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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26859 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

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Well, there is currently a ton of people on (Matt's) Twitter feed socially reconstructing Latinos from the category of "non-white" to "white, white adjacent, possibly white supremacists".

One thing I find interesting about this is that if we continue to shave "minorities" off of the "minority" list and add them onto the "white" if they vote a certain way, we will have built a more diverse coalition of "whites" than "minorities." "White" now contains Asians, Whites, and Latinos.

Most Asian American group lean Democrat,with few exceptions (Vietnamese lean Republican), none of them vote R as strongly as whites.

Asians have already been put in the White category for overperforming other minorities (and even whites) in school grades and earnings. Further, I think that they're way more fickle than a lot of other demographics. (East) Asians are much less political than other races until someone messes with their schools. You see this repeatedly in California, where every single initiative to make schools more "equitable" guarantees that Asians vote against it.

White already expanded to take in Italians. It can't get any worse than that.

Who are the big left twitter people besides Matt? I checked Hasan and he's calling for more progressivism - Kamala was centre-right with her 'lethal military' and 'border protection' rhetoric!

I think it is a fair critique that Harris ran to her right. The problem with running to her right was that it was fake. She didn’t assure moderates because she couldn’t explain why she switched on numerous positions (it felt fake). But her left wing was pissed because she ran from them.

I'm not sure about big accounts, I mean stuff of the sort that one can find in the comments and retweets of this tweet, for example. (though admittedly in a lot of cases it's more like "white adjacent" or "think they are white" or so on.)

Most brazilians in the south, along with argentinians and uruguayans, are at least 75% european. I really don't care about getting into the "white club", but acting as if "latinos" make sense as a racial category is where the stupidity begins in the first place. "Castizos", "Mestizos" and "Mulattos" are infinitely better descriptors of the most common "races" in Latin America. In Richard Lynn's study, the average IQ for brazilian castizos was 95, while mulattos/mestizos had 83.

Again, I don't care whether we're considered "white" or not, there's barely any advantage to being considered "white" today other than being blamed for a lot of things, but it frustates me that "latino" is considered like, a real and useful category. It's only useful in the US context where you're often talking about mexicans, puerto ricans and so on which are majoritarily mestizos/mulattos, but as a general descriptor of everyone coming from Latin America it tells as much information about your race as saying you're "american". Can you imagine using "american" as a race category?

Glad to see my pet peeve about American racial categories getting support from an actual Latin American.

What are your predictions for the new 'Hispanic' census label? I expect mestizos to continue using it but I imagine the next generation of castizo children will abandon it for 'white'

In the very long-term, even if Republicans get more strict about immigration, I doubt that they'll be able to completely stop the universal pattern of genetic exchange between neighboring countries. "White" people, as in 100% european, are simply outnumbered in the American continent. Due to interracial marriages "whites" will slowly get some Native American or African DNA in them, I can't imagine even most white nationalists requiring a DNA test to check if your partner has 5 or 10% non-white DNA, and the moment you stop distinguishing between 100% european and 90% european, you'll soon stop differentiating between 90% european and 80% european.

Therefore yeah, I do expect castizos to start being progressively called "white" like the italians or irish were included in the "white" category too over time, and as happened in Latin America itself, however I don't know how long it'll take. Given that there's now a political controversy of latinos voting conservative and being lumped with whites under the banner of "traitors", I think we'll see the change in 1~3 generations, around the time that more whites will have produced offspring with mestizos.

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