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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29719 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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I think this goes back to the whole tangled mess that is race in the United States.

My personal feeling is that 'race' is an awful lot less significant for most purposes than culture, and typically serves as a loose proxy for it. For your example, if your wife grew up in the upper midwest and spoke only English, she'd probably consider herself 'white', and everyone around her would consider her 'white', even if she had an identical genetic admixture.

However, the State needs to categorize everything, and so you get slotted into the 'White' bucket, and she gets slotted into the 'Hispanic' one. So, to answer your question, it's an interracial marriage if the two partners check different demographic boxes on the standardized forms. :-)

It's also an interracial marriage if the two partners are very different ethnically. Say an ethnic Nigerian and an ethnic Norwegian. No one would consider the marriage anything other than interracial even if the two people checked the same box on a form.

Those are the same bucket. Hispanic isn't considered a race (anymore); most Hispanics are actually white.

Yes, Hispanic is an ethnic identity based on Spanish language and culture. 100% racially European people can also be Hispanic. Because Hispanic is not a race.

There is some point to be made about many people being mestizos. That is some mix Spanish and native. So not really white by some strict measure. The Hispanic ethnic identity, to the degree that it meaningfully exists at all, does not specify the presence or lack of native blood.

The statistics OP linked appear to consider "Hispanic" a race for purposes of measuring interracial marriage rates.

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