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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   32742 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Rachel Zegler, even though she is probably about 3/4ths European genetically, is viewed as a brown woman both by the left and the right.

Isn't this the case for pretty much all Hispanics?

American racial categories have never made much sense to me, but taking 'Hispanic' as roughly coterminous with 'South and Central American', the vast majority of Hispanics are in fact significantly European in descent. I understand most South Americans to be mixtures of European and indigenous American, with the exact proportion changing from place to place and class to class; in general, the higher the social class the more European descent, but there are plenty of exceptions. There are also a lot of South Americans with partial or majority African descent, but the fact that we use terms like 'Afro-Hispanic' or 'black' for them suggests that we consider them slightly differently?

It does confuse me a little - as I understand it, all Brazilians, say, are Hispanic, even though they are ethnically diverse and include white, black, indigenous, and mixed-race people.

(Technically you could argue that Brazilians aren't Hispanic at all - sometimes I see 'Hispanic' as synonym for 'Hispanophone', and Brazilians are Lusophone - but American racial categories don't have a separate section for Brazilians. In general I get the sense that in America, Brazilians are lumped in with Hispanics, and Spanish people are not, even though in the literal sense Brazilians are not related to Hispania and the Spanish should be the central example.)

Anyway, Zegler is majority-European-descent, but isn't that quite common among Hispanics? Most Mexicans are mestizos, i.e. of partial but significant European descent, and then roughly a third of Mexicans are just European. I think that even white Mexicans would be considered 'Hispanic' in the United States? Or am I mistaken?

It does confuse me a little - as I understand it, all Brazilians, say, are Hispanic, even though they are ethnically diverse and include white, black, indigenous, and mixed-race people.

"Officially, Brazilians are not considered Hispanic or Latino because the federal government’s definition applies only to those of “Spanish culture or origin.” In most cases, people who report their Hispanic or Latino ethnicity as Brazilian in Census Bureau surveys are later recategorized – or “back coded” – as not Hispanic or Latino. The same is true for people with origins in Belize, the Philippines and Portugal. An error in how the Census Bureau processed data from a 2020 national survey omitted some of this coding and provided a rare window into how Brazilians (and other groups) living in the U.S. view their identity. In 2020, at least 416,000 Brazilians — more than two-thirds of Brazilians in the U.S. — described themselves as Hispanic or Latino on the ACS and were mistakenly counted that way. Only 14,000 Brazilians were counted as Hispanic in 2019, and 16,000 were in 2021. The large number of Brazilians who self-identified as Hispanic or Latino highlights how their view of their own identity does not necessarily align with official government definitions. It also underscores that being Hispanic or Latino means different things to different people."

That's about as organised and consistent as I expect racial identification in the Americas to be!

Many American government forms needlessly ask you for your race. Some have two categories of "white and Hispanic" and "white (not Hispanic)". Other forms have a yes or no Hispanic portion and a separate racial section. That is strictly speaking more correct since Hispanic is not a race. A Mexican whose ancestors immigrated from Japan are Hispanic and Asian.

According to the census bureau, Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race, and is orthogonal to race. You can be a white Hispanic, a black Hispanic, Asian Hispanic, etc. So yes, Zegler is a white Hispanic.

But is she a Snow White Hispanic, that is the question?(!)

If they wanted that they would have used Ana-Taylor Joy. She white enough to glow.

Too old now.

True. Maybe in 10 years she can play the Queen.

Ana-Taylor Joy

I like the look of that one. Very unique face.

More of a Sandy Tan Hispanic, if you ask me.

The census bureau categories don't have great overlap with how people behave in real life, though, do they? For instance, the census categories include Middle Easterners as white.

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