Could a thread on this work:
What do you think would be the hardest on you, and which do you think would be the easiest on you? Being a different sexuality than you are now, being a different race than you are now, or being a different gender than you are now?
(Basically a different way to get people to reflect on what's currently worse in American society... racism, sexism, or homophobia)
I see nothing beyond the pale as to that kind of thread. It is not asking about the merits of a group as to which having a negative opinion would raise issues, but rather a personal question about how one might navigate having been dealt a different deck of cards than one was in fact dealt.
OK...
I can address that.
I was born a normal white kid in Cuba, the grandchild of Euro immigrants (Spaniards).
I migrated to the US in 1968, and apparently something happened on the flight over because once we landed, we weren't allowed to mark the "Caucasian" box in the immigration forms. I'm not quite sure what we were called, but we were no longer Caucasian. I recall correcting someone who asked me if I was Mexican a couple of years later (they saw my last name), and his response was basically "Cuban Mexican, Puerto Rican Mexican, Mexican Mexican... what difference does it make?"
That was rough.
Then in 1973, Richard Nixon invented Hispanics and suddenly I'd been transferred. I was now a member of an ethnicity that didn't exist at the time of my birth. It was (as best as I can explain) ethnic conscription. Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans... one big happy opinion pollster group. As an additional benefit, I had a whole new box to check off on the census forms.
Everything went along fine for years, and I sort of got used to my status, then one day George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin and VOILA! White Hispanics were born, and I'd been transferred again.
I'm training my kids to be white as most descendants of Europeans seem to claim that they are, and to enunciate their last name the same way that people from the UP pronounce it (that's as Caucasian as one can get) and maybe people will see them and think "you're too white and too tall to be a Mexican of any nationality", and the generations of my descendants will just be...
Well, maybe by then we'll stop the silliness and decide to just be people.
The whole Hispanic category is pretty stupid. The census should abolish the "Do you have Hispanic/Latino ancestry" question and add mestizo, mulatto, and native Meso/South American as racial categories. Asian should also be split into East and South/Central Asian while Caucasian should be split into European (which is what everyone means by white) and Middle Eastern/North African. This last one is actually supposed to happen in 2020. I think that would help.
I would consider you white if your ancestry is just Spanish. I think from a political standpoint white hispanics are more right leaning than brown hispanics. It would be interesting to see polling of the different subsets of Hispanic/Latino if that category was abolished.
