Most of the time it does NOT mean skin color. Otherwise 'caucasian' wouldn't be there, a lot of latinos (or at least Brazilians) would be 'white' too, my wife (who basically reflects light) and myself included.
By the US federal definition, a lot of latinos are white. Hispanic/Latino is classified as an "ethnicity" not a "race" so you can be e.g. white/latino or native-american/latino
> Hispanic/Latino is classified as an “ethnicity” not a “race”
Hispanic/Latino (and not-Hispanic/Latino) are the only ethnicities in that context, and it exists specifically to enable categorization that reflects the social construction of Whiteness at the time it was created while not obviously breaking the (bogus, in any case) biological rationale for the construction of “racial” categories, which is why most categorizations of data using that ethnicity treat Hispanic/Latino as another bucket alongside the racial buckets, from which everything of either White or every race (usage differs) is transferred if Hispanic/Latino ethnicity is also indicated, leaving the effected race buckets with only the non-Hispanic/Latino elements.
Don't they call you "white hispanic"? As far as I know they just have white, black, native american and asian in the main race categories, then you might add "hispanic black" or "hispanic white" to those two, but hispanic isn't a separate category.
Brazilians don't really associate themselves with the term "hispanic" given the country was colonized by Portugal, not Spain... and it's hard to argue the term is a drop-in replacement for "Latin American" when Brazil represents ~50% of LatAm population
I'm talking about how USA sees race and the forms you fill in there, not reality of human ancestry. USA has a very antiquated view on race, but that is the legal definition so that is what we talk about when we are talking about race with respect to US employment laws.
Hard to be hispanic when I'm 50% German, 25% Italian, 25% Portuguese (in terms of my grandparents/grand-grandparents). Where I'm from in Brazil, it's very common for people to be eligible for getting Italian and German citizenships (wife and myself included)
I'm in Canada, which I think it's similar. I'm not sure, but I would guess yes, because Latinos are considered PoC, independently of actual skin colour, AFAIK. If I say to anyone that I'm white, they'll think I'm wrong, because of accent+name
It sounds more and more like in the US (and, perhaps, in Canada too) people are being divided into essentially 2 categories: white and non-white. But to complicate things, people with identical ancestry and of identical skin color can be considered white or non-white based on the country of their birth.
Meanwhile, us Slavs, who were genocided 80 years ago for not being ‘Aryan’ enough, and not even considered ‘white’ 100 years ago are lumped in with WASPs…
I’m committed to anti racism but the US approach is charlatanism all the way down. The esteemed Dr King and Mr X would be rolling in their graves.
You should know that anti-racism means a specific thing, it's been co opted by a certain ideology. The rest of your comment attests that you do not ascribe to that ideology so you may want to update your nonclem to just "against racism"
Technically there are more options, I agree. Practically very often these options are divided into whites (includes Asians) and people of color (includes Latinos but blacks have priority).
> Most of the time in the US race means skin color.
No, it doesn’t. In fact, most of the time in the US, “skin color” is code for race/ethnicity. Light-skinned Black people, White non-Hispanics, mostly-White Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians can have very similar or even identical literal skin colors; but the Black person is still Black, the Whites are still White (except maybe the Hispanic ones), and the rest are neither White nor Black.