The US and Latin American media has done a great job of constructing an image of what Latinxs look like, and that image is rarely black or fully indigenous, for example. We, like the rest of the world, have internalized these messages of white supremacy through the media and through our education. Francesca: Damn. There has to be a better way to talk about this.
Well, there is a better way. The census is planning to make changes in in one huge way. Hispanic, Latino and Spanish origin will be a category like everything else, with no qualifiers. That means people will now check the categories that best describe them. This will not only give us a better idea of how many people identify as Hispanic or Latino, but could also give us a better idea of multi-racial and multi-ethnic numbers.
To return to the original question, are Hispanic or Latino people white? Special thanks to my friend, Kat Lazo. Tell us where we can find you online. Thanks so much for watching. With over k subscribers on her two YouTube channels, Chescaleigh and Chescalocs , she and her videos have been featured on numerous style and entertainment blogs and news publications including MTV, The New York Times, Essence.
Kat Lazo is a self-proclaimed social commentator, media critic, and overall, a woman who questions everything.
Used by hundreds of universities, non-profits, and businesses. Click to learn more. Are Hispanic People White? He blogs at eddiethoughts. Census, it was a jarring thing to hear that Puerto Rico is 70 percent white , according to its own inhabitants! I n June of this year, the Census came out with a report showing the non-Hispanic, white-alone population to have declined by one fifth of a percent in absolute terms during the last year while every other racial group grew.
This factoid has immense significance for those on opposing sides of the culture wars, both of which have taken it to herald the decline of white political significance and the rise of a diverse, and presumably more liberal, electorate. But before we commit ourselves to the vision of a wildly more diverse America—and the progressive utopia it allegedly promises—there are two peculiarities that need to be addressed: The first is that there are serious discrepancies between the official and social definitions of whiteness, and both are flexible in the long-term.
The second is that this demographic shift is being driven by Hispanics, officially an ethnic, not racial, group, more than half of which is officially white. As it does, Hispanics, particularly those of European descent, will come to think of themselves as conventional whites—and perhaps change their politics accordingly.
In short, Hispanic-Americans will follow the arc of many immigrant groups, moving from the periphery to the cultural mainstream and learning to identify as in—rather than out—members of society. But for those of us nerdy enough to frequent the annals of the U.
In addition, Houston and Miami have sizable non-white populations. Both cities have notably large mainland Puerto Rican populations—the latter the highest per capita in the United States—few members of which would readily identify themselves as white in a casual conversation. So what gives? In the United States, the informal concept of whiteness seems to continuously evolve with domestic politics.
The island of Puerto Rico, though a part of the United States, is removed enough that it operates by Latin American conventions. Importantly, and at times confusingly , our official statistics use a definition that hews closer to the Latin American understanding than our own pop-cultural distinctions. The boundaries of whiteness are plastic across time as well as space.
It expanded and contracted over the twentieth century to include southern and eastern Europeans, briefly embracing some people we today would broadly classify as Asians. These changes have happened on the formal and informal arenas of race in America. So why is any of this worth mentioning? The rising tide of American diversity is mainly the result of a four-decade wave of immigration from Latin America and the high fertility rate of their descendants.
In , less than four percent of the country identified as Hispanic or Latino. Nearly 60 years later, that figure has risen to to just under 20 percent, with expectations that a quarter of the country will identify as Hispanic by In projection after projection showing a minority-white America, Hispanic members of each racial category are separated and lumped into their own distinct group.
For starters, most American Hispanics already identify as white, at least when asked to do so officially. Per the Census , more than half of U.
Second, Hispanic identity seems to fade the further removed from immigration a one is. In the second generation, that share increases only slightly, to eight percent. But by the third and fourth generations, it climbs rapidly, to twenty-three and fifty percent, respectively.
This is truer among younger cohorts.
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