Racing to racialize Latinos

[CheapShotArtist]

Read more here: http://www.beinglatino.us/comunidad/racing-to-racialize-latinos/

The Census tackles a question 500 years in the making:
“Hispanics may become a race of their own in the U.S. Census — a major change that some Latino advocacy groups are opposing.
Currently, the Census considers Hispanic not a race but an ethnic background. Hispanics can be of any race, and Hispanic origin is asked on Census forms in a question separate from the one about race.
Now, the Census is considering eliminating the Hispanic origin question and combining it with the race question in a ‘race or origin’ category. …
Hispanics historically have had difficulty identifying with existing race categories.”

[Igel]

1. It would be a bad thing.

Good for some kinds of politics, a rich resource to be mined for political power and the personal power that goes along with it (for certain people).

But divisive. The last thing we need are more boundaries to accentuate and fight over, more Balkanization of American society. Even if it does help align power structures the way "we" like them it's a foolish idea.

As though America never has foolish ideas.

[CheapShotArtist]

2. .

[HiPointDem]

3. "a race" = stupid.

[lunatica]

4. Let's see...

Most Latinos are made up of every race. There are still pure native Indians, but they're a minority. But there is a lot of Spanish blood which is basically white, and black slaves were once imported but they soon mixed it up with the natives, so there's black blood there too. And there some Chinese mixture so I think there's not much of a pure racial thing going on with Hispanics.

[Nye Bevan]

5. I wish they would simply stop asking about race.

As multiracial families become more and more common, the whole question becomes more and more meaningless. What box do you check if you are one quarter Native American, one quarter Zimbabwean, one quarter German, and one quarter Spanish?

[CheapShotArtist]

6. Agreed. Just ditch the race question.

Many other countries don't even ask about a person's race on their Census. It's a socially-constructed concept.