Hispanic people are from Hispanic countries, white people look white. This is literally as far as the distinction goes and is exactly why dividing people up based on skin color is useless.
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stan_stanminson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months agoCan someone tell me the difference between Hispanic and White? I’m not American
PapaStevesy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
RBWells@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yes it’s confusing because “white” is a cultural category not a phenotype. Where I grew up the Hispanic people were the white people - all the rich Cubans who fled Castro, and people from Spain. You can be Hispanic & white, or black, or brown, it just means your grandparents spoke Spanish, basically. And it’s so funny because it was the white people who brought the Spanish language to the americas in the first place.
It’s not possible to understand racists with logic. Their ideas are illogical.
Apytele@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
One of my coworkers commented on one of our difficult patients calling the weekend crew racist against them and how ridiculous it was because both the patient and the weekend nurses are black. I was like oh yeah no that’s because the weekend nurses aren’t black (being a cultural term for African-American), they’re African. Emphasis on the not-born-American. That’s different (to people who care about that sort of thing). Is it rational? Not even a little, but racism, despite the claims of phrenology et al, is about as far from rational as you can get.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 month ago
Hispanic are like Spanish but poor.
echodot@feddit.uk 1 month ago
But Spaniards are white.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 month ago
I know that. You know that. Antonio Banderas knows that. But Americans are funny about race. They didn’t count Italians as white. They didn’t even count the Irish as white.
But a line gets drawn somewhere I guess, and without exception it gets drawn where the wealth disparities arise.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Damn, are you a poet? You should be a poet.
PlaidBaron@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Concisely? No.
EtherWhack@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Hispanic refers to a person with a mix of native American and Spanish heritage created when the Spaniards conquered Latin America.
White generally just refers to a caucasian-looking person.
Darkmuch@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The USA was mostly colonized by Germans, Irish, and English. So skin tones are usually much lighter.
Central and South America had a larger indigenous population, and the Spanish/Portuguese colonizers had a bit darker skin, with much more frequent inter racial relationships.
However, the region in question is fucking huge. Don’t expect Mexicans, Columbians, Argentinians to all look the same.
Really Hispanic is more of a cultural category for all things with Spanish Legacy.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
It gets massively more complicated the more granular you get.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of distinct people groups in Latin and South America.
Many of them can directly tie their lineage back to the Maya, Aztecs, etc, and those societies themselves were amalgamations of many different people groups.
There are a ridiculous number of variations of Spanish that have different vocabulary, pronounciations rules, as a result of merging with local languages in different ways.
… ‘Hispanic’ is roughly the American equivalent of ‘European’.
Oh, he’s European, he’s from Europe.
Oh, he’s Hispanic, he’s from south of the US.
Are proper Spaniards, people actually from Spain … Hispanic?
Uh well… according the the US government, basically, maybe. Are they brown? If yes, Hispanic.
That is pretty much how it works.
Image
www.pewresearch.org/…/who-is-hispanic/
As with most race-based terms… it doesn’t actually make barely any sense.
fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
None that I know would consider that that term describes them, neither do I. And I’m from Spain, so I know quite a bit of Spaniards.
The word hispanic is used in “hispanohablante”, which is a word to describe countries or communities that speak Spanish outside of Spain, naturally.
However, when talking about “hispanohablante” (spanish speaking) communities in Europe for example, the term doesn’t distinguish between South Americans or Spaniards, so idk. It’s just weird to think of us as Spanish speaking people, we are in Spain, of course we speak Spanish. Duh.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
That’s honestly good to know that you as a Spanaird (and your fellows) don’t identify as Hispanic.
Because I have had to work with data sets, in the US, with ‘race’ data, that has to be in compliance with US govt standards, and… yeah ‘Hispanic’ just doesn’t make any sense, even when you go into the ‘logic’ of it.
Oh I fully agree.
I’ve got a bit of Italian heritage, and… oh dear lord, you’ll get a similar kind of nonsense happening with southern Italians / Sicillians… Italians in general weren’t even considered ‘white’ untill… the 70s?
Hasherm0n@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’ve met people from South America (Brazil specifically) that take great offense at being referred to as Hispanic and insist that they are in fact Latino.
This was also a long time ago
meldrik@lemmy.wtf 1 month ago
What does Latino mean in their context? Don’t they identify as Brazilian?
LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Thank you for breaking this down. I was astonished sometime around the year 2000 when someone told me that Christina Aguilera is Latina. Blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin, how? But her last name definitely sounds exotic so that’s fair 🤷🏼♀️
Sludge@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Would you consider a latino + white couple an interracial couple? The categories to select from are white, Asian, and black - after that there’s typically a question to identify if a person is Hispanic.
Darkmuch@lemmy.world 2 months ago
White and black is just a product of the USA slave system.
In Spanish territory they had:
What is considered in a race changes over time. Hell, at times Jews and Irish weren’t considered white. Just dirty “others”. It’s only when the top caste hold on things is challenged do they let others join the ruling group.