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.
The term Hispanic just refers to anyone with heritage from a Spanish speaking country in the Americas. It is neither a race nor an ethnicity.