Who is White?
I’m confused.
I read the report from the Census Bureau that for the first time ever in the U.S.,
more non-whites are being born than whites. Now, I consider myself a white guy,
and probably everybody else would, too. I grew up in a WASP neighborhood in the
60’s that was startlingly homogenous.
The Census Bureau attributes the recent demographic change to an increase in non-Hispanic whites.
I guess we all know this means people from south of the border. But I find myself confused by the terms.
If there are non-Hispanic whites, there must be Hispanic whites, and maybe other kinds of Hispanics.
Is this an important definition? A family that moved to Mexico from Spain during the height of the Spanish
Empire, and then continued to marry into other privileged families, thus maintaining the bloodlines
of their ancestors: are they Hispanics? How are they different from people who remained in Spain,
who I assume are classified as White? And what is the relevance of this?
Aren’t all Europeans classified as white?
Greek people are whites, too, right? Because they are from Europe.
Even though a Greek could look vastly different from a Norwegian, and they
have very different cultures, they still get lumped together in the “white” demographic. Then how come Hispanic whites
have their own category, when the difference between a Honduran and a white Iowan is no more extreme than
the difference between a Greek and a Norwegian?
The Census Bureau considers Jews to be white. What other category would they fit? If you say, “well, they’re Semitic”,
because of the cultural origin of the people group, then that means that other people groups from the Middle East
are white, too. Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians. Abraham, the father of the Hebrew people, was originally from an area
that is now in Iraq. Abraham’s grandson Esau is named as the father of the tribes who settled in Edom, just south of present-day Israel.
He made the move because Canaan, where his brother Jacob lived, was getting too crowded for the both of them.
This gets more confusing, because the sons of Abraham who now live in “the Middle East”, as we call it, would consider themselves to
be Arabic. Is that a racial definition?
No. It is cultural.
What about the Turks? They’re in the EU. At different times over the pat two thousand years they’ve been part of the
Byzantine Empire, and of course Constantine ruled the Roman Empire from what is now Istanbul. He must have been
a white guy, surely. What about Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Siberians, Uzbeks, Afghanis?
There may have been a time when it was relevant to divide people into racial categories. It is meaningless today.
I am pleased to say that my country allows anyone to become an American. The country where I spend most of my
time, China, doesn’t allow non-Chinese to be Chinese citizens. Their country is racially defined. Oh, except that there
are 55 officially-recognized minorities in China–people who are not Han Chinese, which is the dominant ethnic group.
Those minorities are allowed to be Chinese citizens because their little nations were swallowed up by China over the past 1,000 years.
In 2012, what is the need for identifying someone as an African-American, or a non-white Hispanic?
Other indicators–religion, poverty, wealth, the location where a person grew up–are going to tell you a lot more about a people group
than the color of their skin or other random self-identifying ethnic descriptions.
Culture matters.
Skin color and arbitrary ethnic definitions don’t.
petermaize 