> >Hispanic Origin. Persons of Hispanic origin in this file are
> >determined on the basis of question that asked for
> >self-identification of the person's origin or descent. Respondents
> >are asked to select their origin (Or the origin of some other
> >household member) from a "flash card" listing ethnic origins.
> >Persons of Hispanic origin, in particular, are those who indicated
> >that their origin was Mexican-American, Chicano, Mexican, Mexicano,
> >Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or other Hispanic.
Barbara Jeanne Fields commented usefully on this kind of confusion:
***** One of the most important of these absurd assumptions, accepted implicitly by most Americans, is that there is really only one race, the Negro race. That is why the Court had to perform intellectual contortions to prove that non-Negroes might be construed as members of races in order to receive protection under laws forbidding racial discrimination. Americans regard people of known African descent or visible African appearance as a race, but not people of known European descent or visible European appearance. That is why, in the United States, there are scholars and _black scholars_, women and _black_ women. Saul Bellow and John Updike are writers; Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison are _black_ writers. George Bush and Michael Dukakis were candidates for president; Jesse Jackson was a _black_ candidate for president.
Moreover, people in the United States do not classify as races peoples of non-European but also non-African appearance or descent, except for purposes of direct or indirect contrast with people of African descent; and even then, the terms used are likely to represent geography or language rather than biology: _Asian_ or _Hispanic_.[5] Even when terms of geography designate people of African descent, they mean something different from what they mean when applied to others. My students find it odd when I refer to the colonizers of North America as _Euro-Americans_, but they feel more at ease with _Afro-Americans_, a term which, for the period of colonization and the slave trade, has no more to recommend. Students readily understand that no one was really a European, since Europeans belonged to different nationalities.
==================================================== 5. That is not, of course, to deny the well-justified annoyance of Japanese-, Chinese-, Korean-, and Indian-Americans at being classed together as _Asian-Americans_ or, still more inaccurately, as simply _Asians_. Nor is it to overlook the nonsense that flourishes luxuriously around the attempt to set terms of language and geography alongside the term that supposedly represents biological race. Survey-researchers for the United States government often ask "Hispanics" whether they wish to be considered "white" or "black." The resulting classifications can divide members of a single family. As often as not, the report of the results proceeds to distinguish _Hispanics_ from _blacks_ and _whites_. Moreover, the government regards Portuguese-speaking Brazilians as "Hispanic" and requires that they so identify themselves when applying for a social security number, as the Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado discovered during a recent visit.
====================================================
A second absurd assumption inseparable from race in its characteristic American form takes for granted that virtually everything people of African descent do, think, or say is racial in nature. Thus, anyone who followed the news commentaries on the presidential election primaries of 1988 learned that, almost by definition, Afro-Americans voted for Jesse Jackson because of racial identification -- despite polls showing that Jackson's supporters were far more likely than supporters of any other candidate to identify with specific positions that they agreed with on issues that mattered to them. Supporters of the others regarded their men as interchangeable, and were likely to switch again and again, in response to slick advertising spots or disparaging rumors.
("Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," by Barbara Jeanne Fields. New Left Review, May/June 1990.) ***
Carrol