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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'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.

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.

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