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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Do you consider Lionel Messi white?

I was answering the survey on slatestarcodex and wasn't sure how to answer the ethnicity/race question: "what race do you consider yourself?" or something like that, having anwserer "Other".

I had always pattern matched the skin color and that's it for "black" and "white". But recently I heard two comments form an American and a Russian considering themselves "white" and people from Latam as white as Messi or the Pope, not white. Maybe "Latino"? but I don't think this means anything else than the geographical place of origin, why not both?

I'm supposed the label have a different connotation for them but I also have the suspicion it's a status mark for many (just from what a Russian friend said, but not sure)

I can't remember if I already posted but I wrote a book review for David Bernstein's Classified which talks about how utterly incoherent the US racial taxonomy is. To answer your direct question, according to the US federal government, Lionel Messi would be racially white but ethnically hispanic.

For one thing, the categories are not consistently delineated. Some are geographic (Asian), some are cultural (Hispanic), and others are racial (Black). To illustrate some of the absurdities, consider what box someone indigenous to Brazil would check. The most obvious answer, Hispanic, is not necessarily correct because some federal agencies do not include Portuguese cultural heritage within the definition. Further, Hispanic is explicitly heralded as an ethnicity designation that is separate and distinct from race (it’s anyone’s guess what the difference between the two is — Directive 15 doesn’t say — and many forms have eventually collapsed the two questions into one). Lastly, American Indian would not apply either, because lobbying by federally recognized tribes has relegated this definition to include only North American indigenous people.

None of this really makes any sense, but these categories are "good enough" for a gigantic multicultural nation of 330 million people. You can choose to have more granularity in your racial taxonomy, but there is literally no limit to how deep you can go.

there is literally no limit to how deep you can go.

Stupid objection but there is an actual limit, the individual.

Tulpas.

I concede your point.

I translate 'white' to just mean European. Messi looks like a standard southern European man, so yes.

The weird historical circumstances that lead to Spanish people being considered their own race in America frustrates me to no end.

Hispanic is not a race. It is an ethnic identity. That's the official explanation.

I don't. I mean, I don't consider this question at all. But, since US society is insanely race-obsessed, I guess it'd depend on the purpose of the query. E.g. do you remember how George Zimmerman became "white" when what happened to him happened? I would bet in another context - e.g. if he was attacked by a member of Oath Keepers, say - he wouldn't be "white". Of course, sometimes it's hard to pull this trick - I personally look so white that nobody would believe I am not (even though KKK would vehemently object to including me in "white" - but they are on the dung heap of history now, so who cares). But in many other cases it depends a lot on the purpose. For me, putting Messi into "white" or "not white" box is absolutely useless - but if for you it is, then you have to start with what purpose these boxes of yours serve?

There is no non-political or objective definition of Whiteness, Whiteness is primarily a political coalition for the purpose of exercising power.

The only historically consistent definition of Whiteness in white-dominant American culture is: figure out the number of white people you need for white people to remain politically/culturally dominant, set the line so that you get that number with as little extra as possible. You (as a white) want to maximize your ability to exercise white political power, while also minimizing the number of people you have to share that power with. That's the give and take that gives us everything from Ben Franklin saying nobody is white except the English* to bringing in the Irish and Italians and Greeks, to today when whites are trying to co-opt Hindus, Chinese, and even African immigrants. The English-descended WASPs are the core of white and work outward from there, everyone else is either over or under the line depending what is needed to exercise power. Everyone tries to be White, and if they're not needed then they are classified as some "Other." Hispanics are classified accordingly depending on situation.

The competing political alignment, and definition for Whiteness, of today is the PoC (or often today BiPoC) coalition, which is the groups historically excluded from Whiteness seeking to band together to form a coalition to oppose Whiteness. They define White as those that are left over after every possible oppression pathway has been tried and could not possibly work. The core group here is African-American Descendants of Slavery and Amerindians, work outward from there depending on how much they can afford to exclude: they need enough members to exercise significant cultural and political power, but the more members they share that power with the more diluted the spoils will be. So here the definition of Whiteness is the negative of the other, you try to be a PoC and if they don't need you you're white. Hispanics are PoC when they're needed, and excluded when they aren't. This kind of politicking is most visible in elite colleges, where students from very marginally oppressed identities try to worm their way into "PoC" labels for job opportunities that were meant for Black candidates, while Black kids try to defend the borders of PoC identity to keep out the Persians/Fillipinos/Jews** who are trying to steal their designated job interviews. Once again you have the push and pull between exercising power and sharing the spoils.

Now within any ethnic ruling coalition, the rules are made for the big groups, and then the tiny groups that snarl the gears of the rules are dealt with piecemeal as is easiest/most consistent. Often they are treated one way in one place, and a different way in another. This was visible in Jim Crow America and Apartheid South Africa with every group except White Anglos and Black Africans. Argentines are about 200,000 strong in the USA and not particularly packed anywhere to my knowledge, so they're not swinging any coalition either way. How we classify Argentines is going to be mostly a function of some other more politically relevant ethnic struggle that is going on within larger groupings. Right now the tension between those two definitions, forwarded by two competing coalitions, is the crisis of defining Whiteness. Some people become white in some places but can't be white in others, some people are white in some places but choose to stop being white when they enter others. Code switching is the name of the game these days.

So where does that leave my opinion on Mr. Messi? Depends where he and I are and what we're trying to achieve. Politically, right now Republicans would love to have white Hispanics identify as white when they go to the voting booth. And I think if we were talking about the universe of elite athletes, most white people would happily claim him in the racial draft given the paucity of Great White Hopes out there right now. And he'd do best to look and act white as hell if he were in trouble with the law or going in for a loan application or meeting his girlfriend's parents. But if I were advising his kids on applying to law school, I'd smack them upside the head if they even thought about writing down that they were white rather than "Hispanic." If he were running for office in America, he'd be a fool not to run as a "Proud Hispanic," but he'd also probably lighten/darken his skin in photo-mailers as appropriate to benefit himself; as would his opponents when trying to attack him.

That's the reality, and it's not any goofier than the people above who pretend that Anglos never excluded Mexicans or the Irish; or people here saying that Ethiopians are white.

*"Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind."

**I'm dead serious that some asshole had the chutzpah to claim that he was oppressed because he was a Jew in law school. I also remember a girl whose grandmother was Korean but was otherwise plain white bread all the way down. Pure madness!

The only historically consistent definition of Whiteness in white-dominant American culture is: figure out the number of white people you need for white people to remain politically/culturally dominant, set the line so that you get that number with as little extra as possible

I disagree, the bar for whiteness has pretty much always been "predominantly descended from the native peoples of Europe". There's a myth that the Irish or Italians didn't used to be considered white, but they were. They just weren't Anglos and that used to be a bigger deal than it is now. There's a reason that the Ben Franklin quote is the one that gets trotted out every time this comes up: because it wasn't a common sentiment.

The competing political alignment, and definition for Whiteness, of today is the PoC (or often today BiPoC) coalition, which is the groups historically excluded from Whiteness seeking to band together to form a coalition to oppose Whiteness.

It's not a coalition of BiPoCs banding together against a united bloc of whites. Most of the people in the BiPoC party (the Democrats) are white.

Ok leave the Irish and Eyeties out of it, explain the history of Mexican status in Texas. Mexicans have gone in and out of whiteness from Texan independence to today.

The Democrats are not a bipoc party, as you correctly observe. The poc coalition forms an important subset of the Democrat coalition, similar to evangelicals and Republicans. The poc coalition is too weak to exercise political control over the country, or even over any state, but they do exercise control over small localities and over certain professions, corporations, and universities. Both democrats and Republicans, corporations and governments, will throw them a bone to satisfy them and keep them in line.

This view makes sense of why white identity is so contested.

PoC is at core the elite campus politics project of allying numerous and talented Asians with Blacks and Mexicans to pry job opportunities away from whites. It's based on the conceit that white racists hate everyone who isn't white. Where that conceit has frayed, the coalition frays.

I think racial classification is often fraught for a few reasons.

One is that our racial classifications are a categorical classification overlayed on a much more continuous phenomena. Whether the phenomena in question is one's appearance (skin color, hair texture, morphology, etc) or genetic ancestry there is the possibility for considerable overlap in these features in a way that our racial categorizations do not account for. When drawing categorical boundaries around more continuous phenomena it seems intuitive to me that different people will draw the lines in different places. Imagine if we categorized everyone in the world by height into "short", "medium", and "tall" groups. There are underlying facts about what an individuals height actually is (the same way there are underlying facts about genetic ancestry or appearance) but I feel pretty confident that different people would draw the boundaries of different height categories in different places.

Another reason is, as you note, being part of a certain racial classification has been a status marker. Sometimes this is purely social (white supremacists regard people classified as "white" better than people not classified as "white") but other times it is also legal (consider Jim Crow laws in the United States). At various times and places ancestral groups have argued for their inclusion in various racial classifications due to the social or legal benefits that can flow from such a classification.

So we have this very simple categorization scheme that we have layered over more continuous phenomena and then imbued with social and sometimes legal significance.

I've posted here before about how my wife is considered a "person of color" by employers and universities because she's from Mexico, even though her skin is pale white. Outside of the really clear-cut cases, American notions of race are pretty incoherent. It's not like sex where 99%+ of people can be reliably classified as male or female.

I wonder if somebody from Sweden (with typical Scandinavian features) moves to Mexico, gets the citizenship, spends a while there and then moves to the US - would they be considered "from Mexico" and therefore "person of color"? What if their parents were from Sweden (i.e. same features, but born in Mexico, all papers are Mexican, etc)?

It's a common joke that Elon Musk is the richest African American, since he's actually from Africa - but I wonder, if he really were interested in declaring himself "person of color", could he do it?

Mitt Romney's father was born in Mexico and returned to the US after rising anti-American sentiment forced most Mormon settlers back during the Mexican revolution. I don't think anyone in the country regarded him as not white.

Yeah. I figure someone like your wife is white in Mexico but not white here. Like Bolsonaro in Brazil and so on.

If everyone already speaks Spanish that no longer qualifies as a non-white, "Latino" characteristic. So you rely on what's left.

Is this specific to speakers of Spanish/Portuguese and occasionally French and Guarani? Are Afrikaners not white because they speak a language in heavy use by nonwhite communities? Are Russians nonwhite because their tongue is used as a lingua franca in central asia?

Mexican whites are white, assuming they aren't lying about their phenotype. HR departments and universities choose to lie about that, because it makes them look good. This is deplorable, but it isn't evidence that white Mexicans are actually non-white.

Spanish.

Oh and I buy all that, and the challenge it presents to my POV here. I'm just saying functionally that's how it "feels" on a work-a-day level and I think just how it goes in America.

They're all kinds of incidental and less obvious markers that can upset this schema.

The Litmus test my circle has been using for where people stand on this is whether Shakira is white. My answer is "lol, yes, obviously, look at her". As it turns out, she's half Lebanese and half Catalan, which will definitely fit into the group I would consider white. Others argue that she's "Hispanic" rather than white, but I think this is basically just an American census peculiarity that doesn't have much to do with how we actually see people.

I consider both Haile Selassie and Narendra Modi White, so Lionel Messi is White.

I am intrigued by your definition of white, have you written more about it elsewhere?

If you come from an ethnic group that historically speaks an Indo-Aryan or an Afro-Asiatic language, you are probably White. There are lots of some obvious exceptions to this rule, like the Hausa, the Somalians, the Basque, the Finns and the Hungarians and the various tiny Caucasian language families.

Nilo-Saharan or Niger-Congo? You're Black.

Yes, the definition is kinda like the Cube Rule in being deliberately provocative and tongue-in-cheek, but at least it answers the question better than Potter Stewart ever could.

Not who you're replying to but if you use the Caucasian definition for "white" then Europeans, North Africans, East Africans, Arabs, and Indians are all "white."

For Italians this is a weird subject.

First a joke - if Messi voted for Biden he’s not white. If he votes maga he’s white.

I myself am Italian and of a whiter perplexion (don’t have a lot of olive oil skin). I dated an Argentinian girl who was 100% Italian. She’s a minority Im not a minority even if our great grandparents came from the same town.

My grandfather was a minority for much of his life in America.

And of course my ex-gf family in Argentinia were professionals and hence upper middle class non minorities.

I think your real question is not whether they are white but whether they would be a protected class.

Of course there are even more things that don’t make sense on this. If Messi moved to NYC his kids would be a protected class and whichever 70k a year high school he sent his kids to would celebrate the minority representation his kids brings to the school. Some Italian kid in Bensonhurst would just be white. My maga voting rust belt ass would be white.

You just have to understand there are a lot of rules to these things. And learn how to play the game.

Of course the establishment may have woken up to the fact Argentina is too white. And now you don’t get to be a minority if you came from there. In fact your now racists because your country didn’t have slaves.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/12/08/why-doesnt-argentina-have-more-black-players-world-cup/

The US Census Bureau, among others, considers Hispanic or Latino to be an ethnicity, not a race. Hence, it distinguishes among Hispanic whites (Ted Cruz), non-Hispanic whites (Bill Clinton), Hispanic blacks (Alfonso Soriano), and non-Hispanic blacks (Cory Booker). See here

There's also the odd Hispanic Asian, due to Asians immigrating to Latin America and their descendants to the United States. I don't know of any famous examples off the top of my head, though.

I think there are also some Hispanic Native Americans, which genetically is most of them, but the Census specifically defines Native Americans as indigenous people of the Americas who maintain tribal affiliation, which narrows it down quite a bit.

A lot of Filipinos count as Hispanic Asian.

Are you talking about the ~500k native Spanish speakers in the Philippines? Most Filipinos speak Tagalog, Cebuano, or some other Austronesian language as their native language.

I don't know of any famous examples off the top of my head, though.

Alberto Fujimori?

Yeah, but I meant Americans.

Decent amount of them in MMA & BJJ.

Not sure where people'd draw the line on Lyoto Machida for instance

Marcos "El Chino" Maidana! (Just kidding.)

Most native Americans who maintain tribal affiliation are probably living in Hispanic countries- I’m thinking specifically Bolivia and Guatemala- by now, though.

And Iirc the majority of people living in Latin America are more white than native.

That's true; I used to know at least one. And then there is Alberto Fujimori, former President of Peru, and his children.

Does the history of the Philippines not also qualify it as a "Hispanic" yet Asian country?

Edit: Macau probably also deserves mention.

The Philippines was a Spanish colony, but there are few native Spanish speakers. Macao was a Portuguese colony, so, like Brazil, it's not Hispanic. Also, hardly anybody there speaks Portuguese anyway.

Interesting: I thought there were more Filipino Spanish speakers (perhaps the ones I've met have been a biased sample). The official Census definition seems to specify Spanish for the definition of "Hispanic", but there's some disagreement from other parties on whether or not Portuguese should be included.

That is an interesting question, though IIRC the Philippines, unlike Latin America, were not settler colonies. And nowadays not many people speak Spanish, esp not as a primary language.

It's frowned upon in the college admissions game for Filipinos to list themselves as Hispanic or even Pacific Islander; colleges instead want them to list themselves in the "Asian" category. It's unclear why Filipinos' racial category should matter, as admissions committees attest that they look at each student objectively based on their individual accomplishments.

Yes, I consider Messi, pope Francis, Jair Bolsonaro, Fidel Castro, and El Chapo to all be white. For that matter Bashar Al-Assad, Ayatollah khameini, and mullah Omar also seem white to me. ‘White’ is a phenotypic description indicating light skin, European features, non-kinky hair, etc. that is not primarily about ethnicity. You can have strong preferences about race or ethnicity or both without considering them one and the same.

According to Wikipedia he is descended from Italian and Spanish immigrants. So yes, as far as Mediterraneans are white so is Messi

Do you consider Lionel Messi white?

German here. Yes, I consider both the Pope and Messi white. I would say the whole latin/non-latin differentiation is an American thing.

Actually only the American explicitly made the differentiation "you are not white, you are Latino".

Now that you mention this, I think the fixation or discussion about races/ethnicity mostly comes from America. Starts to feel unproductive very quickly

Ethnicity is an extremely important and deep topic in Europe. I don't know if you are missing the forest for the trees to make a point here but, bruh.

Skin color and ethnic composition is a massively important thing in Latin America as well. The only thing that definitely comes from the USA is the current ideological framework and the terms the English language speakers use to discuss such issues.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentine-president-says-brazilians-came-jungle-sparking-uproar-2021-06-09/

The comments are "misjudged" according to Reuters but it is absolutely the mainstream view in most of Latin America and things like blanquemiento or moms urging their daughters to marry "whiter" are no joke.

Indeed. The distinction isn't about white/black, but it definitely exists.

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