Again, Hispanic is an ethnicity. It does not refer to language, nationality, (though both of those have some relationship) SES or race. Yes, it is true that for some people ethnic designation would not have meaning, but that does not mean the designation is meaningless for most people. For most of the people who identify as Hispanic in CA 44, the designation is very meaningful.
I don’t know how George Lopez identifies, but most Mexican Americans identify as Hispanic, non-white.* That means their ethnicity is Hispanic and their race is not white. I don’t know of any valid criteria that would allow anyone to say that is an incorrect identification. All of this is relevant here because, in CA at least, Hispanics and Blacks have a significant tendency to vote Democratic. Staci Dash will be running as a Republican in a SoCal district that is more than 80% either Hispanic or black. Obama has a better chance of being elected Governor of Utah than Dash has of being elected Congresswomen in CA-44 * Even though Hispanic is an ethnicity, since such a large fraction of Americans who identify as Hispanic also decline to identify a race (which is included in the code “not white”), for most practical purposes Hispanic gets treated as another racial category, parallel with white, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander etc, and within certain tolerances that works. I would prefer to eliminate racial categories all together and treat them all as ethnicities, since I think that is what they are, and “race” invokes a biological essentialism which is a holdover from the scientific racism of the 19th century, but that is another matter. On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 7:48 PM Tom Wolper <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 9:56 PM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I don’t know that this is a true statement. As I said, Hispanic is an >> ethnicity, white is a racial category. It is obviously possible for someone >> to be both Hispanic and White. I do not think it is possible for a person >> to be in error in identifying themselves as Hispanic but not white. >> > > Maybe it's enough to say there is a big enough gray area to make the > demographics meaningless. Take a grandchild of immigrants from a Latin > American country whose parents were brought up speaking English and the > (now adult) grandchild can't functionally speak Spanish. Add that the > parents did well for themselves and the adult grandchild spent no time in a > barrio. Even if s/he is labeled a Hispanic by the census or in some other > demographic listing, how relevant is that? Or take a young man with the > last name of Gonzalez but his only Hispanic grandparent was his father's > father from whom he gets the name. His 7 other grandparents are of German, > Irish, Scandinavian and Italian extraction. How relevant is it to label him > Hispanic? > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TVorNotTV" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
