Minor nitpick: Hispanic is really not a race, even in the American world where Caucasian (which is always hilarious to me because, you know, the Caucasus is a real place) and "black" are ( and they aren't).
Sure, race and ethnicity refer to heritage. But "hispanic" apparently means only... Well, les'see: A heritage from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. Countries which contain different races and ethnicities. So that leaves only a heritage of... the Spanish language, AFAICS. A linguistic heritage, not a racial or ethnic one.
Hispanic is just a bad name for the category as it is not a race as a descendent of portuguese or spanish, or any other european people, with no intermixture with native americans, or vice-versa, are both hispanics.
Hence why Americans have to distinguish between white or non-white hispanics.
>Hispanic is just a bad name for the category as it is not a race as a descendent of portuguese or spanish, or any other european people, with no intermixture with native americans, or vice-versa, are both hispanics.
How is it any less meaningful than "black" that comprises ethnicities and mixes of ethnicities that vary far more than all(!) people outside of sub-Saharan Africa (in pre-globalization sense) taken together.
>Hence why Americans have to distinguish between white or non-white hispanics.
They also distinguish brown from black, African-American from black and god knows what else.
What, I thought that was just South Africa (under Apartheid)?
> African-American from black
I thought those were synonyms?
> and god knows what else.
Yeah, for a country ostensibly attempting to get away from its old racist ways, the USA seems remarkably fixated on the minutiae of distinguishing and registering "race".
No, despite what the staff of my then-college’s newspaper apparently were thinking when writing about a visit by Winnie Mandela to the US, “African-American” and “black” are not synonyms.
Duh, true, of course. I've seen (and laughed at) the same thing, "African-American" being used about immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Sweden, people who had never been near America.
But what I (must have) meant to write was, "African-American" is pretty much the mandatory term to use for American Blacks, right? (<-- And should "Blacks" really be capitalised there?)
Scientifically, "Black" is probably less of a race than "Hispanic" in a global context, possibly that's reversed if you focus just on USA though.
And neither are really races as science says were all the human race, just if you were going to say genetic similarity is 'race' that would be the case because of the vast diversity in African genetics that happen to have dark skin (which isnt even necessary to be 'black' in the usa.)
Race is a social construct invented by colonizers (whites) as a way to categorize and other-ize everyone else. It has no biological or ethnic or cultural meaning. Race is not an inherent thing, but a complex relationship between groups of people with unequal power and privileges.
It's a race as much as "person from English speaking coubtry" is a race. It encompasses white Spaniards, black Dominicans, and indigenous people from Central and South America who don't necessarily speak Spanish themselves.
There are two dictionary definitions of race: people sharing common biological features, and people in the same ethnic group. The biological features one clearly doesn't work.
An ethnic group is a group of people who share a common cultural background or descent, but the cultures and descents of these people are very different.
There are no human races. The very practice of talking about human races as if they exist is itself already racist. It always boggles my mind how talking about race seems to be completely normal and acceptable in the US...
Does it not depend on the intent? The word "racism" implies some kind of bad intent if I am not mistaken. You might have a useless or uninformed piece of conversation around race (whatever the word "race" is supposed to mean; I really do not exactly know nor do I care) but this does not imply that there is racism involved.
The problem is that using the term “race“ affirmatively legitimizes the concept of human race. Not only does it have no basis in reality, it can be extremely harmful, as history has shown.
And why can't an arbitrary set of genetic and cultural traits have a name? Everything else in this universe can be broken down to an arbitrary set of something. Why for e.g. call somebody an American when it's only a person living withing arbitrary lines on map?
At the very least, representation in government. People who share my ethnicity have unique social problems that don't apply to any other "race". I don't need a race, but the people who share my background need to be discernible on a census.
But you just said "people who share my ethnicity", which has nothing to do with race. People of any race can share your ethnicity. Is a black Mexican closer in culture to a Nigerian or to a Mexican?
I'm not sure you understand how governments work. That's ok. On a census, there's no box to check off every strain that makes up my ethnicity. There's a box that says "Hispanic". I'm being descriptive, not prescriptive.
That's mostly down to a weird quirk of English, which uses the word "race" for both ~"breed" and "species", so you can say "There are no 'races', we're all just the Human Race!". In most other languages, where "race" means only ~"breed" and not "species", that's as silly as saying "There are no 'breeds', all dogs are just the Dog Species!" Yeah, sure, but a Dachshund is quite different from a Great Dane in many ways (and, yes, of course quite similar in many more), so the statement is nonsense. They're both the Dog species, but different breeds.
Limit the word to mean only ~"breed" and it does kind of make sense for humans, too: There are definitely sub-groups of us, the members of which share many similar physical characteristics within the group and differ in these characteristics between the groups, because of long genetic isolation. If you look at it calmly you realise that's not a big problem in and of itself -- the problems come when you start claiming some of these groups are inherently superior or inferior to each other: One can admit that an African differs from an Asian, while still realising that a blanket statement saying an African is "better" than an Asian or vice versa is as silly as a blanket statement saying a Dachshund is "better" than a Great Dane or vice versa.
I'm not sure, but it often feels like this linguistic oddity makes the whole subject so much more inflamed and harder to discuss in the English-speaking world.
Pliny the Elder's Natural History (77–79 AD) derives the name of the Caucasus from Scythian kroy-khasis ("ice-shining, white with snow").[9] German linguist Paul Kretschmer notes that the Latvian word Kruvesis also means "ice".[10][11]
In the Tale of Past Years (1113 AD), it is stated that Old East Slavic Кавкасийскыѣ горы (Kavkasijskyě gory) came from Ancient Greek Καύκασος (Kaúkasos; later Greek pronunciation Káfkasos)),[12] which, according to M. A. Yuyukin, is a compound word that can be interpreted as the "Seagull's Mountain" (καύ-: καύαξ, καύηξ, ηκος ο, κήξ, κηϋξ "a kind of seagull" + the reconstructed \*κάσος η "mountain" or "rock" richly attested both in place and personal names).[13]
In Georgian tradition, the term Caucasus is derived from Caucas (Georgian: კავკასოსი Kawḳasosi), the son of the Biblical Togarmah and legendary forefather of Nakh peoples.[14][15]
According to German philologists Otto Schrader and Alfons A. Nehring, the Ancient Greek word Καύκασος (Kaukasos) is connected to Gothic Hauhs ("high") as well as Lithuanian Kaũkas ("hillock") and Kaukarà ("hill, top").[12][16] British linguist Adrian Room points out that Kau- also means "mountain" in Pelasgian.[17]
It’s actually a very funny term if you are from Russia. Because in Russia Caucasian means someone from Caucasian mountains and they are often considered “black” as opposed to Europeans and Asians by the general xenophobic wisdom.
Appropriately for your pun, the guy who came up with the term caucasian did so because he thought the perfect specimens of young male beauty came from the caucauses.