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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)
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!
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.
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.
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