You, sir, are a chameleon. You can move between cultures, languages and ethnicity with ease. You have a rare and envious gift. And chameleons are usually considered extremely capable spies or ambassadors. LatinX labeling is just another old form of new racist garbage
No one is LatinX because it is a made-up term embraced by less than 5% of the people it is supposed to include. I know many Brazilians as well as Belizeans and Guyanese who are not Hispanic but consider themselves Latino or Latina.
Most of us or our ancestors came from somewhere else. So what. What matters is how we live our lives and we should be judged based on what we say and do. We can all be proud of where our parents or grandparents or ancestors came from. The key point is they came here and we are lucky they did so. That's why I happily proclaim my pride in and love for America as do millions of others who like me are grateful to our forefathers and foremothers and could care less about labels and identity groups. The only one that matters is : American
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I am half Filipino and half white, and to some people I look Filipino (or hispanic), and to some people I look completely white. It probably depends on how much time I've spent in the sun.
I've actually had people tell me that I wouldn't understand a "colored person's" perspective because I've never experienced racism and I've lived a "white" "privileged" life. I found the comment not only extremely offensive and presumptive, but untrue. It really irks me that so many people these days feel like they can know a lot about someone else's life just by looking at them. We all have lived our lives and have unique experiences. This obsession with putting people into categories based on race seems like a way to "other" people and justify completely disregarding their entire lived experience and perspective as "unimportant" or "privileged." I'm with you. Let's regard each other as human beings and stop trying to one up each other on who has it worse.
My maternal grandparents emigrated as babies with their parents from Ukraine to Argentina in the late 1800s escaping the Jew-butchering Cossacks. My mother was born in Argentina. My paternal grandparents and my father emigrated from Austria to Bolivia in 1938 escaping the Jew-butchering Nazis. My parents met and married in Bolivia and moved to Lima, Perú in the early 50s, where I was born a few years later. I emigrated to the US in the 70s to attend college, stayed and eventually became a US citizen. My wife and daughter are US-born. I've lived in Los Angeles since 1981. My best friends are still in Lima, my favorite food is Peruvian (obviously, the best in the world), my favorite music is salsa, and I speak Spanish every day with my family, friends, and people all around me in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Because I still have a trace of accent, when asked where I'm from I answer, "I was born and raised in Lima, Perú and living in the US since the 70s."
Am I Latino (definitely not LatinX!)? (On occasion I get "set straight" by an identity wokester that I can't think of myself as Peruvian because of my skin tone and Eastern European surname.)
White Jew?
Austrian-Ukranian-Peruvian-American?
The answer is that I couldn't remotely care less to be classified into a group. Identify labels are both useless and meaningless unless you crave one because you are an idiot. The best favor we could do to the US is to eliminate the labels, starting with the US census.
Difficult question: Sonya Sotomayor was lauded as the first Latin(x?) Supreme Court Justice, even though Justice Benjamin Cardozo was of Portuguese descent.
But then, Justice Cardozo was Jewish and that plays quite differently with the woke crowd.
I love this essay. All of the questions destroy identity politics by illustrating how people are complex individuals with diverse heritages, not a checkbox identity that reduces people to immutable characteristics.
Wow, your story is so similar to mine, and many other people as well. I hope that the more mixed families we have, the closer we will come to realizing that we are all from the same race...the human race, and that we should drop the labels and just treat everyone with dignity, respect, and love.
You are a human being, as are we all. Your ancestry and upbringing make you the unique human you are. There is no one else just like you. I believe this desire to label every characteristic of a person is meaningless, but also destructive. You cannot be reduced to some immutable characteristic or even your sexuality. You are who are-and that is awesome! No one else can define you.
Maybe the decade in which we were born determines the susceptibility to identitarian left logic, reductio ad absurdum. From an “ethnic” chameleon. Many of us are biracial or mixed in some way, I don’t understand how the nuances are ignored when boxing in groups of people.
Yes! All of this categorization is an absurdity. How do those railing against "colonialism" all the time not want to "decolonize" the very anglo-derived confection of LatinX? Latine covers it all just fine, thanks. The further we want to classify people, the more these groups fall apart. Hopefully one day people will mature enough to find another, more pragmatic outlet for their sympathies.
Latinx, like many hyper modern identifiers, signals a political belief system, not membership in an ethnic or racial group.
You, sir, are a chameleon. You can move between cultures, languages and ethnicity with ease. You have a rare and envious gift. And chameleons are usually considered extremely capable spies or ambassadors. LatinX labeling is just another old form of new racist garbage
No one is LatinX because it is a made-up term embraced by less than 5% of the people it is supposed to include. I know many Brazilians as well as Belizeans and Guyanese who are not Hispanic but consider themselves Latino or Latina.
Most of us or our ancestors came from somewhere else. So what. What matters is how we live our lives and we should be judged based on what we say and do. We can all be proud of where our parents or grandparents or ancestors came from. The key point is they came here and we are lucky they did so. That's why I happily proclaim my pride in and love for America as do millions of others who like me are grateful to our forefathers and foremothers and could care less about labels and identity groups. The only one that matters is : American
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I am half Filipino and half white, and to some people I look Filipino (or hispanic), and to some people I look completely white. It probably depends on how much time I've spent in the sun.
I've actually had people tell me that I wouldn't understand a "colored person's" perspective because I've never experienced racism and I've lived a "white" "privileged" life. I found the comment not only extremely offensive and presumptive, but untrue. It really irks me that so many people these days feel like they can know a lot about someone else's life just by looking at them. We all have lived our lives and have unique experiences. This obsession with putting people into categories based on race seems like a way to "other" people and justify completely disregarding their entire lived experience and perspective as "unimportant" or "privileged." I'm with you. Let's regard each other as human beings and stop trying to one up each other on who has it worse.
My maternal grandparents emigrated as babies with their parents from Ukraine to Argentina in the late 1800s escaping the Jew-butchering Cossacks. My mother was born in Argentina. My paternal grandparents and my father emigrated from Austria to Bolivia in 1938 escaping the Jew-butchering Nazis. My parents met and married in Bolivia and moved to Lima, Perú in the early 50s, where I was born a few years later. I emigrated to the US in the 70s to attend college, stayed and eventually became a US citizen. My wife and daughter are US-born. I've lived in Los Angeles since 1981. My best friends are still in Lima, my favorite food is Peruvian (obviously, the best in the world), my favorite music is salsa, and I speak Spanish every day with my family, friends, and people all around me in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Because I still have a trace of accent, when asked where I'm from I answer, "I was born and raised in Lima, Perú and living in the US since the 70s."
Am I Latino (definitely not LatinX!)? (On occasion I get "set straight" by an identity wokester that I can't think of myself as Peruvian because of my skin tone and Eastern European surname.)
White Jew?
Austrian-Ukranian-Peruvian-American?
The answer is that I couldn't remotely care less to be classified into a group. Identify labels are both useless and meaningless unless you crave one because you are an idiot. The best favor we could do to the US is to eliminate the labels, starting with the US census.
Difficult question: Sonya Sotomayor was lauded as the first Latin(x?) Supreme Court Justice, even though Justice Benjamin Cardozo was of Portuguese descent.
But then, Justice Cardozo was Jewish and that plays quite differently with the woke crowd.
Your post illustrates that these categories are non-sensical and have nothing to do with whether an individual is racist or is ‘privileged’.
Perfect reasoning behind why we should toss racism2.0(tm) on the slag heap of shitty ideas.
I love this essay. All of the questions destroy identity politics by illustrating how people are complex individuals with diverse heritages, not a checkbox identity that reduces people to immutable characteristics.
Beautifully expressed. Thank you.
This resonates.
I wrote about this recently too, as an American with dual citizenship and two different cultural backgrounds: https://erinetheridge.substack.com/p/where-are-you-from
Wow, your story is so similar to mine, and many other people as well. I hope that the more mixed families we have, the closer we will come to realizing that we are all from the same race...the human race, and that we should drop the labels and just treat everyone with dignity, respect, and love.
You are a human being, as are we all. Your ancestry and upbringing make you the unique human you are. There is no one else just like you. I believe this desire to label every characteristic of a person is meaningless, but also destructive. You cannot be reduced to some immutable characteristic or even your sexuality. You are who are-and that is awesome! No one else can define you.
Maybe the decade in which we were born determines the susceptibility to identitarian left logic, reductio ad absurdum. From an “ethnic” chameleon. Many of us are biracial or mixed in some way, I don’t understand how the nuances are ignored when boxing in groups of people.
Yes! All of this categorization is an absurdity. How do those railing against "colonialism" all the time not want to "decolonize" the very anglo-derived confection of LatinX? Latine covers it all just fine, thanks. The further we want to classify people, the more these groups fall apart. Hopefully one day people will mature enough to find another, more pragmatic outlet for their sympathies.