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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 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.

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