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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.

I concede your point.

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