mouseworks

Found this today in the comments section of ethnography.com

Culture studies broadly outline various groups and label them as Latino or Hispanic, African American, Asian, etc… I’m not going to pretend that I know exactly what is taught about these groups in every program, but merely demarcating and conflating nationality, ethnicity, race and geographic region, sets up students to think that these amalgamations are solid groups. They don’t fully reveal the massive internal variation in these groups, or they tend to over sell the degree of variation between groups. I admit this is an assumption on my part using third party information. The degree to which they do or don’t do this, really determines how closely they would align with modern cultural anthropology.

For example, in any US city the single group of “Hispanic” is comprised of various interest and socio-cultural backgrounds and experiences, which can be at odds with each other. The fact that there is no actual term for this supposed group of people that can accurately define them is problematic. If they Hispanic, then they are European. If they are Latino, then they are defined as Spanish speaking, which is tantamount to calling every English speaking person English. The fact is that these groups are largely defined by existent social networks which can be measured. Some of these groups have more in common with groups that would be defined as “White,” than other groups labeled as Hispanic. They also tend to push the dubious notion that people with less skin pigment in the US comprise a single group, with shared values and experiences. This group is either labeled as “Anglo,” (even though Anglos are a minority in the US; there are far more people of German and South European decent in the US), or they are labeled as “Caucasian,” which is an old race term, and would be exactly like calling Blacks, Negroids, or Asians, Mongloids, which are the terms used for these groups on the same list that Caucasian, or Caucasoid, is on.

I'm somewhat reminded of the people who kept trying to define Appalachian. It's basically an identification imposed by people who weren't from the region on an radically diverse bunch of country people: creoles from the tidewater, Africans, American groups of various kind and amounts of purity, German religious refugees, escaped indentured servants, Quakers missionaries, Italian and Cornish miners, and 19th Century British and Portuguese people who thought Maine was way too cold. All that in one county of with a population of 14,000. Identifications are victimizations unless they're self-identifications.

And most people's word for themselves is people.